What makes you a geek?

[Concillian]

Articles I've seen from Tom's Hardware, Anand Tech, and a variety of other hardware websites that have performed true non-sequential tests comparing SSDs and Spindel drives have shown that in non-sequential reads/writes, SSDs are little better than their spindel based brethern showing speeds usually 3 to 4 orders in magnitude less than their sequential read and write speeds.

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.