SSD Experiment

I've been considering experimenting with an SSD drive. I already have a 1T Seagate Barracuda. My plan is to get a 160G Intel X25-M SSD. On a hardware layer, it looks like it would work with my Dell Precision 690 using the SATA-300 interface. I also see that it includes a 3.5-inch bay adapter (given that a standard SATA drive is 3.5" and this is a a 2.5" drive). On a software layer, I would configure the two drives as follows:

• 160G SSD:
  * 96G system drive with the following partitions:

  /                     10G
  /home                 10G
  /tmp                   5G
  /usr                  10G
  /var                  61G
  

  * 64G of cache/swap: I would like to use the extra speed for cache, not storage. Ideas:
  
  
  • Swap: The simplest thing is to swapon to it and then run a lot of VMs under KVM and see if performance for the VM is tolerable. If it is then its much cheaper than buying more RAM.
  
  
  • Disk Cache: If I were running ZFS I'd add the SSDs to the L2ARC on-disk cache.
  
  
  • Other types of Cache: Lots of ideas on this topic recently posted on slashdot.
• 1T SATA:
  I would then use the remaining 1T for directories under /home and /var to store VMs (as raw LVs) as well media. I'd also keep an extra 20G of the SATA space free to play with new file systems.