[ShabbyDoo]

Desktop performance with solid-state drives is less interesting to me than server performance -- specifically databases and other services where seek time is more important than throughput.

Has anyone done performance tests with MySQL on low-latency storage devices? As another commenter suggested for the desktop, strategies of using solid-state for latency bound activities and traditional disks for throughput intensive stuff might be an interesting hybrid to explore.

[Encosia]

Currently, SSDs' limited number of rewrite cycles make them unsuitable for that type of server application.

[wmf]

That's a myth. Enterprise flash drives are rated for years of constant writes.

[Encosia]

The problem with those ratings is that you're only exposed to one side of the potential deviation from the mean. A MTBF without standard deviation is meaningless.

To put those ratings in context, consider that a Western Digital VelociRaptor has a 160 year MTBF.

[wmf]

The good news is that the wearout of an SSD is a gradual, measurable, monotonic process (because at every point you know how many spare blocks are left), while the failure of a hard disk is a random process.

[sketerpot]

I had another hard drive fail on me last week. At this point I would give part of my soul for SSD-style failure properties with sizes and prices comparable to conventional hard drives. (I mean, assuming partial souls regenerate, Xanth-style.)

I'm sure it will happen in a few years. I wonder if there's some starup opportunity here: are there any ways to take advantage of fast, reliable, cheap, flash-like storage becoming ubiquitous?

Probably you could add more fine-grained extension hooks to programs without them becoming bloated, by having plugins loaded lazily at run-time from a solid state drive. I'm convinced that the next big thing will be software that quietly integrates with other software, so you don't even have to click on an icon to use it.

[Encosia]

True, that's a very good point.

[timtrueman]

Depends on the SSD; SLC-based Fusion-io cards are rated for 24-48 years at 5TB write-erase per day (source: http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Fusion%20Specsheet.pdf)