Welcome to the third installment in our ongoing series on the solid state revolution. The last two articles looked at how SSDs work and how mobile devices and operating systems deal with the changes flash brings, but this week, as folks in the good 'ol USA prepare to celebrate our independence day by jumping into our jet fighter planes and shooting down flying saucers—because that's totally what we do, for all you folks not lucky enough to live here—this week we're going to take a bit of a break from the long-form journalism and instead do something a bit more Web-two-point-oh, as they say. This week, we want to hear how SSDs are working for you.

Flash storage is popping up everywhere, in the home and in the enterprise, and the kinds of folks most likely to be regular Ars Technica readers are also the kinds of folks most likely to be using solid state disks extensively. We're interested in hearing you share your experiences with solid state in the comments below. How has flash helped you? It's one thing to say that you bought an SSD and slapped it into your laptop or desktop and it was all fast and stuff, but it's something else entirely to tell the tale of how an SSD in your gaming rig saved your bacon in a deathmatch by keeping your system running smooth. Do SSDs, in fact, make you frag harder?

For my own anecdote, Ars Technica has a thriving Minecraft community; there is a perpetual Minecraft thread in the OpenForum where players collaborate about the game. I administer one of the unofficial community servers, and SSDs factor heavily into my Minecraft hosting. For the server hosting the worlds, Minecraft can be a disk IO-intensive application, and solid state enables me to host a diverse map with lots of people busily building projects with a minimum of lagging, and on relatively modest hardware that runs quiet and cool on the floor of my closet. Without an SSD, to get anywhere near the same level of responsiveness I'd have to use a very fast spinning disk, something like a Western Digital VelociRaptor, which would generate considerably more noise and heat.

SSDs of course aren't just for gaming—clever uses of SSDs at work abound, too. Everyone knows that replacing laptop drives with SSDs can make laptops faster across the board, but the added performance and productivity improvements can translate directly into lowered support costs and real money saved: imagine, for example, how an organization's IT support metrics would be altered if the help desk had to field 50 percent fewer calls about a user's computer being "slow." That might be enough to get a CIO to sit up and take notice.

Another example: corporate virus scanners are notorious performance-sapping resource hogs. It's long been a sad joke that the challenge for an IT security organization isn't necessarily picking the best antivirus suite, but rather picking the one that is the least bad. Full disk virus scans, on-access scans, e-mail attachment scans—often, policy mandates so many scans that users will do everything they can to circumvent or disable the antivirus tool just to get some work done. This leads to security breaches and spyware and malware outbreaks on unprotected equipment, and it happens because no one wants to sit and watch a "Please wait" spinner when they're trying to pull a proposal together while facing a deadline.

SSDs can fix this. Sometimes the antivirus suite is dictated by policy outside of anyone's control, coupled with an onerous scanning schedule, but mandating solid state disks across a network can drastically reduce the pain of compliance by removing the bottleneck. Rather than staring at a wait cursor and listening to the hard drive's unending chattering when a scan kicks off, even an inexpensive SSD can provide enough throughput to let the user continue working while the antivirus application does its thing. With the potential cost of cleaning up a data breach running in the tens of millions of dollars, including restitution costs to customers whose private data might have been exposed, the relatively tiny cost of including an SSD in your standard configuration begins to look like a very good deal indeed.

The high bandwidth and low latency of SSDs guarantee them a place in the data center, too. The most obvious fit, as mentioned in our original installment, is for hosting high-transaction databases; in fact, merely moving a database onto SSD can (not will, but can) provide enough of an improvement in database performance that you can forego expensive and time-consuming tuning operations. Time is often more valuable than money, and if your choices are to spend weeks with a consultant carefully tweaking your database system's parameters or just buy some SSDs and migrate, you might do well to recall the old muscle car adage: "There's no replacement for displacement."

Taking things a step further, solid state in the data center doesn't have to be shaped like a disk at all. We touched in the first feature on high-speed random access storage by companies like Fusion-io and Texas Memory Systems; there are lots of other vendors producing ultra-fast systems based on flash, including Tintri, a company which makes MLC SSD-filled appliances designed and tuned specifically for hosting virtual machines. For some organizations, buying purpose-built SSD appliances rather than using general server and SAN space for virtual machine hosting can be a powerful cost-saver.

So, speak up. Home, work, data center, or otherwise, where and how do Ars readers use SSDs? We want to hear what you have to say, and we'll be promoting up the best comments into the feature area just below the story.