Okay, Intel SSD has arrived and has been installed.

The difference is definitely noticable, though I'm not sure I can make the claim of "best upgrade you can get" right now. I'd agree with it in the sense that other PC parts don't (or shouldn't) bottleneck normal PC use anymore, so SSDs would bring out the most perceivable difference.

I changed over to AHCI mode, and shortly after I installed the SSD I noticed that music and sounds/keyboard/mouse was skipping a bit. DPC-checker confirms this with the highest latency recorded during the observation to be up to 5000 microseconds. It peaks whenever the SSD is moderately accessed. I nailed it down to the Intel Storage Matrix that I installed for my board's chipset, and uninstalling and replacing the AHCI driver with microsoft's default one fixed that. Maximum recorded in the last run was around 1000 microseconds. (<2000 is around the tolerable level). It normally hangs around the low 100s anyway. Reinstalling Intel's driver reproduces the problem, just to be thorough.

The reason I opted for the Intel driver in the first place is because they won't declare my HDDs as being inactive/unplugged if they don't spin up to full speed in 8 seconds when resuming from sleep (happens with large capacity, slow-spinning drives). If that drive was your primary, one would experience a hang or a BSOD soon after.

Microsoft does have a hotfix for the issue for anyone experiencing it though, which can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977178

(I think I've talked about this the last time I played around with AHCI, but here it is again)

I replaced my Samsung F2 500GB drive with a WD20EARS 2TB as my media drive too, but the WD has much more vibration than the samsung, and I can hear the increased noise level even when it's mounted in the rubber knubs of the P182.

I've ordered the Stretch Magic from ebay already, so when it gets sent I'll have a play with suspension mounting my drives like this: