Ok, that makes sense, by bigger do you mean larger capacity? And also, someone pointed out that the intel drives use mlc, so I guess if they're configured right there not all that bad.
On a side note, even if there write speed was not as fast as an SLC drive, these MLC drives are still a lot faster than traditional HDD's correct?
Yes, by bigger, I mean larger capacity.
X25-M is the MLC series whereas X25-E is the SLC series.
SSD are in its infancy, everybody is still learning the rope to produce better, faster, cheaper SSDs.
The NANDs itself will continue to get smaller, faster and cheaper over time with process shrinks as well as the newer and faster standards for it such as the ONFI 2.1/3.0.
MLC/SLC drives have super low latency, .01ms. Typical HDD are usually 7-10ms (raptors 4-6ms), that means SSD is 700 or more times faster at looking up data than HDD. That's why everybody is always saying that SSD is the biggest performance upgrade for any system, it is very extremely fast at seeking data and that's why SSD are recommended for a boot/application drive.
A very good SSD (both SLC/MLC) will always be faster than any traditional HD (except in raid). Unfortunately SSDs have performance degradation issue when the drive fills up over time. Writing to a fresh memory cell will always be much faster than writing to already written used memory cell. They can slow down the write speed after all the memory cells are used up. Read speed and latency will always be the same, it is not affected by that. HDD slows down dramatically as the drive fills up in both read/write speed.
In the near future, the performance degradation will be eliminated by using the TRIM operation. TRIM to SSD is like what defragmentation is to HDD.
