I’m not really convinced that your compiles are disk I/O bound. I compile giant enterprise java projects and they are most definitely CPU bound. Disk activity is just blips here and there while the CPU (both cores) are pegged.
Just be thankful you aren’t running Windows. My compiles took 2x as long with the crappy windows I/O.
I’ve been looking at SSD’s for awhile but I think that the price/GB is still too high. I use my laptop for work and play which means that I have videos, mp3’s and photos on it. For development I have all kinds of different toolkits and frameworks, databases and dozens of source trees. It’s easy to chew up 40-80GB of space.
I do have a 1TB RAID5 NAS on my home network that I use for archiving stuff but I’d hate to have everything but a very slim slice of work related stuff on my laptop.
Buying an SSD won’t make sense for me until you can get one in the 120-150GB range for a reasonable price.
