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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

#41

Post by pilif »

jrnkntl wrote: post #37

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 edit…

well... the video made me feel the urge to replicate the findings. At least to some scale.

So they may have sold an SSD or two.

But then again, I'd probably go Intel and not Samsung.

Still. They got people talking and the video probably wasn't all to expensive to produce, so they got at least SOME value for their money.

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

#42

Post by anamax »

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…

> Now, as a software guy, can I stop hearing about how software "bloat" keeps absorbing all the hardware advances?

Why should you stop hearing it? Hardware is getting faster and SW is using the capacity.

> If hard drives had been advancing, errr, at all,

They have been, just not uniformly. There have been huge increases in capacity. Less so in transfer rate, but still significant. Seek time hasn't been improving much and rotational latency is stuck.

In the same time, arithmetic and logical operations have essentially become free. Branch mispredictions are a big deal. Cache misses are a killer but memory bandwidth is about to become the biggest problem. (It already is for some people.)

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

#43

Post by jerf »

anamax wrote: post #42
jerf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now, as a software guy, can I stop hearing about how software "bloat" keeps absorbing all the hardware advances? Why should you stop hearing it? Hardware is getting faster and SW is using the capacity. > If hard drives had been advancing, errr, at all, They have been, just not uniformly. There have been huge increases in capacity. Less so in transfer rate, but still significant. Seek time hasn't been improving much…

When someone wants to talk about bloat, the odds of Microsoft Office being trotted out are around 80%.

Yet, here we see that with a modern system that is mostly only special in the I/O department that Microsoft Office as a whole opens in .5 seconds, which, believe me, is radically faster than Office 95 opened back in the day it was still cutting edge.

Yes, it was a powerful system, but the only thing that was radically more powerful that what anybody can buy for cheap was the I/O system.

Maybe it's "bloat" in the abstract if programs are simply "larger" than they used to be, but really, who cares about bloat if hardware is actually outpacing software development... in everything but the I/O hardware.

I'm just a bit tired of people babbling on about software bloat when this pretty conclusively proves its the I/O subsystem that is the problem.

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

#45

Post by anamax »

jerf wrote: post #43
anamax wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, as a software guy, can I stop hearing about how software "bloat" keeps absorbing all the hardware advances? Why should you stop hearing it? Hardware is getting faster and SW is using the capacity. > If hard drives had been advancing, errr, at all, They have been, just not uniformly. There have been huge increases in capacity. Less so in transfer rate, but still significant. Seek time hasn't been improving much…

When someone wants to talk about bloat, the odds of Microsoft Office being trotted out are around 80%. Yet, here we see that with a modern system that is mostly only special in the I/O department that Microsoft Office as a whole opens in .5 seconds, which, believe me, is radically faster than Office 95 opened back in the day it was still cutting edge. Yes, it was a powerful system, but the only thing that was radical…

> I'm just a bit tired of people babbling on about software bloat when this pretty conclusively proves its the I/O subsystem that is the problem.

This proves nothing of the sort. (Office95 was bloated too....)

The time to boot is large because software is huge, scattered all over the disk, and has unnecessary dependencies.

It may be convenient to believe that everything fits in L1 cache, but doing so often results in slow programs. The same principle applies here. Some operations cost more than others. Software which uses slow operations will run slower than software that doesn't.

To put it another way, big O is the start, not the end.

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

#46

Post by comatose_kid »

MaysonL wrote: post #44
pchristensen wrote: post #38

The complete system defrags in about 3 seconds. This part impressed me most.

Although I do wonder what the point of defragging an SSD is...

There is none. Even if there were some advantage with sequential blocks, SSDs should employ wear leveling, thereby spreading your bits across random blocks anyways.

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

#47

Post by comatose_kid »

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…

It would be neat to automate this by using the SSD as a file level cache.
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