Why are you not using a SSD yet? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#21

Post by patio11 » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:32 AM UTC

My SSD has been the single biggest win for hardware for me in the last decade. Dell quoted me $600 on putting one in my new laptop. It would be cheap at twice the price.

In addition to my perhaps unprofessional weakness for playing games, the huge win for me is that it slashes boot times for hefty programs, most noticeably the VMs that I do all my development in and, of course, browsers. Chrome boots practically instantaneously -- I often have to wait for my wireless to come up so that it has something to do right after a system boot.

My other suggestion, which combos well with SSDs and is ridiculously cheap to implement these days: get more memory. I have 8 GBs. If there were a convenient option for getting 16, I'd be all over it -- I never find myself thinking "Dang it all, I have too much stuff in memory, why don't I page out some to disk".

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#22

Post by vegai » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:33 AM UTC

Because I'm on a platform that doesn't require massive IO performance on A FREAKING DESKTOP.

How could we implement a tax on horrible programming?

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#23

Post by stewbrew » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:37 AM UTC

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.

So we have people who upgraded their hard disk to a ssd and say it resulted in a "serious performance increase" and we have people who still use traditional hard disks (why on earth would somebody want to do something like that?) who say it isn't. Maybe the judgment is based on experience?

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#24

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:39 AM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#25

Post by jonah » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:41 AM UTC

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.

Oh, but installing apps is so much faster on an SSD, it'll only be 1/2 of a day of work. ;)

Adobe CS5 < 15 minutes onto an SSD vs. 45 minutes onto an HDD.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#26

Post by beedogs » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:41 AM UTC

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.

Uh, how is it NOT a performance increase? Applications load faster. Everything loads faster. The OS boots faster.

What a horrible argument.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#27

Post by stewbrew » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:42 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #20

ctide wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC good performance of ssd requires slightly modified formatting parameters. I'm not sure if this is still true, though. Anyway, with different block sizes etc. I'm not sure if cloning works, does it?

On windows, unfortunately information essential to running an app is stored in the registry and the files are scattered over several directories. So windows users might have to reinstall the stuff -- which could turn out to be a good thing anyway if you were already running your windows system for a long time of period.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#28

Post by beedogs » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:44 AM UTC

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.

On the Mac, all it took was half an hour waiting for SuperDuper to finish copying files to the new SSD disk and making it bootable. Reinstalling? What?

It couldn't have been any easier.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#29

Post by jonah » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:47 AM UTC

mpakes wrote: post #10

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.

Spoken like someone who has never used a machine with an SSD. My SSD is by far the best performance investment I've made in recent years. A fast CPU is worthless if you're burning 30% of your cycles waiting for the HDD to deliver your data. Relying on file cache is not good enough.

I just upgraded my MBP and opted for the slowest 2.0 Ghz CPU and spent the savings on 8Gb RAM and a Vertex 3. Absolutely worth it.

Just to give a rough idea - 4k random writes:

  Vertex 3 - 214 MB/s
  WD VelociRaptor - 1.9 MB/s

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4256/36481.png

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#30

Post by andreaja » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:51 AM UTC

I'm amused at how strongly the for/against sides are arguing in this thread. This is a case where the cost benefit analysis is quite simple. I used to start my day at work by doing git status on my project repos to warm up the disk cache, then go get coffee. Now I just dive straight into whatever's on my plate. Then there's the 20 seconds I save whenever I start up Eclipse. The 2 minutes I save on every reboot. It all adds up.

What I'm interested is why people are so adamantly against. People drop huge amounts of money on RAM for their development rigs, but making the slowest I/O device faster and more predictable is a bad idea?

I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but is there a backlash because the people who are happy about their SSDs are so enthusiastic about them? I realize this is the internet and spending energy wondering why people are so angry is pretty futile, but what's the point?