But not many care for boot times. Especially when many of us do it less than once per week. I think it's funny that my friend sometimes reboots his SSD because it can be too fast causing one or two of his startups to not load properly. Sure he can reconfigure them, but he rather just reboot.
True. I have not rebooted my linux workstation in over one year.
But, more people might care about things like webbrowsing speed. It's fairly obvious that it usually takes longer to write data to the diskcache than it takes to download it from the internet (at least with a reasonably fast connection).
Or, to put it another way, the access time of internet servers is usually lower than the access drive of your internal drive.
The same is true for gimp and photoshop, even when I accidentally opened all images in my photo directory, in excess of 30Gb of uncompressed image data, things were still quick, even though I only have 24Gb of RAM.
There was no noticeable delay when switching between images. If I had actually used photoshop professionally I would have loved it. :-)
And that is with a single somewhat old Intel 120Gb MLC drive.
And as for browsers and operating systems, if anything, faster drives makes it more obvious when they are slow, since the computer is not spending 90% of it's time waiting for the drive when doing things like loading webpages. It is painfully obvious, as an example, that windows is rather slow when you run both it an linux from an SSD drive.
Compiling a 1M loc software project takes about half the time using gcc -O than using visual studio without optimization enabled, perhaps not a perfect comparison, but on the linux system 90% of the CPU time is spent in gcc, and on the windows system 70% is spent in the kernel.
As for tweaks, what about temp files that get written often? Browser cache, thumbnails, folder views, or any prog that keeps and updated database and config? Sure, Trim has solved many of the issues of preventing the SSD to slow to a crawl with many writes and deletes. But not good enough to also use it for the page file? When the pagefile is what you'd want the fastest access times? And how can you use the OS and Apps on only 80GB?
Actually, even without trim SSD:s do not slow down all that much, or, well, the worst case was about a 3x slowdown in the tests. This puts the access times on par with a raid of 20x15k rpm drives. Given optimum conditions for the conventional drives (either 100% redundancy, that is, a 20x mirror, or an access pattern that evenly access data on all drives).
As far as I know my Linux computer does not actually use trim. It's still not noticeably slower than it was when I installed the drive about two years ago.
And as for the page file, I have yet to use that one in my windows destop or linux workstation, RAM is not exactly expensive right now.
But SSD:s are actually very, very good for page-file devices, since a page file is almost always accessed randomly. I use one as more or less exactly that in my disk-server (it's an intent-log cache for changes done, and a cache of the most recently accessed block for reading, sort of like the new intel motherboards, but the Solaris ZFS version..)
This cache has lowered the average file-block access time for my seeding server from 10ms to 0.2ms. Not that that really matters all that much in the grand scheme of things, but it saves a lot of wear on the "classical" harddrives, beacuse more than 80% of the data is now read from the SSD (most of the time only a few of the torrents are actually active, and they usually fit on the SSD drive).
