3:02 PM - Solid state disks
I just got my first solid state disk. It's an Imation 32GB SATA 2.5 inch drive. For comparison, I put the disk in Caryn's desktop. It's final home will be in a new server I'm planning to build next year.
According to diskinfo, the disk seek times are .029 compared to 16 or so on a Western Digital Sata drive. That was to be expected since there really is no seek time on a SSD or at least it's fairly constant as no platter has to move. What I was most interested in was raw transfer rates. The WD generation 1 sata drive best case was 57000 kbytes/sec whereas this new drive read over 100000kbytes/sec as well as averaged around 100000. My newer seagate hard drive peaks at 110080kbytes/sec, but inside only reads at 51842kbytes/sec.
The consistency of this new drive is it's best asset. The drive is MLC, but very lowend. I can only imagine what a high end Intel SSD can do.