Intel today announced the refresh of it's SSD range of solid-state storage drives.

The X25, the original Intel SSD has bit the dust, replaced by the new MLC-based drives. Of course, Intel haven't stood still, and as well as increasing capacity and speed (the drives are now based on the 25nm fab process), they have also managed to drop the price.

Much of what we do for clients involves stream processing. This involves parse, processing and analysis vast quantities of data, but all in memory. What get's written out is the condensed results of the stream (although sometimes the stream is stored as well). SSD drives are great for this, as they give us a very fast boot time and fast execution load. If we are storing lots of data, we'll still of load this to standard disk-based drives, at least for the moment.

One of the interesting points is that Intel is now starting to push these towards data centre usage.

It looks like SSD's are finally coming of age. Indeed my new Macbook Pro due for arrival will have my first SSD as the system drive. I must confess though that I'll still have a standard disk as well for the storage of media (the Superdrive's coming straight out).