I don’t know how it is with toy operating systems, but with Linux I am quite happy with having /tmp on a ramdisk (tmpfs in Linux-speak; my computer has 4GB RAM). No need to play with expensive toys.

On the last ed-remark, you need to do that just about every time you do a build - or do you reboot your machine before each build?

When I got an SSD, the speedup I noticed first was in the time of starting apps. Starting almost anything now takes next to nothing, under almost any conditions. When I log in, all the open-at-login items (stickies/skype/itunes/etc.) start crazy fast. Effectively, you should expect (and tune for) responsiveness improvements (lotsa little things are much quicker), not for speed improvements for big tasks.

The point of the closing editorial remark was that I don't actually need to rebuild the server from scratch so often that I need to do it with office apps or webex (or photoshop or lightroom, etc.) running. But you're right, there are always two emacsen and a web browser and another server running, so the point's cloudy at best.

I did notice how fast apps started. I'm almost certain I'll try it again. After I get caught up from four lost days :-/

How many parallel compiler processes did you have for that build? If your swapfile is on the SSD you really ought to max out your CPU and let swap happen. For example I use -j8 on my quad-core hyperthreaded Core i7 machine with 8G RAM; I close down any large-memory-using programs and let it go to town.

I just did a clean make -j8 and it took 5 minutes 29 seconds (not including boot time, because I didn't reboot) -m

I timed "make slow; make -j3". You're absolutely right that I could have been more aggressive in the SSD case. I'll try again when I'm back in a place where I can.

For the curious: "make slow" compiles eight or ten particularly large modules in series; they're guaranteed to cause swapping if you run them in parallel. That's less important on an SSD, but for fairness I timed the same commands in each case.

Seagate makes a "hybrid" drive now that I'm very seriously considering. The "Momentus XT" (model # STAN500100). About $150 for a 500GB HDD + 4GB SLC NAND + smarts with supposedly similar performance to a full SSD. The most obvious drawback is hardiness (drops). I understand that under normal usage (ie: you do the same thing every day and you are not editing large videos) it should spin down so power usage is similar to an SSD most of the time.

One of these will be going into my desktop over Christmas (the main family machine) as the main system drive. The only thing that's slowed me up on my laptop is that I would actually like a 1TB drive because I share my laptop with my son. No announcements on larger sizes yet, but I'm assuming they must be coming.