Why 512GB? I felt that is an odd size. I recently bought 240GB SSD from staples and I find that to be plenty enough room for the OS/routine storage. I still need to connect my USB drives in 1-3TB ranges if I need anything beyond that size. I believe I can live with 128GB SSD pretty well too.
Large size SSD will be a financial mistake as its price kept falling. I remember my first flash drive is 128MB (at that time pretty large size) for $100 from Fry’s. I just recently bought a 32GB flash drive for $15 from Amazon. You are going to throw away the “large” ssd drive in a few years…buy what’s enough for your data. There is no permanent replacement concept in the PC business.
That said, if you do process large data, 512GB might be helpful. At work, we run some hadoop job and it will be significantly slowed when you start to use hard drive (large memory size to avoid that would help). I have never tried SSD for Hadoop map/reduce ..but I believe it will help the map stage. But you need large hard-drive volume for Hadoop as well.
