Oddly, the speed of an old msata drive has gotten slower and slower over time. It's running debian stable, and that means it's regularly doing TRIM.. but hdparm -t shows 40MB/s disk reads. I've read that this often happens due to firmware bugs, so I'm going to try upgrading the firmware.
I grabbed an .exe from Dell's site, and ran it under wine(32) to basically unzip the files. Now a small side quest to install xfce on it and see if I can get a remote root terminal…