I feel like by the time I'm ready to have an SSD for home use

Go buy a 64gb ssd, right now. Seriously. It's all fine and well to dump games and other stuff on it, but where it shines is the OS being loaded on it. My hard drive used to have little lags all the time. Little lags I just didn't notice until I got an ssd... and then continued trying to use my other roughly equivalent pc. After two months, I was compelled to buy a second ssd for it. Ssds are the best thing single additional cores. I'd give up my video card before I'd go back to an hdd. The 64gb ones are only around $80.

You can probably squeek by with OS + 2-5 important programs (depending on size) on a 64GB SSD if that's all you can afford, but in general I'd say that if you're going to get an SSD, get as much space as you can reasonably afford.

Win7/8 + a full Visual Studio install with offline docs, various common utilities, a graphics editor and you're already dangerously close to bumping into capacity when you account for the the 20 gigs windows will reserve for pagefile, hibernation, and recycle bin on a system with 64GB SSD and 8GB of RAM.

You can disable some of these things if you're willing to give them up. On my laptop with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM windows was reserving 25GB for recycling bin, 32GB for a pagefile and 24GB for a hibernation file. I set the max size of my recycling bin to ~4GB, since I figure any file larger than about 2GB that I delete is a movie or large archive that I actually mean to delete--got 20GB back. The whole point (for me) of having gobs of RAM is to avoid paging, so I disabled my pagefile entirely--saved 32GB. You could just make it smaller though, if you were worried about running out of memory. Hibernation was the hardest thing to give up, but between sleep mode (which easily lasts overnight) when I want to keep the state of my desktop, and boot and load times so fast when I don't care, I rarely encounter a time when I miss it--saved 24GB.

If you really have the time (and still I'm not sure if it nullifies the 0ms seek times of SSDs) you could just copy the biggest files of your most important programs and softlink them from your HDD. So the little files will be read from the HDD and the bigger ones from the SSD.

Its what I do currently with a RamDisk. Instead of copying the whole thing, I just copy the most relevant files and link to them with mklink (or ln in Linux)

If you really have the time (and still I'm not sure if it nullifies the 0ms seek times of SSDs) you could just copy the biggest files of your most important programs and softlink them from your HDD. So the little files will be read from the HDD and the bigger ones from the SSD.

Yeah, when I had a 128GB SSD, it was only big enough to fit Windows, my programs and documents, and a few games on it. Whichever game I was playing at the time, I'd move it's big data files over to the SSD and use windows' mklink to make it appear to still be on the HDD.

I feel like by the time I'm ready to have an SSD for home use

Go buy a 64gb ssd, right now. Seriously. It's all fine and well to dump games and other stuff on it, but where it shines is the OS being loaded on it. My hard drive used to have little lags all the time. Little lags I just didn't notice until I got an ssd... and then continued trying to use my other roughly equivalent pc. After two months, I was compelled to buy a second ssd for it. Ssds are the best thing single additional cores. I'd give up my video card before I'd go back to an hdd. The 64gb ones are only around $80.

I don't have money to spend on going faster. I'm going fast enough for what I'm doing. I know a 64GB SSD is cheap, but apart from putting the OS on it and squealing about my boot time I'd really get nothing out of it. Right now I've got a brand new 500GB and a year-old 1TB running on a SATA 2 board and I'm having no trouble with anything I'm running. My next upgrade will probably be the CPU, and - by extension - possibly the mobo (I'm still running an AM2+ dual core 2.1GHz CPU). Honesty, I don't really even need that to change at the moment, since I'm not doing a lot on my home system apart from homework.

I know SSD's are awesome. The thing is, if I wait until I feel like I need one then they'll have become cheaper and I can buy a larger volume.

Also, I'm curious as to whether or not there's DVD/BD drives with an SSD cache out. So that when you put the disc in anything you read gets loaded into the cache and then when you're not reading it keeps caching more data in the background until it's read the whole disc. I saw an article about a DVD/SSD 'hybrid' drive, but it was really just an SSD strapped onto a laptop DVD drive and they use the same cable.

EDIT - Correction, the emulator in the ADK is slow as hell on my box and I was considering upgrading for that, but since school started I haven't been programming much (irony...). I'm heading in next week to set up my classes for next semester and I plan on packing the schedule with programming classes to make up for this first semester which consisted of pre-calc that I already knew 90% of and then English and more English. (Bleh...)