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

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#91

Post by robotresearcher » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 10:21 PM UTC

chrisjsmith wrote: post #62

I don't use an SSD simply because the operating system block cache is good enough! More RAM is a better investment if you ask me. And I only reboot my laptop every month or so, so I don't notice the boot speed. I use Windows 7 x64 with 8Gb of RAM on a cheap Acer laptop. On a side note, developing software on the "best workstation you can get" is a really bad idea. You never get to see how the software will run on a p…

By your argument, shouldn't you toss out 3/4 of your RAM?

You should indeed test your code on a client-like machine, but for many if not most apps, building is much more demanding than running them. Developer time is expensive, so building on the fastest available machine is a good idea.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#92

Post by eyeforgotmyname » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 10:30 PM UTC

Would be tech writers need to learn that when you mention jargon like a solid state drive (ssd) you should define it in the beginning of the article, and it helps to explain what it is.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#93

Post by ENOTTY » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 1:10 AM UTC

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.

Wow, okay lots of replies and I'll address them here.

First, a lot of people are talking about using two drives. On Windows this model does not work. Moving programs from C: to D: will often screw up registry settings and other crap like that. On OSX and Linux, thanks to a single root filesystem and symlinks, this model might work better. Furthermore, I have to manage moving files back and forth. This is a problem algorithms should take care of and no OS does this yet.

Secondly, a lot of people are saying the Momentus benchmarks are terrible. This seems obvious. Any standard benchmark does not take advantage of a large read cache. You have to use some sector of data over and over again in order for the drive's algorithms to put it into the SSD cache. Read real world benchmarks here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-revi...

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#94

Post by slashclee » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 7:14 AM UTC

dexen wrote: post #73

masklinn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get yourself a decent 15k harddrive, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps even short-stroke it if you are a racer. 15k HDDs are nowhere near modern SSDs in access time, IOPS or random access bandwidth (let alone factoring in noise and consumption). Nowhere. And they're in similar prices ballparks. 15k drives in desktops are the most worthless technology available these days.

A quick search on popular polish auction site (allegro) gives: OCZ Vertex 3: 120GB: 1100PLN, 240GB: 2100PLN Cheetah 15k 147GB: 400PLN (second hand).

If you're willing to go up to 469PLN you could get a previous-generation (still basically pushing the limits of SATA2) Sandforce-powered 60GB SSD.

http://allegro.pl/ocz-vertex-2-e-ssd-2-5-60gb-285-mb-s-275-m...

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#95

Post by chrisjsmith » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 9:00 AM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #91

chrisjsmith wrote: post #62

I don't use an SSD simply because the operating system block cache is good enough! More RAM is a better investment if you ask me. And I only reboot my laptop every month or so, so I don't notice the boot speed. I use Windows 7 x64 with 8Gb of RAM on a cheap Acer laptop. On a side note, developing software on the "best workstation you can get" is a really bad idea. You never get to see how the software will run on a p…

By your argument, shouldn't you toss out 3/4 of your RAM? You should indeed test your code on a client-like machine, but for many if not most apps, building is much more demanding than running them. Developer time is expensive, so building on the fastest available machine is a good idea.

Picking the right tech and keeping your product size small is sensible.

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#96

Post by geekam » Thu, Apr 21, 2011, 2:38 PM UTC

geekam wrote: post #89

What about the shelf life of an SSD? I have also heard that your system needs some kind of TRIM support otherwise performance slowly degrades. what's the truth in that?

I asked a question sometime back: http://superuser.com/questions/208560/hard-drive-question-ss...

Re: Why are you not using a SSD yet?

#97

Post by spicyj » Fri, Apr 22, 2011, 3:06 AM UTC

dawkins wrote: post #55

AngryParsley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard drives are much more likely to fail without warning than SSDs. Modern SSDs use wear-leveling along with spare flash cells to increase reliability. To give one example: Intel warranties their X25-Ms for 3 years. They claim you can write 100GB/day for 3 years without exhausting the flash cells. The typical failure mode for a hard drive is for it to work fine and then completely die. No reading or writing, just dea…

That's not my experience. I bought a 128GB Patriot Torx some time ago and one day it stopped working completely. I lost all my data. They gave me a new one and 7 months later I started having data corruption problems. Now I can't even format it from Windows. Maybe it was bad luck twice but I'm sticking with hard drives for now.

The Intel drives are especially reliable.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/...