Solid State Disks (SSD) are becoming an option for your server, workstation or notebook. Deciding which one to get is never easy. If you are considering getting one you should do a lot of research. Tom's Hardware has an excellent article about current state of SSDs.
It also clarifies differences between the types of SSD - SLC and MLC.
All the premium products are based on Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory. You can identify these by their high write performance and I/O performance.
And then there is the flash SSD mainstream, although we’re having a hard time declaring this a “mainstream” segment when it still averages several hundred dollars per drive. The mainstream differs from the high-end in its utilization of Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash products. These can be read quickly, but their write and random access performance generally lag behind.
Then they compare 14 SSD hard drives in various test configurations for workstation and a notebook. Make sure you have enough time for reading, the review is 19 pages long and as usual, loaded with graphs of performance results.
The tests are
- access time, interface
- read/write, throughput
- PCMark benchmark
- I/O performance
- workstation performance
- streaming read and performance
- power consumption at DVD playdack
Finally the conclusions - there is no a single drive that will rule them all. Instead, consider the criteria for choosing SSD - performance, cost or both.
For me these drives are still too expensive, too small to go and buy. Most of drives reviewed are 32 or 64 GB. In my laptop I have 100 GB hard disk and I'm struggling with free space (I have to move data to external USB drive). Definitely when capacity increases (for mainstream products) to 128 or 256 GB I'll have another look at the cost/performance of SSD hard drives. For sure, they are here to stay and in long(er) run replace magnetic hard drives.
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