Any decent SSD will be well beyond any regular mechanical disk in practically every single read-intensive application. Often times several hundred percent better. The main forcé of SSDs is instantaneous access. SSDs avoid mechanical seek time, and are logically indexed to reduce response times to being no higher than a few hundred microseconds, oftentimes 40-50 times faster than mechanical drives. Beyond the obvious advantage that fast request-to-reply times represents in storage devices, it also allows for a comparatively mind-boggling amount of IOPS, no performance degradation owing to fragmentation, and hugely increased reliability.
Write operations, owing to the nature of the indexing, takes a good deal longer than read operations in SSDs, but any decent drive nowadays will be on par with mechanical drives.
If you're complaining about cost, SSDs aren't for you. If you just want better performance than your spinning disks, however, they most certainly are.
Edit:
Great timing.
Last edited by mikkel (2008-02-02 04:41:34)