First off, clicking. ; Can you be certain it's the drive and not something to do with a cooling fan? ; In my case they can sometimes be difficult to tell apart.
Secondly, SSDs.. ; I don't think they're ready for prime time yet, except for people who really want to spend the serious money to get the latest and greatest. ; I find they're mostly being marketed towards gamers who want the fastest possible transfer rates. ; For computer games loading times can be a big deal, ya'know, always waiting for the next level to load up. ; For a while I was running a RAID setup and I was the fastest of anyone I ever played with. ; Of course that meant that I was always waiting for everyone else to load up, but.. that gives you an idea of the mentality. ; I got a kick out of being the first, I felt smug about the speed of my system.
I have some serious concerns about their longevity. ; There's a key point here, SSDs are all flash based memory. ; And flash based memory degrades itself as it is written to. ; These SSDs have a fixed lifetime ahead of them, and I don't know how long that life time is in typical computer usage scenarios. ; It may well be quite acceptable, but I just don't know what it is and for the moment it concerns me.
I also don't know how much of an performance gain you'd see in choosing an SSD over a reasonably fast HDD. ; I guess I wouldn't be surprised if your apps loaded up faster, but you might try to find some benchmarks in real world situations.
I found some benchmarks on tomshardware.com, my typical first stop in terms of hardware comparison testing.. but.. they're all artificial benchmarks. ; I really wish they'd do a test that just shows how long it takes, to, say, start up Photoshop or boot up into the OS.
Their benchmarks show significant performance increases for an SSD, but I really don't know what that would mean in terms of loading up PS or doing real world tasks like that.
