SSDs
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
Henry Minute wrote:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks
What about batteries life-times when used on a laptop ? should that be part of the benchmarks ? M.
Watched code never compiles.
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
Henry Minute wrote:
in a magazine!
Well how very 20th century of you. :)
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair. nils illegitimus carborundum me, me, me
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
I was planning to get an SSD in the hope to speed up compilation times. But I found that it really does not help in improving compilation time based on several inline forums. May be someone here can talk to their experience. But I do agree with maximillen giving more battery life is a big advantage for laptops.
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
I'm hoping they do over some nice boost. When I did my last build, all said and done I could only afford a cheap HDD on the budget, so I decided I'd come back for a SSD in a few months. It's really holding back my Windows Experience Index (for whatever it's worth) everything rates between 7.3 and 7.5, HDD is 5.9 :laugh:
He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
I haven't had the chance to play with them on a desktop system yet. For a laptop, they are the great escape out of the performance - weight - uptime triangle, with mechanical robustness thrown in. Speed denepnd entirely on the benchmarks taken. Especially a seek-bound benchmark should see large improvements. (e.g. running two such benchmarks in parallel...) For R/W speed, it appears that you need to shell out serious money to get performance benefits.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
I was planning to get an SSD in the hope to speed up compilation times. But I found that it really does not help in improving compilation time based on several inline forums. May be someone here can talk to their experience. But I do agree with maximillen giving more battery life is a big advantage for laptops.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
But I do agree with maximillen giving more battery life is a big advantage for laptops.
An alternative view: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html[^]
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
SSDs can actually bring a *huge* increase in performance, but it depends on the situation and most software isn't really optimized to take advantage of them. I've got junction points all over my SSD and HDD to map folders that work best on HDD to that and folders that work best on SSD to that, and it's a mess. I have a game called City Life which used to take ages (like 3 or 4 minutes or something) to load on HDD. I moved the whole game to SSD and it took even longer (like 10 minutes). Using sysinternals filemon I found out that this was because it was writing several gigabytes of temporary files to it's own directory each time the game was played. So I kept the game on HDD but junctioned just the subfolders containing graphics etc to the SSD and now the game starts in about 20 seconds. Windows seems to start up a lot faster from SSD as well, though since I tested with a fresh installation it's not really a fair test. I doubt build times would be affected much as there's so much writing going on. SSDs are very fast at reads but writes seem slower than on a HDD, in my experience anyway.
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I was planning to get an SSD in the hope to speed up compilation times. But I found that it really does not help in improving compilation time based on several inline forums. May be someone here can talk to their experience. But I do agree with maximillen giving more battery life is a big advantage for laptops.
I'd love to try that, but spending €400 or more for just a test seems ridiculous. However, I can tell you that: VC6 was largely disk bound, building off a RAM disk was the kicker. VC7 and up aren't anymore. Parallel builds are the kicker here, and I'd expect an SSD to help at least with that.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
Henry Minute wrote:
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust.
Most "normal" applications don't read huge chunks of data from disks sequentially. To a large extent, the raw data transfer speed is like the top speed in a car - you very rarely get to use it - a Ferrari and a Fiesta can both do 70mph on a motorway, but if you have a specialised application (motor racing) the Ferrari will win hands down.
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I'd love to try that, but spending €400 or more for just a test seems ridiculous. However, I can tell you that: VC6 was largely disk bound, building off a RAM disk was the kicker. VC7 and up aren't anymore. Parallel builds are the kicker here, and I'd expect an SSD to help at least with that.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server.peterchen wrote:
VC6 was largely disk bound,
Do you know if that was disk bound on reading the source code, writing the object code, or intermediate files like the pre-compiled headers?
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
But I do agree with maximillen giving more battery life is a big advantage for laptops.
An alternative view: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html[^]
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I haven't had the chance to play with them on a desktop system yet. For a laptop, they are the great escape out of the performance - weight - uptime triangle, with mechanical robustness thrown in. Speed denepnd entirely on the benchmarks taken. Especially a seek-bound benchmark should see large improvements. (e.g. running two such benchmarks in parallel...) For R/W speed, it appears that you need to shell out serious money to get performance benefits.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server.peterchen wrote:
I haven't had the chance to play with them on a desktop system yet.
I have on linux. Software loads almost instantly.
peterchen wrote:
Speed denepnd entirely on the benchmarks taken. Especially a seek-bound benchmark should see large improvements. (e.g. running two such benchmarks in parallel...)
That is the key. SSDs can do 100s to 1000 times the IOPs as a hard drive.
John
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Strange how the OCZ SSD is ten times better in every way than any other SSD or HDD.. Must be magic.
harold aptroot wrote:
ten times better in every way
You need to be more precise. Does it: Cost 10% of the others? Read ten times faster? Write ten times faster? Consume 10% of the power? compared to every other SSD on the market?
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Henry Minute wrote:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks
What about batteries life-times when used on a laptop ? should that be part of the benchmarks ? M.
Watched code never compiles.
According to the link in Electron Shepherd's post, a little below yours, that is not necessarily true. Admittedly that article is 2 years old but it may not be true that they are more efficient.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
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harold aptroot wrote:
ten times better in every way
You need to be more precise. Does it: Cost 10% of the others? Read ten times faster? Write ten times faster? Consume 10% of the power? compared to every other SSD on the market?
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Henry Minute wrote:
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust.
Most "normal" applications don't read huge chunks of data from disks sequentially. To a large extent, the raw data transfer speed is like the top speed in a car - you very rarely get to use it - a Ferrari and a Fiesta can both do 70mph on a motorway, but if you have a specialised application (motor racing) the Ferrari will win hands down.
Electron Shepherd wrote:
Most "normal" applications don't read huge chunks of data from disks sequentially.
Agreed. And this is where SSDs shine. SSDs are very fast at 4K reads and 4K writes. Some models can read and write at over 50MB/s with a stream of these random reads and writes. While the same operation on the fastest hard drive would be around 1MB/s because between every random operation the mechanical disk needs to seek. And some of these seeks take 15ms while the access time on a good SSD is less than .1 ms.
John
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
The most obvious benefit I get from my SSD is increased OS/app responsiveness which is really hard to benchmark. Boot and app load times improve nicely, but there's not much to be gained in most apps in terms of actual performance.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
- Windows will boot very fast (I mean very fast, for me it's 17-20 sec after the BIOS screen, so now you can shut down the computer everyday... :) ) - Quite operation - If you are using it on Laptop - Longer battery life - Installation is faster (specially VS and SQL Server) - No need to Defrag, No need for Indexing services, No need to clear page-file on shutdown. - If you want to edit Video/Image fist copy on the SSD and then edit, it will be very faster than HDD. So I will suggest that, get an 60-80GB SSD which is cheaper (~ $150) and then install OS on it and store everything else on regular HDD (you don't want to take the risk of losing your data right - SSDs have limited life span, it's not that short but still I will not store my project files on it). If you want to read more here is a great write up[^]
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peterchen wrote:
VC6 was largely disk bound,
Do you know if that was disk bound on reading the source code, writing the object code, or intermediate files like the pre-compiled headers?
I haven't separated that (only ever compared "entire build tree" on different disks). My gut feel says it was just the total amount - probably dominated by .pch and .ilk.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
I have just read a comparative review of mechanical HDDs (in a magazine! digital man ;P ), in a side bar there is a brief discussion of SSDs. Their conclusion:
Switching to a solid-state drive makes no measurable difference to our benchmarks.
This in spite of their stating that for raw read/write speeds SSDs leave HDDs in the dust. It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself. So I was wondering. Are SSDs 'the great white hope'? Are they actually cost effective in only marginal situations e.g. Data Serving, Image Processing? Anyone got any actual experience?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? - Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. Business Myths of the Geek #4 'What you think matters.'
Yep. These are the things I no longer wait (as much) for now that I have an SSD:
- Outlook starting and loading my 6 GB of email
- The windows forms designer loading
- Tcl writing out and flushing text file writing
- Debug logging
- Virtual machines
- Windows starting
- Excel or Word starting
- Compiling
All in all it was a massive win for me as I had a 5400 old school laptop HDD, and moving up to an Intel SSD was phenominal.