SSDs
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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.
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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:
It seems that modern applications do not spend enough time waiting for disk access for this advantage to manifest itself.
If your data and app is in the cloud, no... an SSD will not speed up the cloud.... try silver iodine.... ;P Now if you are one of the many people who are constantly harassed for still making A) native apps B) coding efficiently C) parallel programming D) asynchronous streaming from disk or onto disk.... Hell yeah SSD are faster....
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
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- 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[^]
Excellent link. Thanks.:thumbsup:
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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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 just added an SSD to my work machine about a month ago, and can report the difference is phenomenal. I am amazed they'd say that there are no measurable differences. I don't need to run any tests to tell you there was a major impact on system performance. Is it going to help your build time, or waiting on IIS? No. But booting, application launching and switching, updating SVN, etc. are seriously noticeable. VS 2010 went from behaving like a pig to virtually no lag at all. They aren't cheap, but if you can get your company to pay for it, it'll pay for itself in productivity very quickly.
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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.'
Yes, bought a new machine about a year ago, Win 7 and all that. Thought I'd use a SSD for C: (Kingston). Made no difference (subjectively, with a new machine who can tell?) Since had many strange problems (unfixable corruption of .pst file on C:, stuff like that) which may or may not be related. About to Ghost it all to a SATA HDD, so I will see if there is any difference after that.
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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 a Patriot Torqx 128Gb boot drive in a Intel 980x box. 6GB DDR3, Nvidia GTX 470. Boot time on Win 7 is about 25 seconds, Compile times for C++ on Visual Studio 2008 is half the time using the SSD drive vs a separate 7200 rpm 1GB WD drive. Other programs start up and shut down much faster also. How about MS Office, double click the icon and it is initialized and downloading (via cable) within 1.2 seconds. This is with four .pst files of about 600MB each. The SSD is the biggest factor in speeding up this system. I did a test install on the 1GB drive, and boot times were about 90 seconds. Not a gamer, so I cannot comment on the effects there. Then again, recent games generally need more space than available on a reasonably priced SSD drive.