You know, SSDs or NAND Flash based storage has been fascinating me ever since the very beginning. And though that might sound like a decade ago our first ever review was the OCZ Core SATA 64GB Solid State Drive review -- back in July 2008. So yeah, that's only four years and ever since that time the technology advancements have been evolving incrementally. When we started with SSDs in 2008 the performance was roughly equal to a very fast HDDs, that would be 100 MB/sec for reads and writes where the norm. However with that mechanical head inside a HDD not being used anymore inside the SSD everybody was flabbergasted by the fast access times an SSD offered.

Then the first nags started to become apparent, controllers not being able to manage small files fast enough causing OS hiccups and obviously the series of controller issues we have seen over the past few years have just been nasty at times.

It's now Q4 2012 and the past year we have seen many improvements in the SSD segment. Stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers. But with technology advancing as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. As such SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us where we are today ... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive my big chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. You can say that I evangelize SSDs, yes Sir .. I am a fan.