Slow installers and SSDs

[yellowviolent]

Hi, I'm very new to the whole osx86 scene, but have managed to get both my HP mini 1000s updated to 10.6.5 without any issues. One thing that has been irritating me this whole time is how long upgrades would take; specifically, system updates ran through Installer. They would often seem to hang or take much longer than the estimated time would indicate. I initially thought it was just a side effect of it being run on different hardware, but after reading the Wikipedia article on solid-state drives, I'm beginning to think it may be something else altogether.

Specifically, under the section "Quality and performance":

 

In particular, operations that require many small writes, such as log files, are particularly badly affected on some devices, potentially causing the entire host system to freeze for periods of up to one second at a time.[source: "Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives". Anandtech.]

 

Could this be the reason why installs seem to drag? I have only experimented with machines with SSDs, so I have no idea if similar phenomena are experienced on machines with optical drives.

 

Sorry if this issue is covered elsewhere.