What is faster? A local mechical hard drive or a solid state drive over gigabit ethernet?

SSDs are rather new, so I couldn't find this information on the Internet.

Would the performance of a local hard drive connected using SATA2 get out performed by a SSD over gigabit ethernet?

In terms of both latency and bandwidth, mechanical hard drives and local networks are very similar.

The SSD would over course be SLC or Intel's MLC. Not a cheap MLC.

EDIT

As for usage, think typical computer user with some multimedia. Let's say its a regular computer with mechical hard drive vs a diskless computer that boots off a USB stick and then loads the OS off a SSD over gigabit

Solution 1:

Large sequential operations - go with local disk as you'll get 100MBps or so with the right disk and controller.

Small random operations - more likely to go with the SSD as the 'seek' time will offset the lower bandwidth of 1Gbps Ethernet (plus the encapsulation overhead).

Solution 2:

This article states 53 MB/sec transfer for 32 GB ssd drives in June 2007.

In October 2008, Engadget reviewed a SSD drive claiming 235 MB/sec.

The key difference I have found with SSD drives is that:

• their seek speed is next to nothing (0.2 msec) vs a 7 to 16 msec seek time on a regular hard drive.
• in addition to performance not being affected due to heating from moving parts
• cpu utilization seems to be much lower
• power utilization is lower

Based on the above and the fact that solid state is generally always faster than moving parts, I would go with SSD, as long as it wasn't cost prohibitive, and you had a drive that could drive the full capacity of your network gear and the cabling, as well as the computer on the other end being equipped to communicate at full capacity.

Since we love charts, here's one from the first article.