Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
A couple of years ago I had a Dell netbook with an SSD. Reading from disk was OK, but writing was mind-numbingly slow.
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I have had the "pleasure" of seeing and [trying] to use one machine with such disk. One big chain of stores here was bundling them for one euro with large purchases, such as luxury lawn-mowers. The machine was slow to the point of being totally, utterly, completely unusable. Unfortunately, it wasn't standard IDE or SATA compatible SSD but some module that looked more like RAM modules.
I have also used EEE netbook from Asus with very cheap SSD that was even older and the performance was OK.
It is VERY important to do your homework before purchasing such item. Have a look at this table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS
A good SSD can have 100 times better read AND write speeds for random data.
One more thing. SSD has limited number of writes to a single memory cell before it starts to fail. This is not that bad with modern units, but still, it is something to keep in mind. So have enough RAM and try to eliminate needless swapping in OS. There are many HOWTOs on the net describing how to optimize system for an SSD disk.