24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds • Hacker News Board

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#31

Post by tutwabee » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 5:34 AM UTC

mcav wrote: post #2

So, 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.)

I have a 64GB SSD in my laptop and I love it. Upon a clean Ubuntu install my system booted in 28 seconds. After tweaking my system some I got my boot time down to 12 seconds.

I tried opening OpenOffice after watching this video and found that OpenOffice writer opens in less than 1 second and opening all Office applications except for database and impress takes less than three seconds 3.

The difference between SSDs and HDs is definitely noticeable.

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#32

Post by tdavis » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 6:11 AM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #4

Wow. Simply -- wow. I was amazed at really seeing the HD bottleneck minimized this way. I always knew about it, but -- wow.

I think this bottleneck is easily (and still amazingly) noticed when storing things in RAM rather than on disk. For instance, immediately after a restart of our production database it can take up to a minute to run certain queries. Give it a few seconds to load everything into RAM, though, and it's nearly instant. I've noticed the same thing when switching from file-based to RAM-based queuing.

Everybody thinks, "duh, RAM (or SSD or w/e) is faster than disk" but sometimes these sorts of real-world tests still amaze.

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#33

Post by Encosia » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 6:35 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #28

Encosia wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with those ratings is that you're only exposed to one side of the potential deviation from the mean. A MTBF without standard deviation is meaningless. To put those ratings in context, consider that a Western Digital VelociRaptor has a 160 year MTBF.

The good news is that the wearout of an SSD is a gradual, measurable, monotonic process (because at every point you know how many spare blocks are left), while the failure of a hard disk is a random process.

True, that's a very good point.

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#34

Post by whatusername » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 6:46 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #14

That 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…

http://www.fusionio.com/Products.aspx

Have you seen the startup Woz has started working with?

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#35

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 6:56 AM UTC

10ren wrote: post #10

This should work with USB thumbdrives too. The ones I've tested are faster than a HDD (and faster than the SSD in a eee PC). They're also cheap. Bottleneck would shift to USB bandwidth (60 MByte/s) and the PC itself.

[deleted]

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#36

Post by sketerpot » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 7:49 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #28

Encosia wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with those ratings is that you're only exposed to one side of the potential deviation from the mean. A MTBF without standard deviation is meaningless. To put those ratings in context, consider that a Western Digital VelociRaptor has a 160 year MTBF.

The good news is that the wearout of an SSD is a gradual, measurable, monotonic process (because at every point you know how many spare blocks are left), while the failure of a hard disk is a random process.

I had another hard drive fail on me last week. At this point I would give part of my soul for SSD-style failure properties with sizes and prices comparable to conventional hard drives. (I mean, assuming partial souls regenerate, Xanth-style.)

I'm sure it will happen in a few years. I wonder if there's some starup opportunity here: are there any ways to take advantage of fast, reliable, cheap, flash-like storage becoming ubiquitous?

Probably you could add more fine-grained extension hooks to programs without them becoming bloated, by having plugins loaded lazily at run-time from a solid state drive. I'm convinced that the next big thing will be software that quietly integrates with other software, so you don't even have to click on an icon to use it.

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#37

Post by jrnkntl » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 11:26 AM UTC

Although I understand the awesomeness of this video I don't get that a marketing company comes up with this video. The nerd community is already familiar with the potential of SSD's and their speed increase. I think that the consumer market should be steamed ready for the 'next-gen' in hard disks via a video that's not focused on RAID configs, 6 TBs, a benchmark of 2GB/s and stuff. Focus on things like homevideo editing or working office, photo apps, mediaplayer and stuff all at once.

More exposure, more familiarity with the hardware and advantages, more potential buyers.

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#38

Post by pchristensen » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 1:25 PM UTC

The complete system defrags in about 3 seconds.

This part impressed me most.

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#39

Post by ivankirigin » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 1:56 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #27

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #4

Wow. Simply -- wow. I was amazed at really seeing the HD bottleneck minimized this way. I always knew about it, but -- wow.

Now, as a software guy, can I stop hearing about how software "bloat" keeps absorbing all the hardware advances? If hard drives had been advancing, errr, at all , this would be considered normal performance. And I daresay that in three or four years, this will indeed be considered "normal performance", if SSDs continue to develop. All hail the SSDs! Maybe in a couple of years we actually will be able to feed our octo…

I wonder if there is a market for open desktop software that is designed to be as fast as possible and still get the job done.

Imagine a WYSIWYG editor that is actually 2^10 times faster than those made 15 years ago.

I think uTorrent has proven small can be loved.

Re: 24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

#40

Post by onk » Tue, Mar 10, 2009, 2:52 PM UTC

jwilliams wrote: post #11

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #4

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.

Given the tested max throughput of the Hitachi 1TB SATAs (http://www.storagereview.com/Testbed4Compare.sr) you should be able to get ~2GBps with 2/3 the drives (16 instead of 24) and near triple the storage space (16TB instead of 6TB). They're cheaper, too, of course. That's just theory, though. It would probably be difficult to get all drives "bursting" at the same time but anyway, this kind of looks like a "jumping into jeans" viral published by Samsung.