[ubuntu-us-wi] SSD recommendations

[Tony Yarusso]

Given your use case, I assume the driving motivation here is
performance of the OS itself.  On that basis, here are the top three
families:
Crucial RealSSD C300
OCZ Vertex 2
Intel X25-M

Of course, all of these are going to have a price tag issue, but
perhaps one of them will work for you.  It's actually getting hard to
find anything as small as 30GB on the high end of performance.  One
factor here is that performance actually goes up with capacity, so a
120GB drive will be faster than a 60GB drive of the same design.  Note
also that a third generation of the Intel controller is due out in
February.  The Crucial C300 has the distinction of being the only SATA
drive on the market currently that will saturate a SATA2 link and
benefit from a SATA3 upgrade, clocking in at 355MB/s.  The 64GB
version goes for $135
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148357).

In the Intel, an 80GB model is available for $172
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167028).
OCZ takes the prize for price, since they still make a 40GB model
which goes for just $110
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227610).
When you go a bit higher and look at price/performance/capacity, the
brands become pretty equal, with 120GB models of the OCZ and Intel
both going for $230
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227551 and
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167035).

If you need to go even lower, the OCZ Vertex (first generation) has
great performance for the price, with a 30GB model for just $90
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393).

Meanwhile, if you want to drastically improve performance and can
manage a little bit of a price increase, you can get a 50GB OCZ
RevoDrive, which is a PCI Express model with 540MB/s read and 450MB/s
write, for $200 even
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227596).
The higher capacities of these go for thousands.

On a related note, you may want to consider putting at least some of
the "dot-files" of your $HOME on the SSD, even if you aren't storing
your actual documents there.  Things like the Firefox cache,
gnome-panel settings, Evolution mail folders, and gconf settings would
all benefit from the SSD speedup.  Of course, that negates the
administrative niceness of sharing them from a central NAS, but then
you could use a scheduled rsync to partially offset that.

I'm also curious as the the specs you have in mind for said NAS.  :)

 - Tony