1 You've been busy!

2 I have been busy.  But I've lost my colours/anime girls names list.

Let's see:

Aoi - blue
Midori - green
Akane - crimson
Mikan - orange (well, orangey-tan)
Ai - indigo

And

Momoko - peach (momo + ko)
Akari - red (red - aka, Akari is a name based on aka)

Sakura - cherry-blossom pink
Kurumi - brown
Kitsune - fox red
Ruri - azure

I might go for Mikan and Akari, since we've already had an Akane.  Then Ai and Momoko for the next two servers.  And Kurumi and Kitsune for side servers.

Anyway, here's a little Japanese colour chart I just found, which is quite useful.

3 So could you say allround that SSDs are better in terms of performance ? I've been tossing as to whether to get some for desktop use.

Granted I can see you using them for server functions.

Is there any truth to the concerns for longer term unrecoverable fragmentation on the Intel SSDs ?

I've been watching the various SSD drives. Manufacturers keep coming out with faster drives every couple of months. Some actually faster and others not.

Being a hairs breadth away from dropping the $600 for a 120Gb SSD. I just get the sense that 250Gb would be better. Hence the waiting.

4 For databases, if you're talking the Intel X25-E (or the ioDrive, of course), the answer is YES!  YES!  OH!  OH!!  GOD, YES!!!

For desktop use, meh.  The way Windows chews through disk space, it's not really worth it, unless you reboot every day for some reason.  It would be cheaper just to install 16GB of RAM and let caching work its magic.

As for the unrecoverable fragmentation: Yep.  That's what it'll do.  All SSDs do this to a certain extent.

The difference with the Intel drives (both the E and the M) is that the are engineered for maximum random IO throughput, while all the cheaper drives are engineered for sequential throughput.  They use much larger erase blocks, and suffer much less from fragmentation.

But there's a catch - random write performance on cheap SSDs is craptastic.  We're talking about 2 to 4 IOs per second - where even a 5400 RPM notebook drive can deliver 80 or so.

On the other hand, the X25-E, even when it's 100% fragmented, can still deliver sequential reads at 120MB/second.

On the third hand, a 32GB X25-E costs A$800.

Anandtech have a very good article about this.  Most of this stuff was known by July last year - I contacted OCZ about it at the time, but since I don't run a leading hardware review site they didn't feel compelled to take much notice.

5 I guess thats the difference between SLC and MLC ? And the clear difference between commercial and retail grade for SSDs. If performance is the be all and end all, its worth it to bite the bullet and go the extra cost for the Intels.

6 Partly SLC vs. MLC, but the X25-M is MLC and still clobbers all the other drives on the market.

7 Vista on 32Gb might be a tough ask. XP would have room to spare for some other stuff. Somehow a WD Scorpio Black seems better value. At least for a notebook.