Ah but in this time of the credit crunch, the important question has to be, how much of a hole will it leave in my wallet? At 256GB that's surely in the realms of a remortgage?

Um. Aren't SSD's meant to be good at random?

Yes, AC, it's sequential I/O (particularly writing) that SSDs are usually not good at. With zero latency, they do random I/O at the same speed as sequential -- much faster than discs do.

SSDs have huge problems with lots small random writes as each requires rewriting of a very large sector. It's so bad that many reviewers don't recommend first generation SSDs purely because of this. There's lots written elsewhere on the net on this subject.

This is what gave Intel SSDs marketing impact - they managed to squeeze really good random writes from MLC silicon. But SLC write performance is quite decent by nature - is this Samsung drive MLC or SLC?

..add a small loudspeaker to produce that turbine like spinup whine of a 15K hdd to a ssd? half the fun of having enterprise class kit in a workstation is having it sound like it means business on power on!