This should be required reading for anyone considering an SSD at the moment:
The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News
Additionally, since OS X does not currently support the "TRIM" command, you may notice dramatic reduction in performance over time.
I read the entire article. A really long and interesting read. And for me these ponits stood out:
1. Even with Trim a SSD will have it's performance degrade over time. It's worst case scenario though can be better then HDD's. But for the price at the moment this fact makes SSD's less attractive. Trim more widely used + cheaper SSD's would help a lot.
2. Without trim you write to blocks and don't delete blocks you delete till you need them. As in deletion takes place jsut before the write and not after the delete. So 50GB free is not 50GB free. It's jsut 50GB available to write new information to use. Some will be free and the rest will be deleted before the write.
This is pretty fact on a SSD. But to me it screams security issue. People could hack the drive and access the drive's deleted data as it's only "flagged free to use" and not actually deleted till it's over written. And there is no over writing in SSD's. It's deletion then write.
So stuff flagged free for deletition and write - could be accessed and the data accessed off those sectors. I'm not sure if that is a big issue or not but that's what came into my mind as I read the article.
3. SSD's only have a limited number of block delete/write cycles before that particular block dies. 10 thousand from what I remember from the article. Could be wrong. And it's hard to predict when the blocks will die.
4. So in my opinion the SSD's are better then HDD's. Even when SSD's are full and in their "worst performance state". But they are to pricy for me. For a internal HD with thr OS and base apps on it it might be good. But for general use/scratch disk, the price per GB for SSD is way to high.
So for me I'm in the camp of waiting till SSD technoloty improves and comes down in price then I might buy but now HDD's are not perfect but they work and are cheap as chips per GB. And I'll stick with them for now.