Are solid state drives any good?
 

Are solid state drives currently any good?

TIA

They can be. Much depends on the SSD (probably; more exactly the controller and the algorithms, even more exactly the wear levelling and the behaviour over time) and the application scenario, the filesystems and the adaptation to the ssd devices.

In particular, if you use the devices that Sun reccommend in intelligently planned ZFS arrays, you can get a real performance boost over using a plain ZFS array, and all using less power and at a lower capital cost with a hybrid array than just buying loads of SCSI disks (because of the relatively low density of performance SCSI drives, going down the SCSI route pushes you into using a larger number of drives...well, unless your total array size is pretty small and then one quantum of storage doesn't push you beyond an n-by-1 array in scsi, and that therefore implies that the competing sata array defaults to being oversized).

The bad news is that I strongly suspect that there are ways of using the less highly performing SSDs (hint: benchmarks on performance always seem to use Intel SSDs) that increase capital cost and decrease performance, at least by the time the array has aged.