jskrewson - 6:01 pm on Jan 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

While SSD is screaming fast compared to a standard HDD, most people overlook the simple fact that a couple of GB of RAM used as a smart RAM disk cache coupled with a high end HDD can easily put SSD to shame when it comes to sheer speed and performance.

There is not question that RAM is better, if you can afford it. I always buy the maximum amount that I can afford, but the true amount of RAM my back end server would require adds an extra $1000 a month to my server costs, that I'm not willing to pay.

A RAID 0 array of 2 x 64GB SSD's is costing me less than $100 a month.

Here's just one simple example of how SSD's work really well for my setup. I have a dual quad core server and every day I need to unzip and scan about 1,000 large compressed files. I need this scanning to run very quickly, so I run about 14 threads at once. My 15K RPM drive array could not keep up with so many random reads, but if I take the time to copy 14 files at a time to an SSD array, I can keep all 16 CPU's (hyperthreading) at 85-90% of capacity throughout the entire process.