How much would you pay to reduce load times on your PS3?

It's amazing how big games are getting these days. Big-budget next-gen titles can occupy up to 50Gb thanks to the Playstation 3's BluRay drive*. This allows games to include large amounts of uncompressed textures, video and audio. The downside of the Blu-Ray drive is a rather limited read speed that has led to the practice of installing large portions of games to the PS3's hard drive. Even with large portions of games installed to the hard drive, you may still have to wait for anywhere from six to ~thirty seconds.

I don't find those load times to be a big nuisance. However for those ADD-riddled gamers who can't sit still for that long, ExtremeTech has tested the effects of installing a high-performance solid-state drive, (SSD), in a Playstation 3. They find that load times are reduced quite a bit. The difference between the PS3 HDD and the SSD"anywhere from 33% to over 40%. The question is, are you willing to dish out $600-700 for such an upgrade?
Check out ExtremeTech's article here.



*Let's put 50Gb into perspective. Back in 2001 I was absolutely shocked that a full install of Baldur's Gate II was going to occupy 2Gb of my 10Gb hard drive. That's a 2,400% increase in the size of what we consider a 'big game.'