Jeff Moden (11/26/2012)
...The writes are another thing caused simply by a lack of understanding of how to update data from one system to another. It involves mostly 2 large tables and I'm surprised it hasn't "cut a path" in the proverbial carpet of the current disk system. I think the related processes would be pretty tough on the life expectancy of the spots hit on an SSD for that...
I believe that SSDs balance their writes so that data is actually written to a new spot each time in order to level the "write wear" over the entire memory area. Most have a significant over provisioning of memory cells in order to reach the stated lifetime.
I agree that most performance issue have their origins in bad code, and the problems should be addressed there. However, there are times, especially with vendor supplied software, where you just can't do anything about it, and an SSD may provide relief.
I had one a year ago where we had to use a large disk array to get the write performance we needed for an application that gathered network performance metrics for a large network. The database was actually fairly small, and I think it would have been more cost effective to use SSDs, but I just could not talk management into it.