I have been waiting for SSD disks to "take off" and make a performance difference in our industry. It seems that the time is drawing closer with prices dropping.

Here’s the standout thing in the article:

• Kingston 40GB drive (the purple line on the chart from Anandtech), based on the 35nm Intel X-25M
• Price: $115 before rebate ($85 after mail-in rebate, but am not going to assume that)
• delivered 4000 4K IOps random writes.
• delivered 7500 4K IOps random reads

Don’t get the big deal?   First – look at the odd ones out.  Those are fast spinning magnetic media disks.

Still don’t get it?   Ok, let me make a comparison.   Sure, a 1.5TB 7200 SATA drive can be bought for $115.   But it will do 80 4K random write IOps.

So:

• Expressed as GB/$ = the SATA drive is a 38x better deal
• Expressed as IOps/$ = the SSD drive is a 50x better deal (for write IO workloads, for reads, it’s 93x better).   The SSD delivers 34 IOps per dollar.   The SATA drive deliver 0.69 IOps per dollar.

To match the random read IO performance of that $115 Solid State disk, you would need 50 of the 1.5TB SATA disks.

Source: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/10/solid-state-disk-will-change-the-storage-world.html#more