Decent links / experiences to / with SSD's anyone

Hi all
Any decent links to SSD's also any experiences - good and bad.

I really want to beef up the I/O on a laptop so replacing the HDD with an SSD might be a good idea --although does SSD have a standard SATA interface.

Also performance on desktops -- it would seem to me a great place to store system paging / scratch or work areas for Photoshop etc.

The OS doesn't need to be on an SSD as once its loaded very little actually needs to be read from the system disk except when loading a new application.

Photoshop with scratch disk area on an SSD should FLY.
Paging area on an SSD would also make the OS fly as well - especially if you had more than one SSD.

I think having two SSD's would pay MORE benefit in running most applications than getting the fastest CPU since most applications are generally highly I/O bound. It's not a shortage of CPU power that generally causes sluggish performance unless you are heavily into Video editing or complex mathematical functions. - You will still need adequate RAM of course - but most machines come with 3 or 4GB anyway now - even laptops.

The OS will get most of its data via prefetch from the system paging device which needs to be FAST for the best performance. Having the OS on the SSD is just wasting the advantages of the SSD -- if you rarely re-boot the system then you don't need the faster boot that the SSD would give you.

If you run any Database apps (MySQL for example) having the index areas on the SSD should also make the queries and hence data retrieval really FLY as well -- you don't need the table spaces on the SSD just the indexes since the data can be retrieved via prefetch as the query is being resolved.

Cheers
jimbo

This is my fav....

...although probably a little extreame for most of us.