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Why are you not using a SSD yet?

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Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#11

Post by silencio »

shin_lao wrote: post #5
ctide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?

It's more than $ 200. It's more around $ 300 per computer and in a laptop it's an incredible amount of money ($800+ if I'm correct) if you have a Sony or an Apple one. Additionally the performance increase is important, but doesn't matter for everything network related. In other words I'd say it's almost worth what you pay for it.

It is $200 or so for a decent 2.5" 128gb SSD that you can install into a laptop or a desktop (see http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&#3...).

The only real problem with that solution is that 128gb isn't enough for some people, but it is not difficult to offload the data to another storage device, either internally or externally. I've been keeping under 128gb on my main laptops (MacBook Pro and Air) for a year and a half now (when I first switched over to using SSDs) without a problem.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#12

Post by ctide »

acqq wrote: post #6
ctide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?

Since when it's a "serious" performance increase when "it boots faster"? Or if the first grep after the boot is faster (others must be fast since the file cache kicks in for every next one, unless you have, say, 128 MB RAM). Really not worth to mention.

Every application I launch, launches in a fraction of the time. I don't like to leave every application I use (some of which are horrendous memory hogs, such as Illustrator and Photoshop) running perpetually, so having next to no load time is an amazing benefit.

Textmate is another excellent example. Search in project is completely usable with an SSD. I had temporarily switched to AckMate because of how unbearably this feature was, now it's instant again.

Booting faster is the least of my cares as my laptop is only rebooted when updates force me to.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#13

Post by catch23 »

shin_lao wrote: post #5
ctide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?

It's more than $ 200. It's more around $ 300 per computer and in a laptop it's an incredible amount of money ($800+ if I'm correct) if you have a Sony or an Apple one. Additionally the performance increase is important, but doesn't matter for everything network related. In other words I'd say it's almost worth what you pay for it.

Actually it's around $200 for a 100gig drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227...

But you can always have more than 1 hard drive. Buy a 500gig one for all your large file content and use the smaller one for the OS. Pretty much all SSDs come in laptop drive format so I don't know where this $800 number is coming from. They might have been $800 last year, but transistor prices drop pretty fast.

I have 2 drives in my macbook pro -- 120gig vertex 2 ssd, and a 500gig samsung "old style" hard drive.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#14

Post by masklinn »

ENOTTY wrote: post #2

Because it costs an outrageous amount of money. I'm waiting for further development of hybrid drives, which are SSDs combined with a traditional hard drive for mass storage, but seen as one drive by the OS. The SSD is basically used a huge read cache. Current models of hybrid drives from Seagate have only 4 GB of SSD cache, which I don't feel is large enough.

Hybrids are nowhere near the orders-of-magnitude improvements SSDs provide. And neither can they be.

You won't see a hybrid able to saturate a 6Gbps SATA connection on random-access any time soon.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#15

Post by catch23 »

acqq wrote: post #6
ctide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?

Since when it's a "serious" performance increase when "it boots faster"? Or if the first grep after the boot is faster (others must be fast since the file cache kicks in for every next one, unless you have, say, 128 MB RAM). Really not worth to mention.

Try doing a fgrep in 500 files. It's almost 20 times faster than my hard disk. I think it's funny how all these people spend money on a faster cpu when they could really just use a faster disk.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#19

Post by masklinn »

rodh257 wrote: post #9
acqq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when it's a "serious" performance increase when "it boots faster"? Or if the first grep after the boot is faster (others must be fast since the file cache kicks in for every next one, unless you have, say, 128 MB RAM). Really not worth to mention.

Applications start faster, loading any files from disk start faster. It depends on your usage scenario, but for .NET development in Windows I can vouch for it's value. $200 for an SSD is a far better use of money for the average programmer than say the upgrade from I5 to I7 on a 13" MBP. There are many parts of your computer which you'd spend $200 on that get you less of a general every day performance boost than a S…

> It depends on your usage scenario, but for .NET development in Windows I can vouch for it's value.

The reality is that it significantly increases performances for all workloads but streaming videos (huge sequential reads).

Most of computer usage is random access to small files, and that's a field where SSDs utterly annihilate rotating platters (not that rotas have any advantage but storage capacity, mind you, SSDs are also superior in seq read and write, but on random we're talking 2MB/s on 4k random write for a VelociRaptor to >200MB/s for a Vertex 3; 0.68MB 4k random read for a VR to >90MB for a Vertex 3, for sequential performances the difference will be a factor of 2 or 3 tops between a VR and a top-of-the-line SSD)

The difference is, of course, even more impressive for laptop drives: most laptops don't house 10k, 10W monsters like the VRs

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#20

Post by masklinn »

ctide wrote: post #17
WalterBright wrote: post #16

Because I'd have to reinstall my OS from scratch, then all my apps, etc. It's a full day of work.

I can't speak for Windows users, but on my Mac, I didn't have to do any of that.

I don't think you need to do so under Windows either, just clone from disk 1 to disk 2, maybe fiddle a bit with the drivers, and you should be done.
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