Buying my first SSD and have a couple questions

[Wyndru]

I haven't any personal experience. It would seem (please correct me if I'm wrong) that you put your OS and apps on your SSD, have your data on a HD. Back up your SSD, and you can restore and save yourself a lot of work, and of course, as always, back up your data at a frequency level you're comfortable with.
Thank you, that works.

For desktops, yes. But laptops benefit form ssds because they can get banged around, they are lighter, they are a great upgrade in terms of performance, and they save battery life. The problem of course, is that laptops commonly only have 1 hdd bay (short of using an adapter for optical to hdd). I thought it was a good idea to upgrade some laptops with ssd's, and well lets just say I have some people upset that their data is gone. Oh well live and learn I guess...

 

[Muse]

For desktops, yes. But laptops benefit form ssds because they can get banged around, they are lighter, they are a great upgrade in terms of performance, and they save battery life. The problem of course, is that laptops commonly only have 1 hdd bay (short of using an adapter for optical to hdd). I thought it was a good idea to upgrade some laptops with ssd's, and well lets just say I have some people upset that their data is gone. Oh well live and learn I guess...

I only rarely take my laptops out of the house. I generally keep my data (just about all of it) on a machine that runs 24/7 (it's actually a laptop running XP!). The data's on an external 2TB HD that's connected by USB to the server laptop. All my machines have access to that data over the network. The data on there that I'm concerned most about I back up regularly to at least one other HD.

I do have an optical slot HD for one of my laptops (not currently being used). I could have an SSD in that machine and a separate HD all within the case of the machine. My machines do frustrate me alot with slowness at times, it can get rather aggravating. I suppose SSD's would alleviate a lot or maybe almost all of that. I should research it further, obviously, maybe start at Wikipedia.