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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

#101
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way TRIM would be useful because you're deleting data a lot? Do you cope with that by running linux/win7 aside or do you use Disk Utility to 'free empty space' once in a while?

I haven't run into the problem yet. How do you ask Disk Utility to call TRIM? Does writing 0's over every free block actually have the same effect?

I meant the process described here: http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-SSD-Reconditioning.ht... And then the "restoring performance" part on the bottom.

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

#102
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the colorful circle?

Looks like iPulse. http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/09/ipulse-a-system-reso... http://iconfactory.com/software/ipulse

Exactly that. I've been a fan of it for laptops for years. I've yet to find another sysmon that can display so much area in such a small space in such a easy-to-consume format. It's also much less of an impact on the system than many other tools I've tried, which is pretty important when you're on battery power.

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

#103
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to get into a prescriptivism debate but "Price gouging" has a specific meaning, not just "charging a lot of money": > Price gouging is a term for a seller pricing much higher than is considered reasonable or fair. or > pricing above the market price when no alternative retailer is available

Not to get into a prescriptivism debate but "Price gouging" has a specific meaning, not just "charging a lot of money" That's my point, actually. Price gouging is a term for a seller pricing much higher than is considered reasonable or fair. I'm only interested in the non-value-judgement related meaning. "Reasonable" and "fair" are meaningless. What other people are saying is "you can't use that word because it's loa…

I don't understand your assertion that the second definition is meaningless. Charging the market price is by the given definition not price gouging.

Scarcity may be the term you're looking for.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if you're making a TV show or the like, it's not unusual to be compositing multiple video streams. TV companies have massively expensive hardware for this of course, but this will be a real boon for anyone who makes a living with multimedia.

Professional video editing has developed workarounds for that problem as far back as the 80's. Basically they do the editing on a low-res version of the footage (it's called an "offline edit"), then export it as an "Edit Decision List (EDL)" and then the big computers crunch on it overnight using the original, hi-res footage and produce an "online" edit. Companies like Avid sell specialized servers that have an in-bu…

Quite so, but if you're greenscreening or color correcting in, say, After effects it's nice to be able to work at full res whenever you can. Right now I use RAM preview to get a quick idea of how something looks, but I can see an SSD obviating a lot of the usual disk-bashing for longer previews. For final render, as you say CPU becomes the dominant factor.

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

#105
post #7

I'm using one of the 120GB Samsung SSDs that Apple ships stock in the MacBook Pro. It's definitely faster for things like program startup, etc. (many things start in less than one dock "bounce"), but otherwise not so clear. Sure wish Apple would ship the Intel drives. Perhaps they can't get a low enough price on them. Or, alternately, that Samsung would get with the program and do the kind of controller work required…

Why are you waiting for apple to ship it? Just go to a store, buy one, and install it to your laptop. It's not exactly hard, even if you are not a hw geek.

Replacing the HDD in a pre-unibody MBP isn't exactly easy, either. You have to take off the whole top case just to get at the drive. That one action voids the warranty, and if you don't do it properly, you can bend the case or damage components or connections.

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

#106
post #46

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 "…

Are these the equivalent tests (he links to this review)? http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1651&pageID=7404

If so, the Crucial 128GB SSD doesn't look half bad versus the Intel SSD. If this isn't the tests, the rest of the tests in that particular review have the Crucial doing really good.

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

#108

Does everybody here use laptops? Is a SSD still useful if you use a desktop? I cannot seem to find any 3.5' SSD's, can you connect the 2.5 to an desktop? Is there any performance penalty?

2.5" SSDs work fine in desktops; the benefit is just as large.

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

#109
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to get into a prescriptivism debate but "Price gouging" has a specific meaning, not just "charging a lot of money" That's my point, actually. Price gouging is a term for a seller pricing much higher than is considered reasonable or fair. I'm only interested in the non-value-judgement related meaning. "Reasonable" and "fair" are meaningless. What other people are saying is "you can't use that word because it's loa…

I don't understand your assertion that the second definition is meaningless. Charging the market price is by the given definition not price gouging. Scarcity may be the term you're looking for.

It's meaningless because if you're the only provider your price is by definition the market price. Market price means the price on the market, not the price in a hypothetical fair competitive market.

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

#110
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.]

Because being ungreen hurts everyone. Giving customers a choice on how safe they are, however, is a completely different issue.
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