Digital Home Thoughts: It is time to TRIM Those SSDs

"The SSD vendors’ marketing divisions simply do not tire of citing insanely high MB/s throughput numbers and sky-high IOPS. While these figures aren't inaccurate, per se, they don't necessarily reflect the truth either. Everyday operation does not equal the hygienic test conditions laid out carefully to maximize numbers. In the end, this means that the mentioned performance specifications can, in fact, be reached, but it takes some optimization."

There was a time when storage media was simple. It had a capacity, transfer speed and seek times. Then we started having to worry about how much electricity it uses. And random read/write performance. Sequential read/write performance. Rotational speed. Performance difference between using the inner and outer edge of the platters. The list goes on. Then along comes SSDs and while many of the specifications relevant to magneto-optical drives makes no sense, a whole range of other performance related issues have cropped up.

While SSDs remain pricier than traditional hard drives, prices are still coming down and becoming much more popular, at least in the smaller capacities and they do offer great performance advantages. With many devices also using the cloud for storage, is there really a need for 2TB hard drives for most of us?