Wow. Simply -- wow. I was amazed at really seeing the HD bottleneck minimized this way. I always knew about it, but -- wow.
Would be interesting to see a baseline against a RAIDx24 with conventional HDDs.
24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
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Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#12Wow. Simply -- wow. I was amazed at really seeing the HD bottleneck minimized this way. I always knew about it, but -- wow.
Would be interesting to see a baseline against a RAIDx24 with conventional HDDs.
Agreed. I wouldn't go so far as to call it meaningless without something to compare it to, but I'd imagine conventional disks would still be very fast in that setup.
Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#13It's actually quite clever marketing on behalf of Samsung, and impressive to seek them using 'geek marketing' in this way. However, given that a 64GB Samsung SSD drive goes for about $500, 24 of them (plus RAID card for that many) is still looking quit steep!
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Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#14That gives some interesting possibilities for computers in a few years -- one relatively expensive drive for code, another cheap drive for data, for example.
Probably 80% of your hard drive is stuff where the access speed is irrelevant -- movies, for example, since your capability to read from the disk far outstrips your eyes' capability to watch the movie. Photos, Office docs, email, ditto ditto ditto.
Then there are programs -- or even a subset of programs, really -- that actually have appreciable startup times. Office, Eclipse, etc, I'm looking at you.
You could put those programs on the "fast" disk (along with most of the OS, presumably) then make it as big as you pleased with cheap spinning platters. With a little bit of software trickery, you could present the two disks as one physical drive to the operating system (or to the end user) and shift data between them using some sort of caching policy (LRU, whatever).
It sounds like a sexy idea for servers too -- can't afford to keep the entire working set in RAM? No problem -- back up the RAM with solid state and only write to spinning magnetic media when you need long-term non-volatile storage.
Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be interesting to see a baseline against a RAIDx24 with conventional HDDs.
Agreed. I wouldn't go so far as to call it meaningless without something to compare it to, but I'd imagine conventional disks would still be very fast in that setup.
Yeah - and perhaps for certain scenarios it might be faster? (Pure conjecture on my part).
So - if seek time wasn't a big factor, a fast conventional drive could be faster? And if you have a very high level of striping (ie. 24 drives), seek time might be significantly mitigated.
Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#16Desktop performance with solid-state drives is less interesting to me than server performance -- specifically databases and other services where seek time is more important than throughput.
Has anyone done performance tests with MySQL on low-latency storage devices? As another commenter suggested for the desktop, strategies of using solid-state for latency bound activities and traditional disks for throughput intensive stuff might be an interesting hybrid to explore.
Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#17It's funny how they never say how much RAM this computer has.
Vista has a feature called 'superfetch' which pre-caches applications in memory so they're never actually loaded from disk. Also, it's hard to tell, but if this computer has sufficient RAM, you could conceivable load everything directly from memory.
Also, the fragmentation test was a little dubious. A computer that new would have very little file fragmentation, so of course defragging would be fast.
That said, it was an entertaining video!
Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#18That gives some interesting possibilities for computers in a few years -- one relatively expensive drive for code, another cheap drive for data, for example. Probably 80% of your hard drive is stuff where the access speed is irrelevant -- movies, for example, since your capability to read from the disk far outstrips your eyes' capability to watch the movie. Photos, Office docs, email, ditto ditto ditto. Then there ar…
That's the way to do it today too. In my machines, I use a smaller 10K RPM drive for OS/programs and a large drive or two for data. It does make a significant difference in performance.
Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#19Desktop performance with solid-state drives is less interesting to me than server performance -- specifically databases and other services where seek time is more important than throughput. Has anyone done performance tests with MySQL on low-latency storage devices? As another commenter suggested for the desktop, strategies of using solid-state for latency bound activities and traditional disks for throughput intensi…
Currently, SSDs' limited number of rewrite cycles make them unsuitable for that type of server application.
Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
#20So, given that demo, does a single SSD perform substantially better enough on a normal laptop to warrant the expenditure yet? (Last I heard, standard advice was to wait until the price drops.)
The 128gb Samsung SSD in my Dell M1330 is amazing. I don't regret a penny of the upgrade cost. When I got it, I ran benchmarks against my desktop's 10k RPM HDD:
HDD: http://encosia.com/photos/things/drive-benchmark-10k.png
SSD: http://encosia.com/photos/things/drive-benchmark-SSD.png
