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Poll: Are you using SSDs?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#91

Post by Overmind »

I've got an SSD that I use as a boot drive (40 gig). I bought it on one of Newegg's previous shell shockers for under 100 dollars.

My recommendation: if you're going to use SSDs, jump in with both feet first. Budget SSDs are ok, mine nets a 7.0 on the Windows Experience Index. It's actually the only technical bottleneck in my system that has an i7, 8 gigs of RAM, GTX 480, etc..

If I were to build my PC all over again I would have invested in a real SSD instead of dilly dallying with a budget SSD boot drive.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#92

Post by catch23 »

sgt wrote: post #33

We are using 4x 512GB SSDs (boy, these were expensive!) in a 16-core i7 computer, running in production using PostgreSQL 9.0.0, Glassfish 3.1 and ActiveMQ. Works great, and we do heavy queries at lightning speed. We currently run Ubuntu Linux on it but would switch to FreeBSD 8.x if the Java support was better.

are they raided?

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#93

Post by whalesalad »

I'm not using one in a production web environment, but my Macbook Pro has one in it now and it's phenomenal. Photoshop boots up in quite literally 3 seconds or less (cold startup) and every other action imaginable is noticeably quicker. I used to feel like browsing files in the Finder was slower than it was for me on my old Windows XP machines but eventually I got used to it. I use keyboard navigation as well, so it felt even slower. (For anyone interested, arrow keys, and command+downarrow to open a folder, command+uparrow to go to the parent folder).

Now that I've got an SSD as a boot drive, navigating the Finder is significantly faster. It feels so quick. Folders open instantly. When I got my development environment up and running (nginx, uwsgi, django, mysql, etc...) I noticed that code compiles wayyy quicker too.

Love it! For the record... I've got the Intel X-25M, second generation. It's only 80GB (they're pricey!) so I also picked up an MCE Optibay which is basically a hollowed out superdrive that lets you mount an additional HD where your DVD drive sits. It also includes an external enclosure so that you can put your otherwise useless SATA DVD drive to use via USB. So now my MBP has two drives in it, an 80gb ssd to boot off of and a 320gb regular drive for bulk storage (media, photos, etc..)

Gotta give credit where credit is due... Paul Stamatiou's blog came in handy a few times with aiming me in the right direction with this. Here is a nifty article from his blog, which describes most of what I did other than the RAID part (which I did not do). http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#94

Post by cpr »

ary wrote: post #78
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.

There are several comments about people putting them in MBPs, but I guess I'll ask you... since OS X doesn't support TRIM have you seen any degradation in performance? I've been on the fence for a while due to the cost and OS X being behind the times.

I haven't seen any after a year of using my MBP with the stock Apple 128GB SSD.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#95

Post by adamfeldman »

I have a 4 year-old MacBook Pro (model identifier MacBookPro2,2). I bought a 48gb expresscard SSD and now use it as a boot drive, with my user folder living on my old internal. Time from start to having a usable system (logged in with all of my menubar apps running) went from 3-5 minutes to 45 seconds!

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#96

Post by Chris_Morrell »

macros wrote: post #65
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.

You may want to consider testing the LSI 9211-8i for a very fast JBOD controller or the 9260-8i for an equally fast RAID5/6 card. I've been very happy with these controllers and they are typically much cheaper than the equivalents from ARECA. Just make sure to use the latest drivers and firmware as LSI has been improving SSD performance by leaps and bounds in the last year.

On thing I noticed with the X-25M G2s is that if you are in a write intensive environment they will degrade in performance dramatically. The SandForce SF1200/1500 drives seems to handle garbage collection much better and run with lower write amplification levels. I've found that the SandForce drives do a much better job at maintaining acceptable random write performance after months of being beat on. That all being said a beat to hell X25-M is still 10 times better than a spinning disk.

If you want I can run an iometer batch or figure out tiobench if you'd like some runs on the 9211 or 9260 to compare with your ICH and Adaptec runs. Ping me at gomeler at gmail if you are interested.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#97

Post by icco »

I put one in my Lenovo x200. Greatest decision I ever made. I use the machine at school and for travel, so I am much more comfortable biking and or running with it now that it doesn't have any moving parts. Also, < 10 second boot times are great.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#98

Post by bhiggins »

blahpro wrote: post #90
bhiggins wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be stunning for SSDs to take off with exponential speed improvements. Sure, I expect them to get faster and faster, but I have no doubt that there's no Moore's Law at work in this case. I stand by my original comment.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#99

Post by gcb »

only buy notebooks with SSD, since my eeepc 1000.

will never go back on that.

But for servers and any other kind of storage I will not get near it because of price.

Re: Poll: Are you using SSDs?

#100

Post by jcnnghm »

bhiggins wrote: post #98
blahpro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be stunning for SSDs to take off with exponential speed improvements. Sure, I expect them to get faster and faster, but I have no doubt that there's no Moore's Law at work in this case. I stand by my original comment.

It has nothing to do with speed, it has to do with transistor counts, which should increase disk size or lower cost.
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