Go buy a Solid State Drive (SSD) right now

Seriously, you can ignore this blog post, just go buy an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD right now. Go ahead.....

Buy it at Amazon.com

Why you ask. Because this my friends is what I like to refer to as silly fast. I've bought the latest processors, filled my memory banks, but I can't remember the last time I got the price to performance ratio of buying the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. Let me share a quick benchmark from my original disk compared to the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD:

Western Digital Cavier Blue 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 

Sequential Read : 48.250 MB/s

Sequential Write : 62.797 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 24.337 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 32.473 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :  0.273 MB/s [66.7 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :  0.820 MB/s [200.2 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  0.661 MB/s [161.4 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :  0.873 MB/s [213.1 IOPS]

OCZ Vertex 3 VTX-25SAT3-240GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD

Sequential Read : 486.503 MB/s

Sequential Write : 303.451 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 412.469 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 299.593 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   31.674 MB/s [7732.9 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :   69.215 MB/s [16898.2 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 185.728 MB/s [45343.8 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 251.923 MB/s [61504.7 IOPS]

I was completly floored by the performance difference. I think Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror said it best:

I can't imagine using a computer without a SSD any more; it'd be like going back to dial-up internet or 13" CRTs or single button mice. Over my dead body, man!

For a much more thorough review and benchmarks checkout Storage Reviews take on the OCZ vertex 3 drive.