The average user is never doing ANYTHING at all on their computer other than opening and closing Office applications and web browsers. All of which hardly stress a Pentium 4 but thrash your hard drive to all hell.
SSD's: there yet, and what is what?
- Thread starter Frank
- Start date
The average user is never doing ANYTHING at all on their computer other than opening and closing Office applications and web browsers. All of which hardly stress a Pentium 4 but thrash your hard drive to all hell.
Where did you get the idea that random read/write speeds on mechanical drives is 0-4MB/s? You seem to have a penchant for exaggeration.
Shit, my 8GB OCZ Diesel flash drive gets better performance than that, and that's fricking NAND flash over USB 2.0.
Depends on the usage model. If you ever do anything compute-bound that P4 will fall to its knees crying, as will the user, likely.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
Or just put a bit more ram in their machines. Certainly you don't double the whole cost of the machine (let alone do it for every machine in the company) to install a SSD that the average user is not going to notice. Maybe if you're doing builds (if you don't have proper dev server platforms) or video editing, or some other corner case where you quickly reach the "money no object" position due to the massively high costs of your man hours, but in general SSDs are still far too expensive for everyday use. They are still a niche, luxury item to address specific situations, not a general replacement for HDDs. SSDs need to get a lot cheaper and bigger before they can take over from HDDs in most machines.
The average user doesn't give a SHIT about performance.
Could we talk about something relevant to the discussion at hand? You know, like the performance of SSDs in Photoshop (or at least workstation class PCs).
Irrelevance.
Desktop PCs don't thrash their hard drives all day long.
I'm sure you have to justify wasting thousands of dollars of your boss's money, but you're not going to fool the knowledgeable folk around these parts.
Whatever.
Computers, in general, run at speeds proportional to their slowest part. These days, 99.99% of the time, that is the storage device. Therefor, logically, if you're trying to get the maximum effect for your dollar the place to target is that slowest part.
Upgrading my graphics card to a 5870 increased my overall, day-to-day computer performance by.. maybe 1-2%? And that's being generous
The literal only visible difference in performance I've noticed from any of my upgrades, in regular day-to-day work usage, come to think of it, has came from the solid state.
Overall "bang for buck" is actually drastically in favor of the SSDs.
Computers, in general, run at speeds proportional to their slowest part. These days, 99.99% of the time, that is the storage device. Therefor, logically, if you're trying to get the maximum effect for your dollar the place to target is that slowest part.
Upgrading my graphics card to a 5870 increased my overall, day-to-day computer performance by.. maybe 1-2%? And that's being generous
The literal only visible difference in performance I've noticed from any of my upgrades, in regular day-to-day work usage, come to think of it, has came from the solid state.
Overall "bang for buck" is actually drastically in favor of the SSDs.
I should just stop here. I've gotten way too wrapped up in this thread, and am becoming aggressive. I apologize if I've caused any offense. I still intend to run benchmarks on my mechanical drives. I've got a WD 640GB Caviar Blue O.S. drive in both of my PCs, and a 1TB Hitachi storage drive in my "media center" PC. Also my roommate just picked up a Seagate 1.5TB drive.
It really does depend on the workload though. It stands to reason if one is compute-bound I/O becomes less of a bottleneck, no matter how slow.
heres a free ramdrive and instructions :
http://www.box.net/shared/htpmm1zm8e
i tested one a while ago with a few games, because i have xp32 i had to limit the size of the drive to 1gb and only games that would fit in that space unreal, quake 3,rtcw, ect
levels appeared to load in sub 1 second times.
edit: newer version with bug fixes (use this one) here :
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=4517
http://www.box.net/shared/htpmm1zm8e
i tested one a while ago with a few games, because i have xp32 i had to limit the size of the drive to 1gb and only games that would fit in that space unreal, quake 3,rtcw, ect
levels appeared to load in sub 1 second times.
edit: newer version with bug fixes (use this one) here :
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=4517
Since I have two 1TB WD Blacks I don't really know what you are talking about unless the 2TB model is way better or something. In other words the raptor is better than the WD 1TB blacks. And the Intel 160GB SSD destroys the raptor and the Blacks hands down.
edit:
Everyone here probably agrees, SSDs are expensive, SSDs are fast. I never ever want to have a laptop without one that is for sure. On a desktop my raptor and blacks are ok, and they are both cheaper.
Last edited by a moderator:
You mean I could use one of this really fast mechanical drivers like a WD VelociRaptor that's not even half as fast in sequential reads as my sdds and delivers an incredible 1/90th of the performance of my ssd in random reads?
Or maybe I should rather go and buy myself Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 600GB, which at least almost reaches the throughput of my ssd in best case, even if it still lacks in average and worst case behind?
So sad that I cannot use these noisy and hot monsters in order to get worse performance than I have, so sad.
It depends how much your people cost. If you have expensive developers sitting in front of their computers twiddling their thumbs waiting on their computer to do something then you're wasting money. Plus as I stated before, waiting leads to frustration, frustration leads to increased defect costs. That's overlooked much too often.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
And people wonder why things are so expensive and businesses waste so much money.
Serious an SSD for a "typical" business computer where the SSD is easily 50-100% the cost of the entire machine before you add in any drives?
That's using your resources well?
Unless they are working with large locally stored databases or exceeding large excell spreadsheets (absolutely incredibly hugely large), there is no HD "thrashing" whatsoever, assuming the machine is spec'd with enough RAM that your programs aren't being cached to the HDD. Also assuming you don't disable superfetch, again with a decent amount of memory...
You'll end up with an office machine with significantly more disk space or similar disk space at half the cost which is withing 5-10% performance of an machine equipped with an SSD. And that 5-10% in being generous.
Yes, there are a few, very few useage patterns for a workstation/desktop where an SSD "might" be financially justifiable, but a "typical" office machine is not one.
If someone wants one for their personal use more power to them, they earned their money and can spend it however they wish, I know, I HAVE 5 of the blasted things. And have been using them for the past 2 years in my personally bought machines, although only in the past year have they become good enough to even challenge standard HDDs for a permanent spot in my main machine.
Amazing that people complain about companies spending money fivolously and then recommend something like this.
Regards,
SB
Serious an SSD for a "typical" business computer where the SSD is easily 50-100% the cost of the entire machine before you add in any drives?
That's using your resources well?
Unless they are working with large locally stored databases or exceeding large excell spreadsheets (absolutely incredibly hugely large), there is no HD "thrashing" whatsoever, assuming the machine is spec'd with enough RAM that your programs aren't being cached to the HDD. Also assuming you don't disable superfetch, again with a decent amount of memory...
You'll end up with an office machine with significantly more disk space or similar disk space at half the cost which is withing 5-10% performance of an machine equipped with an SSD. And that 5-10% in being generous.
Yes, there are a few, very few useage patterns for a workstation/desktop where an SSD "might" be financially justifiable, but a "typical" office machine is not one.
If someone wants one for their personal use more power to them, they earned their money and can spend it however they wish, I know, I HAVE 5 of the blasted things.
And have been using them for the past 2 years in my personally bought machines, although only in the past year have they become good enough to even challenge standard HDDs for a permanent spot in my main machine.Amazing that people complain about companies spending money fivolously and then recommend something like this.
Regards,
SB
Blazkowicz
Legend
These days wouldn't be stand-alone workstations the waste in an office environment? .
give your workers thin clients (cheapest are $100, or $0 if using existing junk) and run all the apps and desktops on a cheap server (such as a dual i7 xeons with 24GB ram, or a single quad core with 4/8GB). No local storage, and less ultra-powerful CPU cores idling waiting for user keypresses.
way off-topic here. But maybe SSD gets quite interesting, leveraging its concurrent/random abilities.
BUT you don't see them in the server realm yet (as in, they aren't in the configurator for Dell servers). it may not be automatically needed either as storage, I/O needs will be spread on multiple drives (and other machines)
.give your workers thin clients (cheapest are $100, or $0 if using existing junk) and run all the apps and desktops on a cheap server (such as a dual i7 xeons with 24GB ram, or a single quad core with 4/8GB). No local storage, and less ultra-powerful CPU cores idling waiting for user keypresses.
way off-topic here. But maybe SSD gets quite interesting, leveraging its concurrent/random abilities.
BUT you don't see them in the server realm yet (as in, they aren't in the configurator for Dell servers). it may not be automatically needed either as storage, I/O needs will be spread on multiple drives (and other machines)
I highly doubt SSDs are practical for the workplace given the high cost/benefit ratio. It just makes no sense to me. If you see the way people have their machines unoptimized your jaws will hit the floor. So many people I know at Oracle for example have decent hardware laptops but they have 10,000 (exaggerating) crapware apps and they all have startup icons etc etc. If they were bothered about performance they would be complaining to their tech department. Because the machines take FOREVER to start. I have seen my dad and he is cool with the laptop taking 10 minutes to get to the desktop. And they are mostly running XP too. People work with slowness because they are working and its their work machines. Some people only I am aware of exist tho who complain about performance and are always looking for a way to improve...me as an example.
SSDs are great but even I have not been completely convinced. I have a pair of Velociraptors in raid 0 and they are awesome and very very quiet. They are very fast and everything runs with a sense of urgency on my machine running win7 rc. Games load up quick and all that and I would love to run SSDs for even more awesome performance but its just too expensive, the tech seems a bit volatile with all these firmwares and bricking and so on. SSDs have their benefits for sure but IMHO its not there yet. It probably will be in the next year or two where their performances are so much more improved and even if their prices are the same as they are right now, then I will consider them. Now with the current available perofrmance and the price vendors are asking for. IMHO not worth it. Especially not in a workplace environment.
SSDs are great but even I have not been completely convinced. I have a pair of Velociraptors in raid 0 and they are awesome and very very quiet. They are very fast and everything runs with a sense of urgency on my machine running win7 rc. Games load up quick and all that and I would love to run SSDs for even more awesome performance but its just too expensive, the tech seems a bit volatile with all these firmwares and bricking and so on. SSDs have their benefits for sure but IMHO its not there yet. It probably will be in the next year or two where their performances are so much more improved and even if their prices are the same as they are right now, then I will consider them. Now with the current available perofrmance and the price vendors are asking for. IMHO not worth it. Especially not in a workplace environment.
I have a 640 gig WD drive. ITs model is wd6400aaks-00a780. It is perpendicular and it was fast. Its 2 years old now. My ssd for every day use runs rings around this drive. There is no comparison. I have friends come and use my pc and are amazed at how responsive and fast everything loads.
Prices of ssd's are coming down too now that holiday demand is slowing. The 30 gig vertex went from $140-150 after rebate most of the last 3 months to $100 after rebate on newegg. The 60 gig drivei s also down $20 .
Prices of ssd's are coming down too now that holiday demand is slowing. The 30 gig vertex went from $140-150 after rebate most of the last 3 months to $100 after rebate on newegg. The 60 gig drivei s also down $20 .
30 gig drives are useless. I could fill that up in minutes.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
30 GB? So I'd need 66 of these drives to duplicate my current setup? Sounds like a bargain! And so convenient too because I'd only need half a dozen cases to put them in!
It'll do about 80-90MB/s, pure linear reads/writes I'd estimate, on the outermost datazone of the platters. At the innermost, you'd be lucky to get more than 50-60... The highest density desktop drives are juuust about at the 100MB/s barrier I believe - again for pure reads or writes, not copying operations (since that would require seeks which vastly slows down a mechanical drive), and again only on the outermost data zone of the platter(s).
Intel's drives aren't quite fast enough to max out SATA2 I believe even under the most ideal circumstances. But it's fairly irrelevant anyway as most computer useage patterns never benefit very much from extremely high linear data transfer rates...
No, they don't, unless you're talking purely buffered reads and writes - IE, to and from the drive's cache RAM. Off the platters, it's going to be significantly less than SATA2 speeds. You need a 15k RPM SAS/fiberchannel enterprise drive to get close to maxing out the OLDEST SATA standard...
Sure! Why not.
Actually it's a bit relevant, as HDD areal density increases at an exponentially higher rate than HDD performance. Even linear transfer speed doesn't increase anywhere as much as you'd think; most of the capacity increase comes from packing tracks closer together rather than packing many more sectors on the same track. This is because it gets expensive to manufacture drive on-board electronics that handle extremely high data rates. It's simply easier and cheaper to increase the precision of the tracking servo instead.
No. It's increased no more than 100% compared to my (in computing terms) ancient 160GB drive. 400%? Not on your life...
I know it's expensive. I've already said as much, multiple times, heh! Wether it's EXPENSIVE doesn't actually have anything to do with its performance advantages over traditional HDDs though.I'm not trying to spoil your party, but don't be surprised if no one else goes out and spends $5/GB on storage
The two issues are essentially completely separate.That question was answered pages ago in this thread. We can't keep discussing the same issue over and over until the sun blows itself out.