You left out an option: using SSDs on development systems but not in production. That is my situation. I have an SSD on my work machine (a 13-inch MBP) but not on any of my servers. I absolutely love it. Not only is it faster than blazes, but it is, of course, dead-silent and it runs cooler too so my fans don't come on as often.
Poll: Are you using SSDs?
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#82I use OCZ 60GB drives for my netbook and desktop. They're good enough for the price, and from what I remember, cheaper than Intel. Makes Ubuntu boot for ~8 seconds on my netbook.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#83Anyone who can afford it and knows about it has an SSD for their boot disk nowadays, including me. I just wish I could get a VPS with SSD storage, then my life would be complete.
If you can find a VPS provider with undersold hardware, then usually any extra RAM is used as disk cache, which should definitely speed things up.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#84I would like to make the switch but am currently broke. I can get 2x2TB for the price of a 128GB SSD and RAID them. The price still doesn't justify the "snappiness" in my opinion since RAID'd drives provide a pretty good performance increase as well as a size benefit. Keep in mind that size is important to me right now as I use my PC as a media server to my house and also a development machine.
I did this, and boy do I wish I would have added a second raid, or even single drive, for my OS. My computer becomes unusable when I thrash on the drives by unraring a large archive or something. I am going to toss in a mid-level SSD for the OS so I can avoid this hit.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#85I would absolutely recommend SSDs. It's one of the few times you can swap out a component in your computer and notice a performance boost. They are getting better very quickly though, so one big decision is when to pull the trigger. Every few months a new generation of SSDs with better firmware seems to come out. I've switched my laptop and home computer to SSDs.
I switched over to a SSD (from a 5400 rpm drive) in my new laptop and didn't notice much difference at all. Everything was instant before, and it's still instant now.
This may be because I have a lot of ram, because I mostly work with small files, or because I'm using Linux which seems to be more resistant to bad disk IO speeds.
However I do like the gain in battery life.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#86I would absolutely recommend SSDs. It's one of the few times you can swap out a component in your computer and notice a performance boost. They are getting better very quickly though, so one big decision is when to pull the trigger. Every few months a new generation of SSDs with better firmware seems to come out. I've switched my laptop and home computer to SSDs.
They're just another product on the Moore's Law trajectory. Treat them the same as you do computers and phones -- plan to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and plan on only having the latest and greatest for about 12 minutes after you get it.
Wrong. HD speed improvements have been pretty flat, and has been far outpaced by HD capacity which is closer to Moore's Law. SSD offers a nice boost in speed. Don't just throw around Moore's Law as if you know something.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#87I will be making the plunge in a production server environment soon, but I will be starting with my read only, or read intensive applications.
I have an elevation service, which has 600gb of binary files which are queried randomly. Since I have users from all over the world using the service at any one time, the heads on the drives must be flying all over the place. Perfect application for SSD's, even if they are poor at wear leveling, because it's a read-only application.
As far as database is concerned, I'll be holding off until I am sure I won't be screwed by the wear leveling. My database is currently sitting at 91% reads, but as we grow I can imagine that 9% writes can add up way quicker on the server than any amount of writes do on a persons desktop.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#88My main desktop (Win7) is running a 64G Kingston SSD. I love the performance it offers and the silent operation. I'll never go back to a moving disk for my main machine. However, all of my servers will remain as traditional disks because their noise doesn't effect me, they're cost effective, and performance isn't an issue on a 100mb home network.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#89I would absolutely recommend SSDs. It's one of the few times you can swap out a component in your computer and notice a performance boost. They are getting better very quickly though, so one big decision is when to pull the trigger. Every few months a new generation of SSDs with better firmware seems to come out. I've switched my laptop and home computer to SSDs.
I switched over to a SSD (from a 5400 rpm drive) in my new laptop and didn't notice much difference at all. Everything was instant before, and it's still instant now. This may be because I have a lot of ram, because I mostly work with small files, or because I'm using Linux which seems to be more resistant to bad disk IO speeds. However I do like the gain in battery life.
you never load a large program like gimp? The speed difference is huge when loading up gimp on a rpm drive vs ssd. It's also pretty big when doing something like a "select count(*)" over a huge un-indexed table.
Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're just another product on the Moore's Law trajectory. Treat them the same as you do computers and phones -- plan to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and plan on only having the latest and greatest for about 12 minutes after you get it.
Wrong. HD speed improvements have been pretty flat, and has been far outpaced by HD capacity which is closer to Moore's Law. SSD offers a nice boost in speed. Don't just throw around Moore's Law as if you know something.
I think you might have misread kbob’s comment. I think he was talking about upgrading from one SSD to another newer SSD — not from HDD to SSD.