Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by jbellis » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 1:32 AM UTC

raganwald wrote: post #84

gohnjanotis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, really! They should provide options to ship with the best SSD options available, even if it has to come at a premium price. They need to let the market decide.

Yes, and while they're at it, why not offer a MacBook with Windows instead of OS X? Why not offer a subscription music service? Why do they insist on making premium products? Why not make one of everything like Dell and let the market decide?

Obviously offering one of everything isn't what Apple does.

Offering the _best_ of everything is. So shipping a crappy SSD is dumb. (Personally I strongly suspect it's because they can get closer to that 100% hardware markup they love on a lower-end model, than because it's greener. But I'm sure "green" sounds better.)

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

#112

Post by sketerpot » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 3:08 AM UTC

ezy wrote: post #95

I'm still a little wary of the reliability of these drives. I think it's prudent to wait at least another half-year. It isn't the long-term lifetime of the memory itself, which is fine. It's the tendency of the drives to be dead within a couple months. Go to newegg and sort the reviews by date on some of the most popular ones.

Do you know how they're breaking down? Part of the great promise of SSDs is that they can degrade gradually, rather than suddenly failing like spinning-platter hard drives. Is there a fundamental problem with that vision, or are the early SSDs just a little flaky?

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

#113

Post by kentosi » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 4:34 AM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #51

If you'd like to see exactly how a macbook pro with an Intel X25-M feels like, I made a video to give you an idea: http://vimeo.com/7057850

oh dear god .. i feel like i'm going to do an impulse purchse this evening.

drool

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

#114

Post by codexon » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 6:11 AM UTC

billswift wrote: post #52

Those complaints about the cost are hilarious. Either the person making them is a kid, or they have no "on-board" memory between their ears at all. The first 5 Gig HD I bought was a cheapo Maxtor at Staples and it set me back $500 about 10 years ago.

I remember when desktops cost $5,000 about 20 years ago.

Call me a young whippersnapper if you like, but I am not paying anywhere near $1000 for one now. Same idea with SSDs.

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

#115

Post by blasdel » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 7:13 AM UTC

jrnkntl wrote: post #101

KirinDave wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That guy is a moron -- filling a mounted filesystem with large files of zeroes is not erasing it. To actually do so, dd from /dev/zero onto the full device.

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

#116

Post by eru » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 9:40 AM UTC

Eliezer wrote: post #63

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?

The phrase you're looking for is "market clearing price" or just "market price". See also Obama's elementary explanation of why lowering gas taxes doesn't lower gas prices when gas is in limited supply: the market clearing price is still the price at which the amount of gas that people want at that price equals the supply of gas. Setting the price lower than this will result in shortages. It doesn't matter whether ga…

America could buy a greater share of the global supply of oil, if it could pay more off the retail price on the world market instead of giving it to the government. (And over time supply might go up with higher prices.)

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

#117

Post by scorpioxy » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 11:46 AM UTC

Does anyone know if that big performance effect is also noticeable while running a couple of VMs?

I have those dreaded pauses when my VMs(typically 2 at a time) are busy doing something and I decide to untar a file for example. Does anyone have a similar problem?

I still run on a 32bit environment so use only 3GB of ram.

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

#118

Post by mseebach » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 12:01 PM UTC

scorpioxy wrote: post #117

Does anyone know if that big performance effect is also noticeable while running a couple of VMs? I have those dreaded pauses when my VMs(typically 2 at a time) are busy doing something and I decide to untar a file for example. Does anyone have a similar problem? I still run on a 32bit environment so use only 3GB of ram.

It sounds a lot like you're out of CPUs (from the 3-GB limit I'm guessing you're on a Core Duo MacBook), not disk-IO.

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

#119

Post by raganwald » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 1:56 PM UTC

jbellis wrote: post #111

raganwald wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and while they're at it, why not offer a MacBook with Windows instead of OS X? Why not offer a subscription music service? Why do they insist on making premium products? Why not make one of everything like Dell and let the market decide?

Obviously offering one of everything isn't what Apple does. Offering the _best_ of everything is. So shipping a crappy SSD is dumb. (Personally I strongly suspect it's because they can get closer to that 100% hardware markup they love on a lower-end model, than because it's greener. But I'm sure "green" sounds better.)

I think "best" is part of the perception they market, but the reality is that they off er a variety of products that don't suck. Sometimes that comes across as "high end" because of how many other bag-sucking PCs are marketed as "cheap."

But seriously, when was the last time an Apple computer has the fastest CPU? Or the largest laptop screen. Or anything with a card reader. Or blue ray... Just pointing out that they are entirely willing to avoid the absolute top of the line and have done so consistently.

Maybe it's a margin thing as you say, I don't know...

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

#120

Post by cdr » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 2:20 PM UTC

lpellis wrote: post #107

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?

I bought a G1 SSD for my desktop over a year ago; it was the best single upgrade I've ever made to a desktop machine.

When the G2s were released, I put a G2 in my desktop and the G1 in my laptop. Having a SSD in my laptop is great, but the improvement from the SSD in my desktop is actually much more noticeable.