Scenario 3: SSD Upgrade
This third option may not appear as significant as the previous two. However, SSDs have overtaken hard drives in terms of synthetic and real-world performance, so it makes sense to consider a simple hard drive replacement. A modern SSD is still rather expensive per gigabyte, but it delivers tangible performance gains, nevertheless.
The G.Skill Phoenix is based on the popular SandForce SF-1200 controller. SandForce solutions work without additional cache memory, unlike Indilinx, Intel, Samsung, or Toshiba architectures. Instead, it utilizes part of the flash memory to handle wear leveling and performance management features, such as algorithms that deal with operations to minimize write amplification.
This SSD, like many others based on a similar architecure, delivers more than 200 MB/s of read and write throughput plus excellent I/O and application performance. We examined how this would impact our 2007 system.
