How much of a benefit does a regular system see with an SSD?

[x88x]

Well, $500 wasn't really necessary. The X-25M isn't really that great a drive anymore, tbh, and other manufacturers have made cheaper and much better performing drives. IMO the best balance atm is the OCZ Vertex 2. The 120GB version is $355 atm at Newegg, and gets:
Max Read: 285 MB/s
Max Write: 275MB/s
Sustained Write: 250MB/s

Crazy performance increase over the previous generation Vertex drives, and way better than the Intel drives.

[jevery]

Well, $500 wasn't really necessary. The X-25M isn't really that great a drive anymore, tbh, and other manufacturers have made cheaper and much better performing drives. IMO the best balance atm is the OCZ Vertex 2. The 120GB version is $355 atm at Newegg, and gets:
Max Read: 285 MB/s
Max Write: 275MB/s
Sustained Write: 250MB/s
Crazy performance increase over the previous generation Vertex drives, and way better than the Intel drives.

I wouldn't say way better, In this review the Vertex 2 only managed 226 mb/s average read.

My X-25 averages 231 mb/s and costs about 9% less per GB

.

[Luke122]

We just went with what the customer asked for. He specifically chose that make/model, so we said ok. He said "damn the cost" and we said !!! but ok.

He's super happy with it anyways, so that's all that matters.

[x88x]

I wouldn't say way better, In this review the Vertex 2 only managed 226 mb/s average read.

My X-25 averages 231 mb/s and costs about 9% less per GB

.

Every site that I've seen benchmark SSDs has said that HD Tune still doesn't handle SSDs very well, and in fact in the review you linked, they specifically mentioned (and showed) that the Vertex 2 performed much worse on the HD Tune test than on any of the other benchmarks. I would be interested to see the performance of the newer X25-M's in the Atto, IO Meter, and SiSoft Sandra benchmarks. I found this review that has Atto benchmarks for a X25-M, but it's almost 2 years old, and I believe (and hope) that Intel has updated the X25-M line since then. The place where almost every SATA MLC SSD I've seen struggles the most is write speeds, both sustained and burst, and that is exactly the point that the SandForce controllers are designed to address, and from what I can see looking at all of the benchmarking software used in the article you linked, they succeeded beautifully.

[jevery]

For my use, write speed is inconsequential and the reason that I didn't go with a Corsair SSD back when I bought the Intel. To be fair, this review does show a better average read in HD Tune than the one I linked earlier and it also has a direct comparison with the Intel, but the earlier G1, not the G2.