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by old-gregg 6354 days ago
Only if the drive is based on Intel's MLC or, even better - Samsung's SLC flash.

Regular (cheap) MLC-based SSDs are good only at reading big sequential files and lose out to 7200rpm drives when it comes to many small writes.

I can't find a ling to a guy who blogged about his disappointing experience compiling C/C++ sources on a regular MLC drive, but I googled Linus Torvald's experience with Intel:

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-...

I personally find that I just have all my software open all the time, most of what I need gets pre-cached in 4GB of RAM I have, and I never reboot, i.e. no need to restart anything [unless, of course, freaking Adobe Flash freezes my Mac]

1 comments

This anandtech review was very helpful to me:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34...

Gives a lot of detail about the various types of SSDs and why the intel is currently the best bet. Warning, reading it might cause you to go into a "gear lust trance" and spend a lot of money.