Some thoughts on the performance of SSD RAID 0 arrays

My Friend Alan Rocker and I often discuss ideas about technology and tradeoffs.  Alan asked about SSDs for Linux:

> I haven't been following hardware developments very closely for a while, so I
> find it hard to judge the arguments. What's important?

Ultimately what's important is the management software, the layer above the drivers, off to one side. That applies regardless of the media and means that the view the applications take of storage is preserved regardless of changes in the physical media.

> The first question is, what areas are currently the bottlenecks and
> constraints, at what orders of magnitude?

The simple answer is 'channels'.