I have been using a Kingston pro SSD drive im my main laptop for some time, and have been greatly impressed with the speed , heat and noise improvements. The machine starts incredible quickly , and everything just runs more smoothly.
Now Kingston have launched a range of cheaper SSD drives, at around £100 for a 64GB drive. They are not as fast as other models, but are way faster than any mechanical hard drive, so I thought I would pop one into my notebook.
As expected , the performance improved, and boot times were dramatically reduced. I bought an external enclosure to put my old hard disk in (USB 3), and now use that for external storage.
I can heartily recommend one of these units. If you want to give your notebook/laptop a speed boost, then you could far worse that just add one of these drives and some more memory and save yourself some money.
Here is a more detailed article on the drives.
Kingston Value SSD drives
Regards
Nick
I have just started testing the next version of Ubuntu 11.10 with an SSD, and with the latest version 3.0 Linux kernel, and improved boot manager, it is near as damned instant on.
I have also noticed a much improved response to suspend and resume, which is really worth having, as that has not always been perfect in the past.
Nick
What OS are you using Miles? I have one of those in an external e-sata enclosure. It offers great performance improvements for reads, but write times are about the same as any normal HD. It just worked with Ubuntu. As it is a standard SATA drive, I would have thought the machine would see it, but perhaps the driver would not be optimal in Windows.
I got one of the hybrid Momentus XT drives but the laptop does not see it. I need to find a SATA driver for my HP that’s up to date enough to recognise the drive 
. Going from a 1Tb 5400 to a 500Gb 7200 hybrid should make quite a difference though. When I get the chance to have a go I’ll let you know!
Unfortunately Carl I don’t use windows as a main operating system , so I can’t comment. Using Ubuntu Linux my boot times have come down from about 1 minute to 10 seconds. You should expect to see a similar drop in boot times.
I have seen a dramatic speed improvement in the boot times of my Windows VM however, which is also very useful…
Regards
Nick
I’d love to give an SSD a go soon. I have a space in this laptop (i think) without removing one of the two current drives (RAID 0) and then I could set it up as RAID 10.
what sort of cold boot times do you get with windows?