Where can solid-state drives be used?

Analysts currently predict that SSD will not compete in terms of cost per GB for at least five years. For general capacity being accessed at an average rate, disk is the economical choice -- but for very high-performance applications, solid state can win out. These scenarios are most likely to include Exchange server and database acceleration, and finance operations. In short, if an application needs lots of underutilised (in terms of capacity) disk drives to achieve the required I/O, solid state could be a cost-effective alternative. For SSD to take off more widely in enterprise storage, the price must fall significantly and array vendors will have to optimise their subsystems to work better with solid state. Issues include data in flash drives being accessed in far larger chunks than disk drives, and controllers being a bottleneck when used with SSD because they don't keep up with the performance of the drive. Expert Podcast: While you may know about the advantages of solid-state ...  more