What I meant was is it overall faster than a hard disk using sata III.
Current state of commercial products is:
. you can get PCIe SSDs that are a few times faster than the SATA III
BUS, but they cost several times more than SATA SSDs, so you are
unlikely to take that route.
. SSDs run at slightly less than full out SATA II speed (300MB/s),
about 2 time the fastest rotating SATA drive speed. (I'm not
sure if SAS rotating drives are much faster, but they cost
alot more than SATA rotating drives, so you are unlikely to
take that route.
. All current SSDs do static wear leveling (Note that static,
meaning even unchanging pages are wear leveled, is better than
dynamic.)
. Some SSDs do background clean up, so you won't see significant
slow down unless you write a full disk's worth of data without
giving the SSD time to cleanup. (240GB/275MB/s is about 15
minutes.)
. No current stuff will "wear out" with any normal load, but
you could setup something to do so.
(240GB/275MB/s is about 15 minutes, 1000 passes means
you could wear it out in 10 days.)
. Some current stuff optimizes out writing 0's or even redundant
data in general. This speeds them up and increases their
lifetime.
. SSDs may run 20 times or more the speed of rotating drives
for small files.
. You may be able to wear out an SSD in a few months
if a paging file is on it, but you will have done a few
year's work if you do, so it is sort of like the
drive lasted 3 years. (The difference being that
the replacement costs just a much instead of 1/4 as much.)
Unfortunately some (most, all?) current SSDs have problems some
sequences of operations. I haven't much testing for these problems
in the reviews of devices, so it they are a possibility with any
of the SSDs. Therefore I recommend that you run benchmarks with
any SSDs before you use them in production.
You should specifically check for problems with programs that
you use a lot or folder structures that you use that might
be unusual. For example:
.. lots of small files (say 10k totaling 1gB or less)
.. lots of files (say 100k or more)
.. virtual disks, including encrypted disks.
.. downloading USENET files. (This may involve lots of disk
to disk copying and merging of small files into large files,
with 10 or more streams running at the same time, all on the
same disk.
A good disk will be able to run at about 1/2 of it's initial
speed even if you keep running the test long enough to write
an entire disk's worth of data.
speed Assuming that you have already determined that your I/O
load
