OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro Preview: The Fastest MLC SSD We've Ever Tested

Just buy one. Ubuntu is very slim to begin with (~4gb) and it's very easy to configure the filesystem to keep core files on the SSD and other stuff on a magnetic disk, e.g., symlink /home/kristianp/Music to /media/bighdd/Music or even just mount the hdd as /home. (Do they still make laptops with two drive bays? Used to be common but now that I think about it I can't recall any recent models with this. Maybe the Taiwanese brands? Asus, MSI, etc?)

I have a 16gb drive in my wife's netbook that has plenty of room still (no big music collection, though.) Our home computer has an 80gb drive, 70gb for Win7 and 10gb for ubuntu. Just to give you an idea, next time you boot up Ubuntu (karmic) watch the splash animation, the one that says "ubuntu" with a pulsing white progress-bar like thing underneath. The animation only cycles once and then gnome is instantaneously loaded and sitting idle (autologin is on.) Rebooting between Win7 and Ubuntu is like switching between Firefox and IE on my old computer. If you can afford one now, just buy it. If you wait for the "sweet spot" between price/performance/capacity you'll probably be waiting for a while. They'll be a better value in the future, but that will always be a case and it doesn't mean they're not a good value now.

What is "affordable" though? Since prices have yet to be published, we can only speculate (and articles praising the unit so highly will almost assuredly raise the price).

The Vertex 2 Pro should come in cheaper than Intel’s X25-E in a cost per GB sense

The Intel X-25 M G2 is $299 for 80GB at newegg. Let's say that the OCZ is the same. For me and my work habits, that is more than affordable; it actually costs me money not to use it.

If I compare this to my 10k RPM platter drives, boot up and wait times for me are 4 or 5 times longer than they are on an SSD. Paying "just" $299 to do things 4-5x faster will give me a great ROI even if I throw the thing away in three months and buy another.