Solid state drive technology has matured in the past few years. This, with data layout flexibility in Vector, make SSD technology an interesting, viable storage consideration for your system. For example, you may choose SSDs for temporary database storage to improve performance for spill to disk operations.

A single Solid State Drive (SSD) can sustain 250 MB/s or more, independent of size. SSDs are still more expensive per storage unit than spinning disks but large size SSDs are widely available. For maximum performance configurations--unless most of the frequently accessed data can reside in memory--SSDs are often the best available option to drive Vector’s data processing capacity using only internal storage, as they provide excellent bandwidth for their physical size and power consumption.

A special type of SSDs is PCI cards available for example from Fusion-IO. Throughput on these cards is restricted by the PCI channel, which is a high 1.5 GB/s per card. If extremely high I/O throughput rates are required and the cost of the configuration is not a major concern then consider evaluating such cards.