Anandtech: Battle of the $125 SSDs

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).

These 'cheap' SSDs really make me consider going the route of replacing my cd drive in my laptop with one as my boot drive. From what I understand, having your documents and media on a traditional magnetic drive doesn't really slow down the boost gained from having apps and the OS on an SSD. Anyone have experience doing this (specifically in a MacBook Pro)?

I have a $100 gift card burning a hole in my pocket so I'm planning to spring for an X25-V, but if you are considering the same, it might be worth noting that IMFT's new 25nm flash is coming in Q4 this year, promising double the capacity for roughly the same price. If you can wait that long that is.

I just bought a Kingston 64GB SSD for about $149 at Fry's. I put it in my Sony Vaio as the only drive and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9. It is really super fast now. Open Office spreadsheet opens in under 2 seconds. It boots in about 15 seconds. The install of the OS was considerably faster etc. I have only had 1 actual session on the new setup but it seemed to speed everything up the whole time. Loading web pages in google chrome seemed almost unreal.