Wow. AnandTech has always been great, but this was especially well-written and informative. If you think 31 pages is too long, well, it's worth it. The article gives really good technical explanations of how SSDs work and how they compare to disk drives, tells about an interesting back-and-forth with OCZ (a Taiwanese SSD manufacturer), and gives you the info you need to make an SSD purchasing decision. And it's a shining example of tech journalism at its best (which we rarely see).
Agreed, I'm getting ready to buy some SSD's for my production servers, and after reading this I know exactly what I want to buy and why and what to avoid. This was a great article.
I wish I'd read this before buying my SSD for my workstation, an impulse buy while at Fry's with my boss. I've largely avoided the write stuttering that is problematic for these low end MLC SSD's by using my old HDD for all my data and the SSD for OS/Programs so writes are fairly rare to the SSD; it still kicks the shit out of the old HDD.
For a database server however, buying a non intel MLC SSD would have been a huge mistake that I'm now well informed enough to avoid.
We're seriously considering putting them in developer desktops, but are waiting to test the ioXtreme (a slightly downmarket product from the same company). 2 grand to dramatically improve developer productivity isn't that big a deal (the other top contender is 1 or 2 X25-Es, so the upcharge is at/under 2K)
The ioDrive isn't that expensive though... you don't need a million dollars. Their 80gig model is around $2500 so anyone who is building one of those "ultra-fast" gaming rigs probably wouldn't mind dropping $2500 to speed up the slowest part of a computer (usually)
But what is the performance delta between a $2,400 ioDrive and a $400 X25-M for an "ultra-fast" gaming rig? I actually own an ioDrive (not for personal use) and it's hard to find a real workload that can saturate it. I think some people here are on the wrong end of Amdahl's Law.
How big is the build directory? You can get a ANS-9010 and 8 gig of DDR RAM to put in it for something like 1/3rd that price. Plus, it will never slow down on you.
You also have to consider tools used to build and test, and any DLLs used. Theoretically for something used frequently, it should stay in memory, but I have no idea how well that works in practice when doing a large build.
ANS-9010 is a RAM drive, that presents DDR RAM as a SATA drive. You can configure it up to 64 gigabytes, but at that price it's prohibitive. You can buy its little brother, the ANS-9010B, which only has 6 slots for memory and tops out at 24 GB.
Many shops will be able to fit the most frequently used 20% of their toolset onto a small disk drive like this. if the most frequently used 20% of their toolset represents 80% of their development wait, this is still a big win.
