Look But Don't Leap at SSD Boot Drives

The benchmarks in this article point to a potential major stumbling block in using solid-state disks (SSDs) in ordinary PCs. The Achilles heals with SSD disks are write speeds and longevity.  Vendors do all sorts of technological tricks to speed up SSD writes (reads are fabulously fast). But SSDs have a finite write life.  My experience is that the real world life may be measured in months, not the years we are used to.

I just yanked a pair of Intel X25 SSD disks after less than six months of daily use.  They ran as a RAID 0 pair in my daily driver PC.  I think I hosed them by trying a apply restore images to recover from an un-bootable system.  As the article says, the more you write small files over an SSD, the more internally fragmented it becomes. (And no, you should never use a defrag utility on SSD's.)  The SSD drives were Intel X25M engineering samples, so your milage may vary. But read the article anyway before dropping your hard-earned cash on the barrel head.

So, as Joe posted below about SSD prices dropping, beware a technology bargain you do not understand.  I'll try to recover the SSDs after I rebuild my system with a conventional hard drive.