Everything you ever wanted to know about Solid State Drives

I am making a very conscious effort not to be a link blog and I do my best to make each post meaningful in some way. I am making exception here with a great article on Solid State Drives (SSDs). Its from AnadTech, and tells you pretty much everything you need to know including a thorough explanation on the performance degradation these drives suffer from as they are used. The link is below and its worth reading from start to finish.

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531

If you want the shorthand version, the Intel X25 drives look awesome and while performance will degrade over time the problem for these drives isn't nearly as bad as for the competitors (owing to some clever disk management). Even with the performace degradation the Intel X25 drives vastly outperform regular drives. Though you will pay a pretty price for one of the Intel ones.

Its worth noting that the "performance degradation" can be reversed if you do a "secure erase" of the drive i.e. completely wipe it. This is a complete wipe which is not equivalent to reformatting. Intel provide software with their drives to do this. As a developer I find I rebuild my machine every 6 months or so anyway so I'm not too worried about this performance degradation issue.

I found this link on the excellent "Joel on Software" blog which is also very hightly recommended reading:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/