Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: Are you using SSDs?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 153 posts

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#61

Post by iigs »

egb wrote: post #27

Lots of people here have mac laptops (like me) - any concerns about lack of TRIM support in OSX? Some blogs says that the "easy fix" for lack of TRIM is to just backup/reformat/restore your SSD every X months. Eeech

TRIM's primary value is preservation of performance as the disk fills. If your environment doesn't support it yet, you can stop-gap it by leaving a few percent of your disk space unallocated, giving the internal block allocators breathing room.

It's not perfect, but it is easy to configure and can make some difference without the reformatting hassle.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#62

Post by misterbwong »

mbreese wrote: post #32
waxman wrote: post #13

I have a SSD on my Macbook Pro. Totally worth it. Definitely snappier in booting up, starting up apps, and any disk i/o-intensive operations. It's certainly noticeable. Also, you don't need to sweat the higher price per byte, because more and more of my files (and I would assume yours?) are on the cloud every day anyways, so 256GB or even 128GB is fine for me these days.

I did the same thing... and it was great. I added a 128GB SSD, but unfortunately, I needed more space for media and work files (large datasets). So, I ended up removing the DVD drive and replaced it with the old hard drive. I never need the DVD drive outside of the house, so this ended up working great for me.

I'm planning on doing the same thing with my Macbook when the new Intel 24nm SSD's come out in Q4 '10 or Q1 '11. The new drives will bring down prices on the 128GB drive to <$200.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#63

Post by waxman »

mbreese wrote: post #32
waxman wrote: post #13

I have a SSD on my Macbook Pro. Totally worth it. Definitely snappier in booting up, starting up apps, and any disk i/o-intensive operations. It's certainly noticeable. Also, you don't need to sweat the higher price per byte, because more and more of my files (and I would assume yours?) are on the cloud every day anyways, so 256GB or even 128GB is fine for me these days.

I did the same thing... and it was great. I added a 128GB SSD, but unfortunately, I needed more space for media and work files (large datasets). So, I ended up removing the DVD drive and replaced it with the old hard drive. I never need the DVD drive outside of the house, so this ended up working great for me.

Very interesting hack.

For me, media files were a killer too, so I simply put my media collection on an external HDD, "cached" my favorite 20GB or so of content on my SSD (the stuff I put on my iPhone, essentially), and started relying more on streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Hulu, etc.

I did this in July and I haven't used the external drive even once...

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#64

Post by marcalc »

mmelin wrote: post #23
nodata wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which SSDs can you recommend for your laptop and home computer?

My MBP has had a 160 GB Intel X25-M for almost a year and couldn't be happier.

Me either. This is the single best improvement I've made in the last 4 to 5 years. My MBP is awesome with this X25-M. I have adapted myself to use this little 160gb space very confortably using some external storage at home. This is great! I sure do recommend this to anyone!

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#65

Post by macros »

iigs wrote: post #52

Where I work we presently have between 5-10 TB (actual, not raw, not counting replicants) across several MySQL shards. $/iop they just slay magnetic solutions. The most interesting insight I can offer is that because there is no seek time penalty and SSD throughput increases as the I/O scatters, our tests with RAID 5 are essentially as fast as RAID 10, which makes $/gb much better than it looks at first blush. TRIM t…

We ended up with the JBOD solutions on a standard ahci controller with soft raid. We've tried a few different controllers and so far the performance with them has been been kinda sad, they just aren't made for the amount of iops the ssds provide.

I saved the results from tiobench from some of my initial testing with 6 intel x-25m here: http://gist.github.com/348417

Not bad for $2400 worth of ssds.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#66

Post by hlidotbe »

jacquesm wrote: post #38
hlidotbe wrote: post #29

We have one database server with SSD (we need more speed than room) and are pretty happy with them. On a more personal note I use a Seagate Momentus XT in my Macbook Pro and this is the single best investment I made in years! This thing cost a third of a "real" SSD of the same capacity and for what an SSD is shining (boot time, application launch, ...) it's on par. The 4GB SSD cache is really improving the experience…

Which brand/model did you go with for your db server?

We have 2 Intel X25-M 80G in RAID 1

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#68

Post by trustfundbaby »

Been using an SSD in my Macbook Pro for the last year ... easily the best computer upgrade I've made in my lifetime (no kidding) ... Photoshop and Netbeans open up in 5-9 seconds, booting into OS X takes less than 30-40 seconds and applications generally fire up in the blink of an eye.

One word of caution though, when the SSD runs out of free blocks and has to re-use blocks marked as deleted, the performance hit can be pretty painful ... sudden application freezes that take many seconds to resolve are not uncommon (This is from Windows XP ... I spend a lot of time in it on my Apple machine)

There is a TRIM command that is supposed to help with this problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM, but only Windows 7 and Linux support it at present.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#69

Post by proee »

My biggest reason for installing an SSD in my MBP is to remove the risk of drive failure from an accidental drop. Knowing there are no spinning platters inside give some peace of mind.
Post reply on HN