Definitely a good contribution to the thread--I really shouldn't be surprised that the performance difference between high-end 'regular' drives (like the WD VelociRaptor) and many SSDs isn't that big. And when you consider that they cost more than five times on the GB, that really puts things into perspective. Of course, there are other things to consider as well, but I still remain skeptical.
There is a LONG way to go for these.
The article actually indicated a huge difference in performance between the "good" SSDs and the Velociraptor. On the critical random read/write benchmarks the Intel SSD destroys the Velociraptor. On some of the graphs he stated he couldn't even list the normal HDDs because it would screw up the scale of the graph. Even with the problems found in the SSDs it looks like he heavily endorses them over a normal HDD.
I still believe that a SSD is the single most effective performance upgrade you can do to your PC; even while taking this behavior into account. While personally I wouldn’t give up a SSD in any of my machines, I can understand the hesitation in investing a great deal of money in one today.
and at the end of the article he basically states again
Drives will get better and although we're still looking at SSDs in their infancy, as a boot/application drive I still believe it's the single best upgrade you can do to your machine today. I've moved all of my testbeds to SSDs as well as my personal desktop. At least now we have two options to choose from: the X25-M and the Vertex.
The article basically sold me an SSD to use as my boot disk. I'll definitely be looking at picking up the Vertex once they come out in Korea.
krapst78 on
Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father prepare to die!
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
Definitely a good contribution to the thread--I really shouldn't be surprised that the performance difference between high-end 'regular' drives (like the WD VelociRaptor) and many SSDs isn't that big. And when you consider that they cost more than five times on the GB, that really puts things into perspective. Of course, there are other things to consider as well, but I still remain skeptical.
There is a LONG way to go for these.
He didn't get into RAID. SSD's don't really shine unless you have them in RAID0, in which case it becomes a lot more obvious. I've used a couple SSD's, and have two Vertex RAID0 in my gaming rig, it's impressive.
I'm rather sad he didn't show faster SAS drives in there. SAS ports are on many high end boards and those are closer in price to the higher end SSD's.
The intel drive is great, but the price is kinda "ouch" even for an SSD. For that price you can go two 30gb vertrex RAID0, with a cheaper, solid or core, drive for applications.
There is absolutely no reason to stay with a HDD if you have the money for a SSD, and that's the bottomline.
Even the slowest SSDs are lightyears ahead of the fastest HDDs.
Reliability and gremlins. A lot of the assumptions on these devices were from high end entireprise drives (which spank even the intels but the cost is insane), the consumer ones seem quirky.
There is absolutely no reason to stay with a HDD if you have the money for a SSD, and that's the bottomline.
Even the slowest SSDs are lightyears ahead of the fastest HDDs.
Are you including the jpmicron or whatever controller SSDs in that statement? Because I am pretty sure having a .5 to 2s delay for random writes to be pretty worthless.
Also, newegg has the vertex 30gb for around $80 right now.
There is absolutely no reason to stay with a HDD if you have the money for a SSD, and that's the bottomline.
Even the slowest SSDs are lightyears ahead of the fastest HDDs.
Are you including the jpmicron or whatever controller SSDs in that statement? Because I am pretty sure having a .5 to 2s delay for random writes to be pretty worthless.
He's including no form of evidence or fact in his statement. He likes Solid State Drives, so therefore they must always be infallible.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
There is absolutely no reason to stay with a HDD if you have the money for a SSD, and that's the bottomline.
Even the slowest SSDs are lightyears ahead of the fastest HDDs.
Are you including the jpmicron or whatever controller SSDs in that statement? Because I am pretty sure having a .5 to 2s delay for random writes to be pretty worthless.
Obviously not. You have to use a little bit of fuzzy logic whenever I talk about extremes because I often speak in hyperbole.
Yeah, my old Phison MLC drive that came with this Eee was painfully slow, but the drive I replaced it with is quite speedy. At least the industry is fixing its mistakes.
There is absolutely no reason to stay with a HDD if you have the money for a SSD, and that's the bottomline.
Even the slowest SSDs are lightyears ahead of the fastest HDDs.
Are you including the jpmicron or whatever controller SSDs in that statement? Because I am pretty sure having a .5 to 2s delay for random writes to be pretty worthless.
He's including no form of evidence or fact in his statement. He likes Solid State Drives, so therefore they must always be infallible.
Unless, of course, you need more than a certain amount of space on a single partition. Then there's no reason to adopt a SSD at this point.
Definitely a good contribution to the thread--I really shouldn't be surprised that the performance difference between high-end 'regular' drives (like the WD VelociRaptor) and many SSDs isn't that big. And when you consider that they cost more than five times on the GB, that really puts things into perspective. Of course, there are other things to consider as well, but I still remain skeptical.
There is a LONG way to go for these.
The article actually indicated a huge difference in performance between the "good" SSDs and the Velociraptor. On the critical random read/write benchmarks the Intel SSD destroys the Velociraptor. On some of the graphs he stated he couldn't even list the normal HDDs because it would screw up the scale of the graph. Even with the problems found in the SSDs it looks like he heavily endorses them over a normal HDD.
Oh yeah, the guy is totally gung-ho about it, no doubts there. But (intentionally or otherwise), the feeling I got from the article is that ALL solid-state drives will cost you at least five-times as much on the byte, while the hardware boosts may be inconsistent (though there is a consistent advantage--it just varies). Before this, I thought the performance boost to SSD was much bigger than it really was--but I was ill-informed.
Oh yeah, the guy is totally gung-ho about it, no doubts there. But (intentionally or otherwise), the feeling I got from the article is that ALL solid-state drives will cost you at least five-times as much on the byte, while the hardware boosts may be inconsistent (though there is a consistent advantage--it just varies). Before this, I thought the performance boost to SSD was much bigger than it really was--but I was ill-informed.
What, are you dense? are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think he is? He's the goddamned Anand!
He makes it perfectly, brutally, humiliatingly clear that you should not waste time considering other drives than the intel or the vertex. He also says about 5 times that you should use SSD as boot drive rather than for storage.
Now;
A 80 GB Seagate momentus costs 50 dollars.
A 80 GB WD velociraptor costs 150 dollars.
A 60 GB OCZ vertex costs 250 dollars.
I dare say anyone who shells out the extra hundred for the raptor could fork out another hundred for a vertex.
Hell, I'd even buy a 30GB vertex to work off, I can park my games on a secondary boot.
30gb would be enough for Windows and all of my most frequently used applications. I'm seriously considering picking up one of those Vertex drives soon.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
Really, I have to say that SSDs seem much more useful on a laptop than on a desktop. I mean, I prioritize capacity over speed most of the time, and so I don't mind a bit of slowdown if I'm stocking my desktop with 1.5TB spinning-platter hard drives instead of 80GB solid state drives.
But on a laptop, weight, volume, and battery life all come into consideration too, and you really don't need as much storage space on a secondary computer.
Daedalus on
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jackalFuck Yes. That is an orderly anal warehouse.Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
It is kind of funny that he shows how fast defragging is on the 24 SSD raid on that video, since defragging is meaningless for SSDs and just costs a write cycle.
It is kind of funny that he shows how fast defragging is on the 24 SSD raid on that video, since defragging is meaningless for SSDs and just costs a write cycle.
Boys and their toys...
Daedalus, why limit yourself to one disk on a desktop? I used to have 6 between my 80 gig boot drive, throwaway 120 gig utorrent drive and 4 1TB storage drives.
It's on a laptop I'd value bigger storage per disk more, especially as I don't expect a lot of speed from portable processors. Then again shock resistance does come in handy, so perhaps the low performance/cheaper SSDs...
Jeez guys I sound like a fanboy and there's no way I'll sneak a SSD purchase past the missus
I have several disks on my desktop. But I've got a limited number of SATA ports, a limited number of hard drive bays in my case, and most importantly a limited about of money. So I'll use these limited resources to maximize capacity over speed because, honestly, most of the time my desktop is being used as a file server to the rest of the house rather than as a performance gaming machine.
now, my Eee 901 only has the physical space for either a specialized SSD or a 1.8" iPod hard drive, and SSDs have essentially already won for speed, capacity, weight, durability, etc. etc. over 1.8" hard drives. Hell, they're pretty much tied on price per gigabyte. I'm confident that SSDs will replace hard drives entirely in the laptop space within the next four or so years.
Oh yeah, the guy is totally gung-ho about it, no doubts there. But (intentionally or otherwise), the feeling I got from the article is that ALL solid-state drives will cost you at least five-times as much on the byte, while the hardware boosts may be inconsistent (though there is a consistent advantage--it just varies). Before this, I thought the performance boost to SSD was much bigger than it really was--but I was ill-informed.
What, are you dense? are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think he is? He's the goddamned Anand!
He makes it perfectly, brutally, humiliatingly clear that you should not waste time considering other drives than the intel or the vertex. He also says about 5 times that you should use SSD as boot drive rather than for storage.
Now;
A 80 GB Seagate momentus costs 50 dollars.
A 80 GB WD velociraptor costs 150 dollars.
A 60 GB OCZ vertex costs 250 dollars.
I dare say anyone who shells out the extra hundred for the raptor could fork out another hundred for a vertex.
Hell, I'd even buy a 30GB vertex to work off, I can park my games on a secondary boot.
Christ, man, I was just speaking in quick observations. Calm down, it's just hard drives. For me, personally, purchasing an HDD that has only 80 GB or 60 GB capacity is kind of out of the question. That doesn't mean you have to freak out about it.
I'm in a similar position to Daedalus--I have considerations as to capacity and cost, as well as a limited number of hard drive bays in my desktop. Though I'm not running as a server for the other computers in my apartment--I don't have that much stuff that could be considered 'storage', so much as things that rely on performance.
Just wondering, would you ever consider spending $120 on a new processor or something like that? Because using an SSD as your boot drive is a huge upgrade in performance for stuff like normal Windows usage. As in, cutting your boot times in half, opening Photoshop in two seconds, that kind of thing.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
Me, personally? Maybe, depending on the situation. But I couldn't fit all my programs onto a partition 80 GB big, after Vista. So it might (emphasis on might) only be an upgrade to a third of the applications I run, rather than all of them. Of course, that would include my OS, so I'd have to consider that--I'm lucky though, Vista actually boots up pretty quick (I've stripped away a lot of stuff). Thought it could be faster...
OremLK, if you weren't asking me, I apologize...I don't want anyone freaking out again on my account .
I think it's safe to say that it would be a pretty big upgrade to the speed of all the applications on the drive, although if you use that many apps regularly, I can understand your hesitation. I'm sure the cost/size ratio will improve quickly, in any case.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
I think it's safe to say that it would be a pretty big upgrade to the speed of all the applications on the drive, although if you use that many apps regularly, I can understand your hesitation. I'm sure the cost/size ratio will improve quickly, in any case.
I have no doubt that's the case--but the numbers are against me presently. My dilemma is that I own what was (and I'd like to think still is) a high-performance gaming machine. Dual SLI, liquid cooling, the works. And like my PS3, my Xbox 360, and my Dreamcast before it, it has sort of become a test bed for all the games my neighbors want to play (none of them have computers from more recently than 2005/6). I have a large, perhaps ridiculously so, amount of high-end games installed on it, full-size, not all of which I play regularly. Subtracting my video and image files, that comes out to about...280GB. Including my installation of Vista Home Premium.
I'd like nothing more than if all 280GB of those programs could run from a fast-access hard drive, but for obvious reasons, that's not really economically feasible (imagine purchasing 5 OCZ drives). I'm sure that'll change, but if I want to keep that many games (I don't think I've purchased more than one PC game this year, it's a nice deal in that regard), I think I'll have to stick with my current 1TB WD Caviar Black. Obviously, it's no SSD, but it's still a decent HD in its own regard.
Yeah, I mean I obviously wouldn't want to install all my games on an SSD, there are just too many of them and they're too huge... it would probably improve load times, but I don't really care about those that much anyway. I more want an SSD for everything from Firefox to Photoshop--all my non-gaming applications, and the OS, basically. From what I hear it simply makes your operating system feel so much more responsive--you click on something and it's just there, no waiting and watching an hourglass cursor.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
Yeah, I mean I obviously wouldn't want to install all my games on an SSD, there are just too many of them and they're too huge... it would probably improve load times, but I don't really care about those that much anyway. I more want an SSD for everything from Firefox to Photoshop--all my non-gaming applications, and the OS, basically. From what I hear it simply makes your operating system feel so much more responsive--you click on something and it's just there, no waiting and watching an hourglass cursor.
Well, there is a certain amount of waiting...but given the investment involved, I'd really need it to be all applications, not limited to Vista, to warrant it.
Though, curiously, Photoshop CS4 loads pretty quickly on my desktop. However, I might just be comparing it to my past experiences, with a lot slower loadup.
Synthesis on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
If I was going to buy a hard drive, I would still rather get a terabyte or so for $90 then spend nearly three times as much for 60GB of SSD. Sure, there are performance gains, but prices are only going to go down. This time next year I'd get much more bang for my buck, so as with Blu-Ray I'm not jumping at the chance to be an early adopter. Especially since the SSD is a fairly recent development in consumer PCs and we aren't totally informed as to the potential issues.
Also, I'm content with my current load times. Could they be faster? Of course. But since I'm used to these, now anything less will seem unacceptably slow. So I'd rather not spend $Texas on a blazing fast home machine and then have all other computers seem unbearable.
SSD sure sounds cool but it's out of the question for me until it gets much cheaper and offers much more space. Current HDD space growth is well beyond what 99% of people need beyond hosting file servers or massive media collections, so there's no rush to catch up to 1TB hard drives or anything, but less than 100gb is really poor especially for an expensive drive. File size is only going to keep increasing to match HDD growth so hopefully SSD will maintain pace as the price goes down.
I think people forget there's no reason to rush. If SSD development mirrors mechanical hard drive development at all, it's just a matter of time for drives to become faster, more reliable, much larger and above all much cheaper. It might take a while, since I can't imagine mechanical hard drives being rendered wholly obsolete any time soon, but it'll happen.
This is true. It's still in the process of really emerging into the mainstream, but I think we'll see a lot of refinement and drops in prices over the next year or two.
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
Yeah, I mean I obviously wouldn't want to install all my games on an SSD, there are just too many of them and they're too huge... it would probably improve load times, but I don't really care about those that much anyway. I more want an SSD for everything from Firefox to Photoshop--all my non-gaming applications, and the OS, basically. From what I hear it simply makes your operating system feel so much more responsive--you click on something and it's just there, no waiting and watching an hourglass cursor.
Well, there is a certain amount of waiting...but given the investment involved, I'd really need it to be all applications, not limited to Vista, to warrant it.
Though, curiously, Photoshop CS4 loads pretty quickly on my desktop. However, I might just be comparing it to my past experiences, with a lot slower loadup.
I remember PS to be realy really heavy on the swap space ever since 4.1, if that is still the case I imagine an SSD disk to swap off would greatly improve it's speed.
(oh and Synth, don't worry about the batman spiel, was feeling a bit rowdy on account of friday! yeah!)
Overall I think this articles was the point where my boot drive started feeling more tied to the processor/ram setup than to my raid/storage. One optimized for speed, the other for size and security.
Yeah, I mean I obviously wouldn't want to install all my games on an SSD, there are just too many of them and they're too huge... it would probably improve load times, but I don't really care about those that much anyway. I more want an SSD for everything from Firefox to Photoshop--all my non-gaming applications, and the OS, basically. From what I hear it simply makes your operating system feel so much more responsive--you click on something and it's just there, no waiting and watching an hourglass cursor.
Well, there is a certain amount of waiting...but given the investment involved, I'd really need it to be all applications, not limited to Vista, to warrant it.
Though, curiously, Photoshop CS4 loads pretty quickly on my desktop. However, I might just be comparing it to my past experiences, with a lot slower loadup.
I remember PS to be realy really heavy on the swap space ever since 4.1, if that is still the case I imagine an SSD disk to swap off would greatly improve it's speed.
(oh and Synth, don't worry about the batman spiel, was feeling a bit rowdy on account of friday! yeah!)
Overall I think this articles was the point where my boot drive started feeling more tied to the processor/ram setup than to my raid/storage. One optimized for speed, the other for size and security.
Yeah, I mean I obviously wouldn't want to install all my games on an SSD, there are just too many of them and they're too huge... it would probably improve load times, but I don't really care about those that much anyway. I more want an SSD for everything from Firefox to Photoshop--all my non-gaming applications, and the OS, basically. From what I hear it simply makes your operating system feel so much more responsive--you click on something and it's just there, no waiting and watching an hourglass cursor.
Well, there is a certain amount of waiting...but given the investment involved, I'd really need it to be all applications, not limited to Vista, to warrant it.
Though, curiously, Photoshop CS4 loads pretty quickly on my desktop. However, I might just be comparing it to my past experiences, with a lot slower loadup.
I remember PS to be realy really heavy on the swap space ever since 4.1, if that is still the case I imagine an SSD disk to swap off would greatly improve it's speed.
(oh and Synth, don't worry about the batman spiel, was feeling a bit rowdy on account of friday! yeah!)
Overall I think this articles was the point where my boot drive started feeling more tied to the processor/ram setup than to my raid/storage. One optimized for speed, the other for size and security.
Yeah, but there is a dirty secret about SSD's as boot drives... :winky:
In order to get the most of your SSD, and this goes for any of them you want RAID0. However onboard raid (which is really software RAID) can get chocked by this, you need a good hardware RAID card. But these take a while to initialize on start-up, which kinda kills the "instant on" factor. Though once you're in things fly!
Yeah, I mean I obviously wouldn't want to install all my games on an SSD, there are just too many of them and they're too huge... it would probably improve load times, but I don't really care about those that much anyway. I more want an SSD for everything from Firefox to Photoshop--all my non-gaming applications, and the OS, basically. From what I hear it simply makes your operating system feel so much more responsive--you click on something and it's just there, no waiting and watching an hourglass cursor.
Well, there is a certain amount of waiting...but given the investment involved, I'd really need it to be all applications, not limited to Vista, to warrant it.
Though, curiously, Photoshop CS4 loads pretty quickly on my desktop. However, I might just be comparing it to my past experiences, with a lot slower loadup.
I remember PS to be realy really heavy on the swap space ever since 4.1, if that is still the case I imagine an SSD disk to swap off would greatly improve it's speed.
(oh and Synth, don't worry about the batman spiel, was feeling a bit rowdy on account of friday! yeah!)
Overall I think this articles was the point where my boot drive started feeling more tied to the processor/ram setup than to my raid/storage. One optimized for speed, the other for size and security.
Yeah, but there is a dirty secret about SSD's as boot drives... :winky:
In order to get the most of your SSD, and this goes for any of them you want RAID0. However onboard raid (which is really software RAID) can get chocked by this, you need a good hardware RAID card. But these take a while to initialize on start-up, which kinda kills the "instant on" factor. Though once you're in things fly!
Wow. I've never thought about RAID for more than 5 seconds at a time.....and that's more or less "RAID? Yeah, maybe tomorrow."
Then again, I don't have identical SATA hard drives (but I've heard that's no longer necessary?). I'm too used to simply putting a HDD in the tray, pushing it in, and turning on my computer to identify it. I assume that won't change for solid state drives. Laziness at it's worse, I imagine...
I haven't been able to find the dual 30gb Vertex cheaper than a single 60 yet. One problem is that the mail-in rebate that Newegg offers is only valid at one per household so it pushes the cost of two 30gb even higher. Another problem for me is that I don't have a hardware RAID controller card so that would add another $10 to $20 dollars making the dual 30gb option around $250 while going with a single 60gb Vertex only costs me $170 or $165 for the Super Talent.
I thought the controller chip on the SSDs already facilitated parallel read/writes (generally up to 10 channels) so I'm wondering how much benefit would be garnered from placing the disks in a RAID 0 array. I guess theoretically it would double the amount of IO channels that could be used concurrently. I'm wondering if that speed would actually be noticeable in real world tests such as boot up and loading times considering that we're already in the fractions of a milliseconds for random reads and around 2ms for random writes. I'm pretty close to pulling the trigger on the 60gb but if there is a substantial performance improvement to justify the $90 I might just hold off and get two 30gb and a RAID controller card.
krapst78 on
Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father prepare to die!
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
Makes me want to run four good ones in a RAID array to see how effective it is with a nicely overclocked CPU on a good motherboard. Maybe next upgrade. It'd make a good showcase machine, and give some customers a reason to buy $2000 rigs, now that I think about it...
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The article actually indicated a huge difference in performance between the "good" SSDs and the Velociraptor. On the critical random read/write benchmarks the Intel SSD destroys the Velociraptor. On some of the graphs he stated he couldn't even list the normal HDDs because it would screw up the scale of the graph. Even with the problems found in the SSDs it looks like he heavily endorses them over a normal HDD.
and at the end of the article he basically states again
The article basically sold me an SSD to use as my boot disk. I'll definitely be looking at picking up the Vertex once they come out in Korea.
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
Even the slowest SSDs are lightyears ahead of the fastest HDDs.
He didn't get into RAID. SSD's don't really shine unless you have them in RAID0, in which case it becomes a lot more obvious. I've used a couple SSD's, and have two Vertex RAID0 in my gaming rig, it's impressive.
I'm rather sad he didn't show faster SAS drives in there. SAS ports are on many high end boards and those are closer in price to the higher end SSD's.
The intel drive is great, but the price is kinda "ouch" even for an SSD. For that price you can go two 30gb vertrex RAID0, with a cheaper, solid or core, drive for applications.
Reliability and gremlins. A lot of the assumptions on these devices were from high end entireprise drives (which spank even the intels but the cost is insane), the consumer ones seem quirky.
Are you including the jpmicron or whatever controller SSDs in that statement? Because I am pretty sure having a .5 to 2s delay for random writes to be pretty worthless.
Also, newegg has the vertex 30gb for around $80 right now.
He's including no form of evidence or fact in his statement. He likes Solid State Drives, so therefore they must always be infallible.
Well, I would, but not for performance.
Obviously not. You have to use a little bit of fuzzy logic whenever I talk about extremes because I often speak in hyperbole.
Unless, of course, you need more than a certain amount of space on a single partition. Then there's no reason to adopt a SSD at this point.
Oh yeah, the guy is totally gung-ho about it, no doubts there. But (intentionally or otherwise), the feeling I got from the article is that ALL solid-state drives will cost you at least five-times as much on the byte, while the hardware boosts may be inconsistent (though there is a consistent advantage--it just varies). Before this, I thought the performance boost to SSD was much bigger than it really was--but I was ill-informed.
What, are you dense? are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think he is? He's the goddamned Anand!
He makes it perfectly, brutally, humiliatingly clear that you should not waste time considering other drives than the intel or the vertex. He also says about 5 times that you should use SSD as boot drive rather than for storage.
Now;
A 80 GB Seagate momentus costs 50 dollars.
A 80 GB WD velociraptor costs 150 dollars.
A 60 GB OCZ vertex costs 250 dollars.
I dare say anyone who shells out the extra hundred for the raptor could fork out another hundred for a vertex.
Hell, I'd even buy a 30GB vertex to work off, I can park my games on a secondary boot.
But on a laptop, weight, volume, and battery life all come into consideration too, and you really don't need as much storage space on a secondary computer.
Daedalus, why limit yourself to one disk on a desktop? I used to have 6 between my 80 gig boot drive, throwaway 120 gig utorrent drive and 4 1TB storage drives.
It's on a laptop I'd value bigger storage per disk more, especially as I don't expect a lot of speed from portable processors. Then again shock resistance does come in handy, so perhaps the low performance/cheaper SSDs...
Jeez guys I sound like a fanboy and there's no way I'll sneak a SSD purchase past the missus
now, my Eee 901 only has the physical space for either a specialized SSD or a 1.8" iPod hard drive, and SSDs have essentially already won for speed, capacity, weight, durability, etc. etc. over 1.8" hard drives. Hell, they're pretty much tied on price per gigabyte. I'm confident that SSDs will replace hard drives entirely in the laptop space within the next four or so years.
But yeah, good point about the netbooks and SATA ports.
Christ, man, I was just speaking in quick observations. Calm down, it's just hard drives. For me, personally, purchasing an HDD that has only 80 GB or 60 GB capacity is kind of out of the question. That doesn't mean you have to freak out about it.
I'm in a similar position to Daedalus--I have considerations as to capacity and cost, as well as a limited number of hard drive bays in my desktop. Though I'm not running as a server for the other computers in my apartment--I don't have that much stuff that could be considered 'storage', so much as things that rely on performance.
OremLK, if you weren't asking me, I apologize...I don't want anyone freaking out again on my account
I have no doubt that's the case--but the numbers are against me presently. My dilemma is that I own what was (and I'd like to think still is) a high-performance gaming machine. Dual SLI, liquid cooling, the works. And like my PS3, my Xbox 360, and my Dreamcast before it, it has sort of become a test bed for all the games my neighbors want to play (none of them have computers from more recently than 2005/6). I have a large, perhaps ridiculously so, amount of high-end games installed on it, full-size, not all of which I play regularly. Subtracting my video and image files, that comes out to about...280GB. Including my installation of Vista Home Premium.
I'd like nothing more than if all 280GB of those programs could run from a fast-access hard drive, but for obvious reasons, that's not really economically feasible (imagine purchasing 5 OCZ drives). I'm sure that'll change, but if I want to keep that many games (I don't think I've purchased more than one PC game this year, it's a nice deal in that regard), I think I'll have to stick with my current 1TB WD Caviar Black. Obviously, it's no SSD, but it's still a decent HD in its own regard.
I'm just springing for an SSD to get my WoW fixes quicker. >_>
Well, there is a certain amount of waiting...but given the investment involved, I'd really need it to be all applications, not limited to Vista, to warrant it.
Though, curiously, Photoshop CS4 loads pretty quickly on my desktop. However, I might just be comparing it to my past experiences, with a lot slower loadup.
Also, I'm content with my current load times. Could they be faster? Of course. But since I'm used to these, now anything less will seem unacceptably slow. So I'd rather not spend $Texas on a blazing fast home machine and then have all other computers seem unbearable.
I remember PS to be realy really heavy on the swap space ever since 4.1, if that is still the case I imagine an SSD disk to swap off would greatly improve it's speed.
(oh and Synth, don't worry about the batman spiel, was feeling a bit rowdy on account of friday! yeah!)
Overall I think this articles was the point where my boot drive started feeling more tied to the processor/ram setup than to my raid/storage. One optimized for speed, the other for size and security.
Right....Batman...worried....o_O
Yeah, but there is a dirty secret about SSD's as boot drives... :winky:
In order to get the most of your SSD, and this goes for any of them you want RAID0. However onboard raid (which is really software RAID) can get chocked by this, you need a good hardware RAID card. But these take a while to initialize on start-up, which kinda kills the "instant on" factor. Though once you're in things fly!
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535
New Vertex firmware 1275 is good. Very good.
Supertalent makes a SSD with the Barefoot Indilinx controller. It's comparable to the Vertex.
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
Wow. I've never thought about RAID for more than 5 seconds at a time.....and that's more or less "RAID? Yeah, maybe tomorrow."
Then again, I don't have identical SATA hard drives (but I've heard that's no longer necessary?). I'm too used to simply putting a HDD in the tray, pushing it in, and turning on my computer to identify it. I assume that won't change for solid state drives. Laziness at it's worse, I imagine...
Dual 30gb vertex costs less then a single 60 and let's you go RAID0, if you are going SSD go RAID.
I thought the controller chip on the SSDs already facilitated parallel read/writes (generally up to 10 channels) so I'm wondering how much benefit would be garnered from placing the disks in a RAID 0 array. I guess theoretically it would double the amount of IO channels that could be used concurrently. I'm wondering if that speed would actually be noticeable in real world tests such as boot up and loading times considering that we're already in the fractions of a milliseconds for random reads and around 2ms for random writes. I'm pretty close to pulling the trigger on the 60gb but if there is a substantial performance improvement to justify the $90 I might just hold off and get two 30gb and a RAID controller card.
Looking for a Hardcore Fantasy Extraction Shooter? - Dark and Darker
Makes me want to run four good ones in a RAID array to see how effective it is with a nicely overclocked CPU on a good motherboard. Maybe next upgrade. It'd make a good showcase machine, and give some customers a reason to buy $2000 rigs, now that I think about it...
Ahaha.