[jrockway]

As another datapoint, I had a laptop with a first-gen SSD and no TRIM or GC support. The performance hit a literal cliff; writes were fast one day, and the next day they were literally 300KiB/s. Download speeds were limited by disk write bandwidth, not network bandwidth! New SSD, writes are back up to 50MiB/s.

(The divide might not be at the capacity of the disk; this was a 16GiB SSD with probably 20x that in writes.)

[cpr]

Well, after 6-7 months of heavy use on my MBP (easily past 128GB worth of writing, many times), Xbench says I'm getting 100MB/sec for just about all disk activity with 256K blocks.