Outlook
Outlook
We deliberately didn’t dig into specific SSD products at this point, as we have other articles dealing with them. Instead, we focused on a higher level overview, basic functions and features, performance and power consumption, business relevance, and some recommendations that should help you find the right course for stepping into the SSD world.
The market is flooded with client SSD products for PCs and laptops. Many of them provide decent performance, and if you have a solid Windows 7-based system and are willing for fork out at least $300, then there's little reason not to purchase an SSD to replace your hard drive. You’ll notice the difference immediately.
Such a step has to be planned more thoroughly for business, and SSDs might not necessarily be the best choice in such environments. Watch the minimum performance results in reviews so you can be sure your systems maintain required performance levels. Check pitfalls with RAID support, AHCI, and TRIM, and ensure that you’ll have support from your favorite vendor. Confirm that your systems are powerful enough to take maximum advantage of the intended SSD storage solution; otherwise you’ll run into self-made bottlenecks.
Once all hurdles are overcome, you can examine key metrics, such as I/Os per dollar, I/Os per watt, and finally some ownership cost considerations. From this point of view, you'll quickly realize that there is no other reasonable option but to deploy SSDs into I/O-intensive environments. The hard part is finding the right way to introduce SSDs into your business in compliance with requirements, regulations, and system validation. Technologically, SSDs are ready.
