Need advice on SSD or HDD for Ubuntu.

[Deeplove]

Hey guys. I've been messing around with Ubuntu for a couple of weeks now and I totally love it. I'm not Linux savvy and all, but do enjoy having a great OS for the price. Free. Mmmm....

Well, my HDD is an older HDD and its about to give out on me. It's making louder noises each time and it's not working like it used to. It's very old and I think it's time to get something new.

I have a AMD 555BE on a Asus M4A7B5TD-v EVO AM3 mobo and 4GB of ram.

What I wanted to know is what should I go with? SSD or HDD?

I wanted to get faster boot times, apps open up faster and overall a faster linux pc. 2nd, I'm not going to be storing anything on the PC. It's basically for web surfing, emails and small stuff. Would I be able to go with a small SSD?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[oldfred]

About a year & half ago I added a 62GB SSD to my system. It does boot faster and loads larger applications quicker. But once apps are loaded there is not any real difference. I also have 4GB of RAM and almost never use swap. Linux caches recent activity in RAM so unless you load many apps you have everything in RAM which is quicker than the SSD.

I have two 30GB / (root) partitions on my SSD. My wife was complaining about too many changes as I always updated every 6 months, so I have 12.04 as my main working install, have 12.10 in the other / and 13.04 on hard drive to experiment with. All my data is on hard drives and mounted into all my installs. Without data my /home is small, so it also is on SSD in /.

[Deeplove]

Would 32GB be too small for what I'm trying to do? I see that newegg has a couple 32GB SSDs for less than $50. I might jump on that.

[oldfred]

As long as you have another drive for data 32GB is fine. I normally suggest 25GB, but can have as little as 10GB for / (root). But your data can be very large so that is not included in my suggestions.