hdd or ssd
 

i've got a 500 gb western digital 7200 rpm 16mb cache hdd, my problem is that i get a very slight stutter when looking at a new area of the map, could it be my hard drive isn't good enough, should i get an ssd and would that eliminate that slight stutter that's bugging me. stutter seems to go away when not running perfect landscape, from what i read ssd's only help initial load times but i would think a ssd would fix this, what do you think?

HD is slower sub-system than SSD but both are far slower than a ram drive.

SSD's are still expensive but I bought a 60GB Mushkin Callisto II and it is incredible how much faster your system is. Still it depends on how much you want to devote of that drive to one game. I prioritized my productivity software and the operating system on the SSD and bought a 1TB WD Caviar Black for my gaming stuff.

do you notice any loading stutters like when you look around? do you think my hdd could be doing this?

Stuttering when you're looking around is not likely to be the hard drive... I would suspect the video card or maybe slow RAM before hard drive. The game should be largely loaded into memory while your playing it with a few things perhaps loading in the background.

probably the video card then, i think my ram is pretty fast, i'll have to play with some more settings i guess, thank you

You've got 8G of RAM. The stock game should be able to completely load and run in half that, no? Buuuuut then there's the mega-load mod pack, of course....