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Oh, and one more thing about SSD's - the speeds of SSD's vary widely, from the very-slow to the very-fast, and is largely dependent on the disk controller that is on the SSD. You want to look for Intel's 2nd generation drive (Intel X-25M's), or drives based off of Indilinx controllers (e.g. the OCZ Vertex and Agility drives). There are even preliminary tests off of a new controller from a company called SandForce that is supposed to knock the socks off of everything else, once the SandForce-based products actually hit the market in the next few months.
If you buy an SSD based off of any other controller besides Intel, Indilinx, or SandForce, there is a good chance you will get a $hit drive with performance lower than a single 7200rpm mechanical drive. If performance is king, then avoid drives based off of JMicron or Samsung controllers.
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I find that the most obvious benefit I get is from very fast start ups and programs open quickly -- adds up to quite a bit of saved time.
Probably not as important if you rarely shutdown and leave a limited number of apps open all the time.
Mine is in a notebook. All my desktops have Raptor C: drives. When SSD prices come down and capacity improves I can see moving to them on all my desktops too.
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It depends what kind of reads you're doing. If you're doing random reads, a good SSD will be faster than any hard drive on the market. A 146GB Seagate Savvio 15k.2 has a random read access time of about 3.2ms, an intel X25-E/M will have a time of under 100 microseconds.
You can see where SSDs make a big impact on desktop performance. Still, it's not nearly as big of an impact as they make in server storage. You can replace a lot of short-stroked 2.5" 15k SAS drives with a lot less SSDs or instead of storing everything in a 192GB of FB-DIMM (350W+) you can use PCIe-attached SSDs.
