SSDs

Tried harder to find info on the write cycles: found som CFs that claim
2million
cycles, and found the Mtron SSDs which claim to have very advanced wear
levelling and a suitably long lifetime as a result even with an
assumption that
the underlying flash can do 100k writes only.

The 'consumer' MTrons are not shabby on the face of it and not too
expensive,
and the pro models even faster.

But ... the spec pdf shows really hight performance for average access,
stream
read *and* write, random read ... and absolutely pants performance for
random
write. Like 130/s, for .5k and 4k writes.

Its so pants it looks like a misprint and it doesn't seem to square with the
review on tomshardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/mtron_ssd_32_gb/page7.html

Even there, the database IO rate does seem lower than you might hope,
and this *might* be because the random reads are very very fast and the
random writes ... aren't. Which is a shame, because that's exactly the
bit I'd hope was fast.

So, more work to do somewhere.