Considering an SSD? Read this

Anandtech's The SSD Anthology is the result of nearly six months of research, testing and plain old work with SSDs. In it Anand Lal Shimpi presents a detailed history of SSDs including his experience with the first SSD from Apple for the MacBook Air:

I also remember my first SSD. It was a 1.8” PATA drive made by Samsung for the MacBook Air. It was lent to me by a vendor so I could compare its performance to the stock 1.8” mechanical HDD in the Air.

The benchmarks for that drive didn’t really impress. Most application tests got a little slower and transfer speeds weren’t really any better. Application launch times and battery life both improved, the former by a significant amount. But the drive was expensive; $1000 from Apple and that’s if you bought it with the MacBook Air...

The next time I turned on my MacBook Air I thought it was broken. It took an eternity to boot and everything took forever to launch...

It was the MacBook Air experience that made me understand one important point about SSDs: you don’t think they’re fast, until I take one away from you.

In the article he notices a problem with SSDs: they get slower the more you fill them up. As it turns out all SSDs get slower over time and Anand explains why it happens and why it’s not as big of a deal as you’d think.

He goes on to review the OCX Vertex SSD (which he likes a lot) and concludes that despite its lumps, SSD is still the way to go if you want the most performance possible.

I still believe it's the single best upgrade you can do to your machine today. I've moved all of my testbeds to SSDs as well as my personal desktop.

The article is 16,000 words of unadulterated SSD geekdom (example: "SSDs have +5 armor immunity to random access latency") and a must read if you're considering getting one.