While a speed boost is great and all, don't you have the added concern of making sure your blocks don't wear out on an SSD? Because log structured file systems commit metadata and data in large sequential writes to the hard drive, they have background processes that constantly move data around to prevent massive fragmentation from files that are later deleted. It seems like there would just be too much writing going on if what you want is a long-lasting SSD.

They do mention in the article that it would be a bad idea to use NILFS on your root partition because of heavy traffic, so lets say I decide to use it on a volume where I store all my media (where I pretty much write once, read a lot, and never delete). Now, a) why would I use an SSD for this given that they're so much more expensive and b) wouldn't I get comparable performance using an HDD here since my files will be laid out pretty much sequentially given my workload? Doesn't the same apply to companies storing mounds of data? Where is the middle ground where I would want to use NILFS on an SSD? One where I a) won't be sending enough write traffic to my drive to wear out my SSD too quickly and b) will be reading a lot of random blocks?

What am I missing? I see the merits in using NILFS, but I just don't see the purpose in comparing its performance against other filesystems on SSD's.