What makes you a geek?

[Lissa]

non-sequential reads / writes are "little better" than rotating storage? Did you even read the AnandTech article I linked to? 30-50x faster in both reads and writes is a "little better"? No, that's more than a little better. 30-50x faster...

sequential read and write speeds are 3-4 orders of magnitude less? In that article the SSD drives are 2x faster than a 10k RPM SATA drive in sequential reads and about half the performance in sequential writes.

so 1/2 the speed of the spindle drive is 3-4 orders of magnitude less? 3-4 orders of magnitude is 0.001 to 0.0001 (1 / 1000 to 1/ 10000)....3-4 orders of magnitude is how far off your reading comprehension is from reality. I linked the article, you chose not to read it, and then formulate an argument based on the hope that I didn't read it either?

Yeah, they lose on sequential writes. Who cares. The whole basis for my argument is that sequential throughput barely matters because normal users don't do large sequential transfers. Normal usage is closer to random than to sequential. It's the whole basis of my argument that RAID is a minimal performance benefit, and it's not something that's changed since the RAID article I linked was written. If anything, growth of file sizes and drive sizes would drive the spectrum further towards fragmented files.

Maybe I wasn't clear or you didn't read it the way it was intended. The loss in read on random reads is for the drive itself. Let's take a standard SSD now which is doing around a sequential read I/O of 200 ms. During a random read, the I/O on said SSD drops from 200 ms to around 50 to 60 ms, that's where the 3 to 4 magnitude loss occurs. In spindle drives, this loss is usually around twice at most. From what Tom's Hardware showed (and I can't find the article at the moment), doing random read I/O between an Intel SSD (s'posedly the best on the market) and a pair of WD Raptor drives in a RAID 0, the Intel SSD was only slightly faster than the RAID 0 Raptors.

The other thing that all SSD manufacturers tell you not to do is defragment your SSD which means it will get fragment far more than a spindle drive over time as you work with it. Spindle drives, you're told to defragment on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance. So as time goes by, your I/O on an SSD is going to go down as it fragments more and more while the spindle drives will likely stay about the same as you defragment them as part of normal maintenance.