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Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

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Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#41

Post by thismat »

rufo wrote: post #8

I picked up a 160GB X-25M G2 for $450 on Newegg the minute they were posted - I have it installed in an otherwise-maxed 17" non-unibody MacBook Pro. It's an amazing and surprising difference, one that reminds me of my first dual-processor machine. It's not that your system feels faster when doing one thing (although it does), but that no matter how much you throw at it, it just doesn't slow down - a tremendous differ…

I have an OCZ SSD in my desktop machine and I can agree with you, the biggest noticeable difference to me is in moving and deleting large files.

I can't remember the last time I had to wait on a file to do the whole moving/copying/deleting dialog.

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#42

Post by spudlyo »

boredguy8 wrote: post #32

If you're interested in a comprehensive review and understanding why the early drives had some problems, visit the extensive review by Anand Lal Shimpi over at AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 . I liked their site before this review, but the detail and writing made me add their name to my 'weekly visit' list.

Their reporting on SSD technology has been excellent and comprehensive. They should win some kind of excellence in tech journalism award.

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#43

Post by KWD »

boredguy8 wrote: post #32

If you're interested in a comprehensive review and understanding why the early drives had some problems, visit the extensive review by Anand Lal Shimpi over at AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 . I liked their site before this review, but the detail and writing made me add their name to my 'weekly visit' list.

Tekzilla just had a good interview with Anand on SSD. http://revision3.com/tekzilla/visback/is-it-time-to-go-ssd-a...

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#44

Post by laut »

rufo wrote: post #8

I picked up a 160GB X-25M G2 for $450 on Newegg the minute they were posted - I have it installed in an otherwise-maxed 17" non-unibody MacBook Pro. It's an amazing and surprising difference, one that reminds me of my first dual-processor machine. It's not that your system feels faster when doing one thing (although it does), but that no matter how much you throw at it, it just doesn't slow down - a tremendous differ…

It's the best. Here's a chart showing how much faster it is than anything else at random reads: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/Intel/34nmSSD/Re...

I've put the same disk in my MacBook Pro. Strongly recommended.

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#45

Post by davidmathers »

randallsquared wrote: post #36
davidmathers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so what idiom should I use instead? I can't think of anything. Is this the market-economics version of political correctness?

what idiom should I use Others are replying, but I don't know that there's any idiom needed. Raising the price to whatever people willingly pay is just being a merchant. Is this the market-economics version of political correctness? I don't think it is. Political correctness applies when people feel they can't plainly say something that's true. In this case, using "price gouging" adds nothing to the statement that pr…

using "price gouging" adds nothing to the statement that prices are high except a sense of outrage

Of course it does. It says:

1. the subject is a retail product with a standard price, as opposed to a market product where the price is determined by bids and asks.

2. the price is temporarily higher than the standard price due to some sort of unforeseen disruption.

3. the price will return to the standard price when circumstances return to normal.

In the present example the product that Jeff says costs $600 will cost $450 within 3 months. Just as it cost $450 for a brief moment 1.5 months ago.

Edit: Also, you are speaking for yourself about the outrage. I certainly don't have any outrage. Not does "price gouging" give me any sense of outrage.

The people who are outraged by the practice will be outraged by it no matter what you call it. And people, like myself, who have no problem with it will have no problem with it no matter what you call it.

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#46

Post by spudlyo »

From the article:

"The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they're cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!"

This kind of hand waving irritates me to no end. There are a ton of different ways of measuring i/o performance, and I'm sure the author knows this. To say that the Indilinx based SSD drives are "just as fast" as the Intel SSDs is simply not true. Let's take my favorite way of measuring drive performance, 4KB random write speed.

Intel: 5923 IOPS (23.1 MB/s)

Indilinx: 1275 IOPS (6.47 MB/s)

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535&p=3

Granted this article is a few months old, perhaps the firmware for the Indilinx controller has gotten faster, or perhaps the Crucial 128GB drive uses a different Indilinx controller than the 'barefoot' model profiled in the article, but I doubt it.

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#47

Post by trin_ »

gruseom wrote: post #39
gohnjanotis wrote: post #24

The day I got my 15" MacBook Pro it was obvious the hard drive is what was limiting the performance. I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks since I have it maxed out at 4GB. For example, intense BitTorrent downloading (and uploading) on a RAM disk frees my hard disk from the constant reads and writes so I can have high speed downloads (and verification of d/led data) and still do disk intensive activities…

I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks Can you go into a bit of detail? How do you do that?

you can mount portions of your ram and use them, but you should be aware that the files need to be put back on a disk before you turn the machine of ;)

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#48

Post by davidmathers »

lacker wrote: post #34
davidmathers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so what idiom should I use instead? I can't think of anything. Is this the market-economics version of political correctness?

Just say the price went up due to unexpectedly high demand. It's hardly "gouging" you if the only way people can keep it in stock is to raise the price.

Just say the price went up due to unexpectedly high demand.

I did say that. The issue is that I need 2 names: a name for the stores charging $450 (and are out of stock) and another name for the stores charging $600+.

I chose "gouging" and "non-gouging". Concise, and everyone who read it understood what I meant to say. I'm not seeing any real alternatives being offered, except to replace clear, concise, universally understood words with tedious explanations.

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#49

Post by chadaustin »

When the Intel X25 SSDs first came out, IMVU bought them for every engineer in the company. From a cold boot, Visual Studio starts in half a second. Subversion got dramatically faster. Boot times are a fraction of what they were before.

Some of my computers are cpu-bound on disk operations now.

If you run an engineering team, make the investment.

Re: Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

#50

Post by jodrellblank »

solutionyogi wrote: post #27
jbellis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's retarded. Stop kissing up to Greenpeace and give me my SSD, Apple. :(

Why the downvote? What's wrong with the idea of giving consumers a choice on how 'green' they want to be? [Don't get me started on the whole 'green' bullshit.]

"give me my SSD"

In what sense is the SSD you haven't paid for that they do not offer, 'yours'?

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