Just in case you are in shopping mood for an SSD drive, here's a must read article on AnandTech. The summary is, not all SSDs are good, or even usable. For sure, staying away from any SSD drive with the JMicron driver seems a given. I'm leaning myself towards the OCZ Vertex drive ($345 for the 120GB drive at Newegg).

Last week I built a new file server based on the ABIT IS7 mobo. I bought 2 large SATA drives, and planned to use simple mirroring of the two disks (RAID-5 just sucks too much :-). I installed Fedora Core 3 on this system, and that worked seemingly without problems. But, upon further examination, I started getting an error like this in my syslog:

Mar 31 20:33:34 server kernel: Losing too many ticks!
Mar 31 20:33:34 server kernel: TSC cannot be used as a timesource.
Mar 31 20:33:34 server kernel: Possible reasons for this are:
Mar 31 20:33:34 server kernel:   You're running with Speedstep,
Mar 31 20:33:34 server kernel:   You don't have DMA enabled for your hard disk (see hdparm),
Mar 31 20:33:34 server kernel:   Incorrect TSC synchronization on an SMP system (see dmesg).
Mar 31 20:33:34 server kernel: Falling back to a sane timesource now.

This obviously couldn't be good... Running "hdparm-t" on the disks showed me abysmal read performance from the SATA disks (like, in the 2-3MB/sec range, when I'd expect at least 60MB/sec). I spent quite a while trying to figure this, trying newer kernels (2.6.11), trying without RAID mirroring etc. I also checked the obvious BIOS settings, but the either all seemed right, or didn't make any difference. Until I tried the setting for the actual IDE controller, where the default "mode" obviously didn't do the right thing. Changing this to "Enhanced mode" did the trick, and the system performs well now.