With most technology, I choose to be a late adopter. Letting other people do the first rounds of QA has saved we loads of money. Waiting for the prices of new gadgets to drop down to reasonable levels has saved even more. So after "everybody" has gotten a SSD drive, I'm thinking it's time to look into it.

I expect to use the drive as a boot drive for Fedora, so it should excel on the random read/write tests. I have an older motherboard which only supports SATA 3.0 Gb/s, so the high end SSD are not interesting at this point. Finally, I'm running a fan-less system, water cooled, and with Silverstone Nightjar fanless PSU, thus also opting for the quiet WD Green drivers (5400 - 7200 RPM). It means switching to SSD will be a very significant improvement, while also removing the last noise from the back-scatter of disk bound OS work.

In Anandtech's review from November 2010, the Corsair Force drives are on top. Furthermore, he stresses the SandForce controllers as "the sensible choice" for OS and applications. At 180 Euros, the F120 is a bit pricey, while the F40 and F60 are almost the same at 98 and 105 Euros respectively. Although the F60 was not included in Anandtech's review, it seems like a safe bet. 60 GB should also be plenty of space for the OS, swap, and basic user files (documents, e-mail, but not images or video).

As for compatibility, in the Fedora 14 documentation, they mention that "ext4 is the only fully-supported file system that supports TRIM". Furthermore, to enable the TRIM command (which is disabled by default), the drive should be mounted with the discard option. Finally, the docs states that the swap partition will use TRIM by default. In other words, everything is ready to go.

Robert Penz goes into details to bust some of the myths around SSD. He concludes that on a normal user system, you don't need to take special consideration when switching from spinning to solid drives. Only on the advice of using "noatime" he seems incorrect, challenged by this thread: "noatime is not necessary. Fedora defaults to relatime , which is a better choice: it reduces disk access almost as much as noatime, but preserves enough atime info for practical purposes".