For those that can afford it.. after feeding their families, paying bills, groceries (ha!), spending 12 bucks a day just for gas, forking out for medication, dealing with intensely increased light bills, putting aside funds for emergencies..etc etc

 Are SSD’s worth it? Answer: YES

 Agreed.

You could apply that to any tech item on the market.  I'm not sure what exactly your point is.

Simple enough....

....there's always more important things to spend your money on...

I wouldn't say 'always'.  Yes, people prioritize, but that could be equally applied to almost anything on the market.

As such, it's meaningless in the context of this discussion.  Nothing is worth it if you can't afford it.

I'm not buying a house anytime soon, but it's worth it if you can afford it.

Oh...FFS ....if you have a few hundred to spend upgrading a computer...it's WORTH IT TO SPEND IT ON A SSD.

There.

Happy now?....

I think that's what Brad said in the initial post.

(Now that I'm done annoying you for the moment, I'm goin to bed.  Night all.)

Needless to say....my 'ploy' to do a hand-me-down upgrade of my SSD kinda went south....the recipient of the hand-me-down...an Acer Travelmate I paid about 300 for just decided to toast it's recharge plug....and it ain't worth it to fork out 150 more for a new MoBo.... easier to bin it and get something newer.....

Still....means I have a couple of gig of ram AND an SSD for the next one....

Indeed, that's why I have a nice new Razer mouse

Now I kinda wish I could buy a laptop without a drive in it.  I wonder what HP sales would say to that request.  Heh.

The gaming laptop brands do allow this.

Would love one, but just can't justify the expense.  So much software is so bloated, I need high capacity, and regular hard drives were still more than ten times the bang for the buck than SSD the last time I was in the market for a hard drive ... sucked, but I really needed a lot of capacity, and SSDs were still too expensive for the capacity.

They offer cache ones now that cache the most used files from your HD.

Sandisk and Crucial and Corsair have them, IIRC.  Probably others.  I haven't checked the reviews but if those had been available earlier I probably would've saved some moneys.

Alright, I finally broke down and ordered it. I went with this:

OCZ Technology 256GB Vertex 4 Series SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) With Industry's Highest 120K IOPS And 5-Year Warranty - VTX4-25SAT3-256G

Seems real fast and it has a 5 year warranty, so it must have a good rate of non failures.

I feel like I need to learn more about the elementary basics of what an SSD is.

More than that though (per perhaps less than that?) is that I'd like to know if any computers start with an SSD in place, and if not, why not.

( or rather, why do we always have to manually install SSDs ... or at least that is the tone here? let me know please )

They are starting to become fairly common in higher end laptops. Not so much in desktops yet.