The story has been clarified on the wire and the eighth paragraph now reads as follows:

An executive of another seller of SSDs, flash chip vendor Smart Modular Technologies, issued her own caveats about them. Flash chips deliver spectacular performance while in a "virgin" state, when the first bits are being written to them, but their write speed falls off dramatically within hours, as new bits are written over on the same silicon, said Esther Spanjer, Smart's director of SSD technical marketing. This is a normal occurrence, but some testers have tested chips in the virgin state, giving unrealistic results. Likewise, an SSD may need time to adapt after switching from sequential to random tasks. An ideal test would take it through that process, she said.