SSD's, what's the latest word?
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
John C wrote:
I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass
***** WARNING ***** If at work, do not scroll down past the first message. Not terribly rude, but NSFW. (Depending on your work of course) The world is full of ass[^].
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.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus! When you're wrestling a gorilla, you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is.
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
John C wrote:
I see there are several and all different prices.
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
John C wrote:
visual studio 2010
John C wrote:
VMWARE
Those are the two problems you have. The limitation is CPU and Video Card (VS2010 is WPF based) not so much the disk. Apart from using a VM as a build machine, I will not use it for development and debugging. I find it slow on my quad core Intel xeon and VM is obviously going to be more slow.
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John C wrote:
I see there are several and all different prices.
I was just upgraded to a revodrive at work, and yeah it makes a heck of a difference.
Curvature of the Mind now with 3D
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
If you are IO bound they will make a big difference. If you aren't a lot of PITA operations like installs and large file copies will be much faster. Upgrading my work system to a revo drive makes database restores and copies much faster as well as compiling .net code. It's also a 6 core Xeon so it has the memory and CPU power to go with the faster disk access. I don't know anything about WPF and silverlight, but I can help with the database stuff. Also, figure out which is the biggest issue, the big databases or the WPF / silverlight part. If you are running SQL server on the same system as your app and you have a large working set, the first thing you need to do is set the memory cap on SQL server. It will take all of your system memory and force everything else to page like crazy. The biggest limit on SQL server performance is how much of the working set of your queries fit in memory. If the bulk of the data it has to keep live to run your app fits entirely in memory, then it is pretty good at batching reads and writes out to disk. Once log flushes start competing with reads and it starts flushing table pages so it can clear up more space to load data things go down hill pretty fast. Also having multiple large active databases on the same server will do the same. Optimizing your SQL for performance in that environment is a dark art of hand tuning indexes, table design, minimizing tempdb usage for queries, etc.
Curvature of the Mind now with 3D
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John C wrote:
visual studio 2010
John C wrote:
VMWARE
Those are the two problems you have. The limitation is CPU and Video Card (VS2010 is WPF based) not so much the disk. Apart from using a VM as a build machine, I will not use it for development and debugging. I find it slow on my quad core Intel xeon and VM is obviously going to be more slow.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
my quad core Intel xeon
:cool: Drool! /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
Pretty much everything you do is I/O bound. SSDs will make VS and everything around it much faster. Compiling, especially C++, becomes very fast, especially debug builds where the amount of data being churned through compiler and linker is almost astronomical. For C# I suspect the gain is not as big, but I imagine a multicore system will become faster, as the compiler threads won't have to sit idle and wait for I/O operations to finish. For the next budget, I am going to claim a SATA 3Gbps drive as a system disk, and a SATA 6Gps drive as build disk. The build server will also get an overhaul, as I think the build and test times will be decimated (lots of automated tests where database and file I/O is used). No more coffee/tea breaks! ;)
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
They are good but not always amazingly good and far from blowing you away, unless you go for the latest possible models which are very, very expensive. Nevertheless, in my opinion they are worth it. Still sad that we are sending people in space but can't cure simple things like flu or come up with something better than SSD (still concerned with the performance degradation in time) Launching apps is faster so overall there's an improvement. If you want this improvement you have to pay for SSD 'cause with the HDD technology the only way to go towards better performance is maybe a 10000 rpm Velociraptor and I don't want more rpm and heat and electricity consumption which is paying more as well. First step was upgrading my Asus R1F tablet. This has a 1.66 GHz Core2 Duo and was always a bit on the slow side. Booting time was very annoying and waking up from sleep the same, so I started to use it less and less. I felt bad for it so, I switched the HDD to a 120GB (109 GB) Ocz-Agility2 SSD. This one really amazed me. This little computer became better than I ever hoped it will be. So, it is way faster to operate, cooler as the SSD warms up a bit but not as the HDD, no vibrations. Energy consumption which I can tell from how much the battery life changed, not a big improvement: maybe 5%. If you want battery life improvement run Windows 7 (if you're not already). As a little tweak I upgraded the memory to 3 GB and I am running it without swap. Works fine no problem. So, as I was impressed, next was my desktop computer which got the same treatment: the 120 GB SSD from OCZ. Long story short, it is much better that the previous setup, but the improvement not as extraordinary as in the laptop's case. Nonetheless still worth it. I am running it with a swap on a secondary hard disk so I limit the IO on the SSD. This was rather long but you wanted experience so I thought it will be better than giving you a link or mumble a two words sentence (not that is anything wrong with that and not that they are not funny). Cheers.
giuchici
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Pretty much everything you do is I/O bound. SSDs will make VS and everything around it much faster. Compiling, especially C++, becomes very fast, especially debug builds where the amount of data being churned through compiler and linker is almost astronomical. For C# I suspect the gain is not as big, but I imagine a multicore system will become faster, as the compiler threads won't have to sit idle and wait for I/O operations to finish. For the next budget, I am going to claim a SATA 3Gbps drive as a system disk, and a SATA 6Gps drive as build disk. The build server will also get an overhaul, as I think the build and test times will be decimated (lots of automated tests where database and file I/O is used). No more coffee/tea breaks! ;)
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
The only thing you'll speed up by getting a 6Gb SATA-3 drive versus a 3GB SATA-2 drive is data I/O from the motherboard to the drive's built-in cache RAM. The platters are still rotating at the same speed, and the seek time is still the same. Unbuffered, uncached data transfer will be the same speed regardless of interface - good 7200 RPM drives will usually max out around 120 Mb/sec. That's just a fraction of the available speed of the bus, and wouldn't even max out 1.5 Gb SATA-1. You can get similar speed via Gigabit Ethernet to a good SAN :) Now, if you were to invest in a 10K or 15K RPM SAS or Ultra320 SCSI drive, then you'd see a difference! If you need fast scratch space, set up a couple of drives in RAID-0, but if anything becomes long-lived there, you'd better have a really good backup system.
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They are good but not always amazingly good and far from blowing you away, unless you go for the latest possible models which are very, very expensive. Nevertheless, in my opinion they are worth it. Still sad that we are sending people in space but can't cure simple things like flu or come up with something better than SSD (still concerned with the performance degradation in time) Launching apps is faster so overall there's an improvement. If you want this improvement you have to pay for SSD 'cause with the HDD technology the only way to go towards better performance is maybe a 10000 rpm Velociraptor and I don't want more rpm and heat and electricity consumption which is paying more as well. First step was upgrading my Asus R1F tablet. This has a 1.66 GHz Core2 Duo and was always a bit on the slow side. Booting time was very annoying and waking up from sleep the same, so I started to use it less and less. I felt bad for it so, I switched the HDD to a 120GB (109 GB) Ocz-Agility2 SSD. This one really amazed me. This little computer became better than I ever hoped it will be. So, it is way faster to operate, cooler as the SSD warms up a bit but not as the HDD, no vibrations. Energy consumption which I can tell from how much the battery life changed, not a big improvement: maybe 5%. If you want battery life improvement run Windows 7 (if you're not already). As a little tweak I upgraded the memory to 3 GB and I am running it without swap. Works fine no problem. So, as I was impressed, next was my desktop computer which got the same treatment: the 120 GB SSD from OCZ. Long story short, it is much better that the previous setup, but the improvement not as extraordinary as in the laptop's case. Nonetheless still worth it. I am running it with a swap on a secondary hard disk so I limit the IO on the SSD. This was rather long but you wanted experience so I thought it will be better than giving you a link or mumble a two words sentence (not that is anything wrong with that and not that they are not funny). Cheers.
giuchici
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
Can't help with how fast they do or don't make apps run, but raw performance... Some are fast, others no so much. Don't believe the mfg's specs -- they pretty much all make the same speed claims despite their wildly disparate performance. Some are only actually fast on only certain parts of the drive (like the first few GB.. probably to get a better performance number from the tests). Don't believe the read/write specs from the reviewer articles either -- for some reason they all seem to get test results that match the claims of the mfg's (I wonder why) yet don't match real world performance. That said, I've found only a few that are actually slower than a spinning media, and they should all beat spinning on random access (we're not testing that so much). So, unless you want to write your own disk performance test, don't waste too much time perusing reviews, just buy a brand you trust and hope you actually get a good one. If you do decide to write your own disk test, make sure you write to the entire surface of the media and do so multiple times. Sometimes the real performance doesn't show up until you do that. So far, STEC's offering that we tested was the fastet I've seen.. nobody has yet come close. Very pricy through. Their performance claims are for "dirty" drives (a lot of mfgs appear to be specing "clean" drives from what I can tell).
patbob
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Can't help with how fast they do or don't make apps run, but raw performance... Some are fast, others no so much. Don't believe the mfg's specs -- they pretty much all make the same speed claims despite their wildly disparate performance. Some are only actually fast on only certain parts of the drive (like the first few GB.. probably to get a better performance number from the tests). Don't believe the read/write specs from the reviewer articles either -- for some reason they all seem to get test results that match the claims of the mfg's (I wonder why) yet don't match real world performance. That said, I've found only a few that are actually slower than a spinning media, and they should all beat spinning on random access (we're not testing that so much). So, unless you want to write your own disk performance test, don't waste too much time perusing reviews, just buy a brand you trust and hope you actually get a good one. If you do decide to write your own disk test, make sure you write to the entire surface of the media and do so multiple times. Sometimes the real performance doesn't show up until you do that. So far, STEC's offering that we tested was the fastet I've seen.. nobody has yet come close. Very pricy through. Their performance claims are for "dirty" drives (a lot of mfgs appear to be specing "clean" drives from what I can tell).
patbob
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
God !!! just imagined what this MacBook Air thingie would be like without one ;-) guess running the VS Team thingie in 'a VirtualBox' is really slowing the developer doing the VMware thingie in a box.... Pricey... and lovely clean spec'ing hint. vNext and eight Kevin :rolleyes:
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The only thing you'll speed up by getting a 6Gb SATA-3 drive versus a 3GB SATA-2 drive is data I/O from the motherboard to the drive's built-in cache RAM. The platters are still rotating at the same speed, and the seek time is still the same. Unbuffered, uncached data transfer will be the same speed regardless of interface - good 7200 RPM drives will usually max out around 120 Mb/sec. That's just a fraction of the available speed of the bus, and wouldn't even max out 1.5 Gb SATA-1. You can get similar speed via Gigabit Ethernet to a good SAN :) Now, if you were to invest in a 10K or 15K RPM SAS or Ultra320 SCSI drive, then you'd see a difference! If you need fast scratch space, set up a couple of drives in RAID-0, but if anything becomes long-lived there, you'd better have a really good backup system.
I was of course referring to SSD drives, not platter drives.
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
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It's been almost a year since we had a discussion on Solid State Drives here. This (NSF LANGUAGE) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html[^] guy has convinced me to take a look with his vehemence and use of profanity. I see there are several and all different prices. Anyone care to share their experience at what to look for? (I'd particularly like to know if it makes visual studio 2010 run any faster in a VMWARE workstation virtual machine as I just started wpf / silverlight and big-ass db development and suddenly what worked great making winforms and asp.net apps is now painfully slow.)
There is no failure only feedback
SSD's have a very high failure rate. IF you can live with that, then by all means.
Where there's smoke, there's a Blue Screen of death.
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God !!! just imagined what this MacBook Air thingie would be like without one ;-) guess running the VS Team thingie in 'a VirtualBox' is really slowing the developer doing the VMware thingie in a box.... Pricey... and lovely clean spec'ing hint. vNext and eight Kevin :rolleyes:
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They are good but not always amazingly good and far from blowing you away, unless you go for the latest possible models which are very, very expensive. Nevertheless, in my opinion they are worth it. Still sad that we are sending people in space but can't cure simple things like flu or come up with something better than SSD (still concerned with the performance degradation in time) Launching apps is faster so overall there's an improvement. If you want this improvement you have to pay for SSD 'cause with the HDD technology the only way to go towards better performance is maybe a 10000 rpm Velociraptor and I don't want more rpm and heat and electricity consumption which is paying more as well. First step was upgrading my Asus R1F tablet. This has a 1.66 GHz Core2 Duo and was always a bit on the slow side. Booting time was very annoying and waking up from sleep the same, so I started to use it less and less. I felt bad for it so, I switched the HDD to a 120GB (109 GB) Ocz-Agility2 SSD. This one really amazed me. This little computer became better than I ever hoped it will be. So, it is way faster to operate, cooler as the SSD warms up a bit but not as the HDD, no vibrations. Energy consumption which I can tell from how much the battery life changed, not a big improvement: maybe 5%. If you want battery life improvement run Windows 7 (if you're not already). As a little tweak I upgraded the memory to 3 GB and I am running it without swap. Works fine no problem. So, as I was impressed, next was my desktop computer which got the same treatment: the 120 GB SSD from OCZ. Long story short, it is much better that the previous setup, but the improvement not as extraordinary as in the laptop's case. Nonetheless still worth it. I am running it with a swap on a secondary hard disk so I limit the IO on the SSD. This was rather long but you wanted experience so I thought it will be better than giving you a link or mumble a two words sentence (not that is anything wrong with that and not that they are not funny). Cheers.
giuchici
I bought OCZ Agilent2 180 version. Loved the difference to 5400RPM. Crashed after less than two months. Lost important data that was not in SVN/Dropbox/Mesh. Had to reinstall full system and tools, as the company policy requires full disk encryption. Still going to try with a new one.