"Why on earth would you pay their outrageous prices if you have reliable flash and ZFS?" ..... By Storage Genius Posted Friday 18th July 2008 01:08 GMT

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There is a difference between 5 times as many and 5 times more - a five-fold increase on 10000 is actually 60000 (10000 increased by 5x10000) but I doubt this is what they mean.

The use of the phrase n times more when what is meant is n times as many really bugs me (yeah, I know) and it seems to be popular in adverts at the moment.

The server grade SSDs go like the clappers - massively faster access time, but with slightly slower peak read/write speed. Since theres no head to move though, you can read one sector, then write a completely different sector for little cost. That what makes them have such a massively superior IOPS to even a 15k SAS drive, and why they rule for any kind of random access usage, like databases and video archives.

Also, since theres no moving parts, the energy required to operate is much much lower than a mechanical drive, so the 100x performance per watt is probably close to accurate, although I agree that its definately someone in marketing who wanted the '100x' moniker.

Paris, because I hear she can manage an impressive number of I/O per second.