White Paper on SSDs

I found this short white paper from Dell interesting, so I thought I'd pass on the link. Among the things I learned from this document is the revelation (to me, anyway) that flash drives have a limited lifespan, and some can only handle as few as 3,000 writes before they crap out.

No kidding about the confidence-lowering effect of the article. I would certainly not host a mission-critical database on SSDs. But in those types of applications reliability trumps performance. I'd have no problem using them in a DAW -- assuming projects were regularly backed up to a conventional drive.

The article notes that with SSDs, since they impersonate conventional disk drives, the limiting factors are the controller channels and scheduling queues, same as mechanical drives. The implication is that for best performance, what you want is what they call an "SSS", basically the same device but on a PCIe card that does not emulate Winchester drives.