"There is a big gain in a small number of circumstances"
This is exactly why DF says: "it's not enough to justify the expense".

Also why spend $100+ for a free to play FPS like Dust?!
Better save those money for the PS4 than spend them now on the PS3 for just few titles.

SSD (as DF says) "In the here and now, SSDs remain an expensive luxury, but they clearly represent the way forward for console technology - if not now, then definitely for next-gen machines."

Also you are judging the improvements on a partial/incomplete code which means that the results you are getting NOW definitely will not be the same you get in the final game.
Not to mention that Dust 514 qualitative inferior to many FPS on PS3, both in therms of performance & video quality, so a SSD can make it run/look better because there's far less to do than on a title such as Killzone 3.

I'm not telling people they should go out and buy one. I merely had one, experimented, and reported my findings here. Some guy has a 250GB SSD in his PS3, others might be happy with a 30 GB drive. Some people even bought PS3s and/or Vita just for DUST. Price/performance values are not universal.

Any 2.5" HDD/SDD will work, just be mindful of the height. I can't recall the specifics, but of the various standard heights out there, the tallest won't fit. I think it's the 1/6" high ones and taller that you have to avoid.

The OP surprises me though. The PS3 is supposed to be a SATA1 device. That means that even a 7200RPM drive is faster. The only time I think the SSD will win is if the game uses a very large number of very small files. Seek times would be lower.

I'd never heard of those before... My wallet does not appreciate this.

This is just a rough guess from what I remember reading, but +players might know more about this as it hit them hard when they got the 6 games for free offer.

You need double the space in GB for the game file you are downloading and attempting to install. So if you got a 20gb or 30gb, the system takes some to run the os, your game saves and data utility files take more, so if the Download is 10gb's or larger you sometimes can't install it, same goes for if you have an almost full HDD.

Any 2.5" HDD/SDD will work, just be mindful of the height. I can't recall the specifics, but of the various standard heights out there, the tallest won't fit. I think it's the 1/6" high ones and taller that you have to avoid.

The OP surprises me though. The PS3 is supposed to be a SATA1 device. That means that even a 7200RPM drive is faster. The only time I think the SSD will win is if the game uses a very large number of very small files. Seek times would be lower.

So, you'll have an advantage over players online?

Stuffed my 300GB SSD drive (that I don't have other uses for atm lol why did I buy it?) and it's amazing how much sharper everything in the game is now.

Pretty much perfect resolution / LOD through the whole game, and menu's etc are much more responsive. Highly recommended upgrade if you're not poor.