Intel 330 SSD running slow, how can I improve performance?

I think the biggest bottleneck in the performance of your Intel 330 SSD is most likely your HP Mini 2140 laptop's SATA controller. My Googling around leads me to think that your laptop uses a Mobile Intel 945GSE MCH coupled with an ICH7M (82801GBM) I/O controller.

While the desktop version of the ICH7 supports SATA II, the mobile version, which is what I believe you have, does not.

In other words, transfers to/from your SSD will be bounded by the max SATA 1.0 transfer rate and will never be faster than ~150 MB/s.

The ~150 MB/s limit is from the SATA spec. In actual use, given that you have an Atom CPU, I would actually expect transfers to be noticeably slower than that.

You'd probably get better use out of your Intel 330 SSD in another system which could take advantage of its SATA 3.0 capabilities. An older SSD would probably work as well for you in your HP mini 2140.

Note: by slow i mean 20 second boot to desktop (no login), 5 seconds to start terminal - was hoping that with ssd starting apps would be 1 sec

This is just a wild guess, but a large factor of the 20 second boot time could be due to the Atom N270 and the 533 MHz FSB not being able to move data any faster than they already are. Even if you had faster transfers to/from your SSD than SATA 1.0, the CPU and RAM transfers are (I'm guessing) still bottle-necking total system performance.

(That's probably why the system designers saw no problem using an ICH7M. Faster SATA was not expected to result in a faster laptop. It would just cost more. Again, just guessing here.)

I think your mini 2140 is just running as fast as it can. (BWTHDIK?)

Yes, your machine is indeed limited by SATA1. That said, I think it's not really a problem at all. For a netbook you are getting very good performance and, many of the smaller random reads will fit in the slower speed range anyway.