So, given that demo, does a single SSD perform substantially better enough on a normal laptop to warrant the expenditure yet? (Last I heard, standard advice was to wait until the price drops.)
HDD: http://encosia.com/photos/things/drive-benchmark-10k.png
SSD: http://encosia.com/photos/things/drive-benchmark-SSD.png
Regular (cheap) MLC-based SSDs are good only at reading big sequential files and lose out to 7200rpm drives when it comes to many small writes.
I can't find a ling to a guy who blogged about his disappointing experience compiling C/C++ sources on a regular MLC drive, but I googled Linus Torvald's experience with Intel:
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-...
I personally find that I just have all my software open all the time, most of what I need gets pre-cached in 4GB of RAM I have, and I never reboot, i.e. no need to restart anything [unless, of course, freaking Adobe Flash freezes my Mac]
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34...
Gives a lot of detail about the various types of SSDs and why the intel is currently the best bet. Warning, reading it might cause you to go into a "gear lust trance" and spend a lot of money.
I tried opening OpenOffice after watching this video and found that OpenOffice writer opens in less than 1 second and opening all Office applications except for database and impress takes less than three seconds 3.
The difference between SSDs and HDs is definitely noticeable.