I was doing some analysis recently and I put together a simple comparison chart between commodity SATA drives, enterprise SAS drives and enterprise SSD. Often SSD is positioned as \\"fast but very expensive\\". But expensive is all a matter of what you are measuring. SSD is VERY expensive for capacity, but realtively inexpensive for performance.\\r\\n\\r\\n\\r\\n\\r\\n\\r\\n\\r\\n\\r\\n\\r\\n   Commodity SATA $100 1TB 75IOPS Enterprise SAS $200 146GB 125IOPS SSD Intel X25E 64GB $700 64GB 3300IOPS GB/$ 1 (10GB/$) .07(.7GB/$) .009 (.09/$) IOPS/$ 1 (.75/$) .83 (.625/$) 6.29 (4.71/$) \\r\\n\\r\\nFirst numbers in each cell are normalized to the SATA drives.\\r\\n\\r\\nThe table above makes it pretty clear just how different these technologies are. The SSD is 100x more expensive per GB than the commodity SATA drive. But when you measure based on IOPS it is 6x cheaper. You would need 44 spindles of traditional drives to match the I/O performance of a single SSD. Before I go on, I should point out the measurements aren't apples to apples. The SSD measurement is write performance. The SATA performance varies a ton depending on the type of operations. Sequential reads and writes can be quite efficient while a SSD doesn't benefit from larger reads & writes beyond a certain point.\\r\\n\\r\\nIt is also interesting to observe that the SAS drives appear to never make sense. They are 50% faster than the SATA drives but they cost so much more that it is hard to imagine a scenario where they would be the right choice.\\r\\n\\r\\n \\r\\n \\r\\n