SSD performance has improved quickly; an early Kingson SSD of mine only
pushes ~85 MByte/s, whereas a later Samsung one can nearly max out a
SATA 6Gb connection. The latter also handles far, far more random i/o
writes, which shows up in postgresql pgbench results. (Which is more
relevant to me than simply writing big files)


In a benchmark I ran I compared a four-disk RAID10 array of 7200rpm sata
drives against a single consumer-grade MLC Samsung SSD.
Measured in transactions-per-second. Higher numbers are better.

SATA RAID10 array: 698 TPS
SSD drive: 7559 TPS

That's an order of magnitude improvement.
As far as I'm concerned, SSDs *are* as good as people claim :)

Toby