Just installed an Intel budget ssd two days ago, fresh updated install of Ubuntu 9.10 had the boot time cut down by just over 10 seconds compared to the mechanical drive. Apps start very quickly GIMP, Blender, OO Writer et cetera are all under 2 seconds. 2-3 meg pngs opening in the GIMP take a fraction of a second. "sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda1" nets ~1330MB/sec over many runs for cached reads on the Intel and on the two mechanical drives. Buffered disk reads on the Intel are in the 156MB/sec range, and 51 and 58MB/sec on the mechanical drives. 6 seconds or so to transfer half a gig of DV video from the mech to the ssd. It's also very quiet so you don't have that grinding on boot or opening a folder with pdf/image previews. Chrome and Firefox don't seem to have the stalls that they did earlier when transferring to disk. Installation plate to fit into the 3.5" bay was fiddly even with a removable hdd cage, so was plugging in the cables as it's such a tiny drive. Very pleased all up, 5/5 on value (remember it's only 40gig though).
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Just installed an Intel budget ssd two days ago, fresh updated install of Ubuntu 9.10 had the boot time cut down by just over 10 seconds compared to the mechanical drive. Apps start very quickly GIMP, Blender, OO Writer et cetera are all under 2 seconds. 2-3 meg pngs opening in the GIMP take a fraction of a second. "sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda1" nets ~1330MB/sec over many runs for cached reads on the Intel and on the two mechanical drives. Buffered disk reads on the Intel are in the 156MB/sec range, and 51 and 58MB/sec on the mechanical drives. 6 seconds or so to transfer half a gig of DV video from the mech to the ssd. It's also very quiet so you don't have that grinding on boot or opening a folder with pdf/image previews. Chrome and Firefox don't seem to have the stalls that they did earlier when transferring to disk. Installation plate to fit into the 3.5" bay was fiddly even with a removable hdd cage, so was plugging in the cables as it's such a tiny drive. Very pleased all up, 5/5 on value (remember it's only 40gig though).