I've been thinking about the impact of SSD's in three areas: databases, frameworks, and virtual machines.
I've always been one who is willing to drop down to an ISAM/hash datastore when the application had stringent speed requirements. I can see that becoming a waste of time if average data read/write time is reduced by 95-99%. Higher level data access methods (that I've sneered at in the past) will become the only economically competitive methods for creating applications.
For frameworks the impact looks similar. The startup penalties for frameworks like .Net and Java disappear with SSD's. The use of native code compilers, which until now have justified longer development times with better performance, become impossible to justify economically.
There will be minimal speed penalties for working in a virtual machine. With virtual machines the question becomes why commit yourself to a particular OS? We will no longer be tightly coupled to the OS running on top of the hardware.
I expect that by Christmas 2011 the machines for sale in Best Buy will have SSD storage instead of magnetic hard drives.
Its time to move away from the metal.
