SSD drives don't actually delete stuff when you 'delete' them, it just tells your OS that that it can write to that space. Normal hard drives do this too, the problem comes when you actually go to write stuff to the space that is 'marked for deletion'.
Unlike normal hard drives that just overwrite the disk space, SSD drives can only write to disk in groups called 'blocks'.
So when the drive is filled up with stuff (or you've been using it for some time), it has to corral the block, make sure its safe to write to, if it isn't, it wipes it, before finally writing to it ... which is really slow.
This manifests itself in your system basically freezing on you from time to time after you've been using it.
Its fully explained here http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8
It can be REALLY frustrating, but even with that ... I would NEVER NEVER go back to a normal hard drive.
Why?
My photoshop opens in 7 seconds, Netbeans (bloated Java IDE) in 10, Windows XP boots in bootcamp in 2 minutes, and OS X is fully loaded in 30 seconds.
So yeah ... you can pry my ssd from my cold, dead, mutilated fingers.
There is a TRIM OS command that allows your OS to basically clean out the space on your hard drive that is marked for deletion while you're not using the computer, so that this problem does not occur, but OS X does not support it ... Windows 7 and Linux are the only OS's I know that do.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/10
The other thing to consider is that SSDs are very fast on sustained writes ... copying a 1GB file from one location to another. However, modern OS'es employ frequent but small writes in their operation ... and certain drives that look good on paper stink up the joint in this department (things have changed recently though, since anandtech called them out on it).
What you want to do when you're looking at specs is find out what the throughput is (MB/s) for writes on 1KB, 4KB pieces of data, and compare it to the sustained write speeds, to see how big the difference is. If you want a shortcut ... buy an intel SSD ... and thank me later.
SSD drives don't actually delete stuff when you 'delete' them, it just tells your OS that that it can write to that space. Normal hard drives do this too, the problem comes when you actually go to write stuff to the space that is 'marked for deletion'.
Unlike normal hard drives that just overwrite the disk space, SSD drives can only write to disk in groups called 'blocks'. So when the drive is filled up with stuff (or you've been using it for some time), it has to corral the block, make sure its safe to write to, if it isn't, it wipes it, before finally writing to it ... which is really slow.
This manifests itself in your system basically freezing on you from time to time after you've been using it. Its fully explained here http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8
It can be REALLY frustrating, but even with that ... I would NEVER NEVER go back to a normal hard drive. Why? My photoshop opens in 7 seconds, Netbeans (bloated Java IDE) in 10, Windows XP boots in bootcamp in 2 minutes, and OS X is fully loaded in 30 seconds. So yeah ... you can pry my ssd from my cold, dead, mutilated fingers.
There is a TRIM OS command that allows your OS to basically clean out the space on your hard drive that is marked for deletion while you're not using the computer, so that this problem does not occur, but OS X does not support it ... Windows 7 and Linux are the only OS's I know that do. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/10
The other thing to consider is that SSDs are very fast on sustained writes ... copying a 1GB file from one location to another. However, modern OS'es employ frequent but small writes in their operation ... and certain drives that look good on paper stink up the joint in this department (things have changed recently though, since anandtech called them out on it).
What you want to do when you're looking at specs is find out what the throughput is (MB/s) for writes on 1KB, 4KB pieces of data, and compare it to the sustained write speeds, to see how big the difference is. If you want a shortcut ... buy an intel SSD ... and thank me later.