The mystery of the 500 Scoped_dir folders...

Your min. read speed is in the range of a few hundred, or even few dozen kB/s for random 512b sectors.

Your min. linear read speed at the innermost cylinders is likely around 120ish MB/s, due to the much shorter data tracks there.

Anyway, consumer HDD RAID arrays don't live up to the brute performance of a modern SSD. There's just no comparison.

Dude they're short stroked and piss on most single SSD's :D
 
ssd's suffer a lot from wear and tear, strange for a non mechanical device ;)

the question is how relevant to normal usage is iops ?
 
Buddy, in IOPS, any current SSD is going to totally beat the shit out of your HDDs...short-stroked or not.

Mechanical is dead. Just face it. :D

At almost 20-40x the cost of a mechanical HDD I don't think Mechanical will be dead for a long LONG time. 1 TB of SSD will run you ~2000 USD where 1 TB of HDD can be purchased for around 50-90 USD.

And it's only the latest SSD's that can match mechanical HDDs (raided as almighty has them) in anything but random reads and power consumption.

The new upcoming 6G capable SSDs on the other hand are set to surpass mechanical in all ways except that all important cost consideration where they will still be 20-40x the cost.

SSDs are definitely nice, but are a very niche product still.

Regards,
SB
 
At almost 20-40x the cost of a mechanical HDD I don't think Mechanical will be dead for a long LONG time.
A 120GB SSD (current sweet-spot, cost-wise) is not expensive and will fit your OS, application programs to your heart's content plus several of your most favorite games. Then put the bulk of your data on a standard HDD.

And it's only the latest SSD's that can match mechanical HDDs (raided as almighty has them) in anything but random reads and power consumption.
That "anything but" (random reads AND writes) just so happens to be at least 95% of the factors that define PC I/O performance. Linear reads and writes are basically a non-issue in almost every useage profile, while IOPS is king.

Oh, and add noise, vibrations to the list where SSDs win, too. :D Heat's kinda implicit as well, due to much much lower power use.

SSDs are definitely nice, but are a very niche product still.
Not really. You should try one, I'm betting you'll never want to go back after having your system boot from end of POST to login prompt in less than half the time of a HDD, and having a responsive desktop with all your resident utilities loaded mere seconds after entering the login password.
 
Not really. You should try one, I'm betting you'll never want to go back after having your system boot from end of POST to login prompt in less than half the time of a HDD, and having a responsive desktop with all your resident utilities loaded mere seconds after entering the login password.

Heh, what a funny thing to read. I've been using SSD's to some extent since 2005/2006. :) And have various generation SSD boot drives in all my machines except the WHS server. Configured correctly even the atrocious early Jmicron based SSDs can be fairly decent in a very narrow range of applications.

I know all about them, their performance characteristics, and their pitfalls. As well watching as they evolved over that time from barely useable (extremely narrow range of uses where the cost "might" almost be justified) to soon being almost universally better than HDDs, except where it comes to cost where they are still astronomically high compared to mechanical HDDs.

The same enthusiasts that used to spend up to 1000 USD for 10-15k RPM SCSI and then later 300-500 USD for 10k WD Raptor drives, etc. would obviously also have no problem with the costs of an SSD.

But that still remains a very niche market.

Just because I personally use and can afford an SSD, doesn't mean I'm blind to their drawbacks and limited market appeal.

Regards,
SB
 
I've tried SSD's and they are nice but they just aint all that, You have to watch what de-frag programs you use, You have to set up Trim for them as well as configure Windows to take full advantage of them.

They're a ball ache, And an expensive bull ache at that.

And a 120Gb SSD wouldn't even have enough for half my Steam files, I need at least 1Tb to store all of my things while laving some space for future stuff.

The last 1Tb SSD drive I seen for sale was nearly ÂŁ10,000

A 250Gb SSD is like ÂŁ500!!

SSD's have a LONG way to go yet before they even can even be considered a replacment for mechanical drives.
 
You have to watch what de-frag programs you use,

Due to the nature of how SSD's work, they don't need to be de-fragmented. As such Windows 7 doesn't include SSDs in its auto-defrag schedule. And trim is only really needed when performance of the SSD starts to degrade significantly. I've never had to use it for instance.

The cost concerns are very valid however, and what will keep it a niche product for a long time.

Regards,
SB
 
Albuquerque. You are the best!

I just did everything you said except doubled all the numbers on my 16GB ram rig.

Not only did things get faster, but I just magically got 10GB more free hard drive space on my vertex 2 c:\drive that really, REALLY needed to have some free space and now I got it without uninstalling any games!
 
Glad it helped you, Mendel :) I don't have the techno-chops that some people have for low-level GPU hardware, but I'm still occasionally useful!
 
because as fas as the o/s is concerned it isnt ram its a drive,
the ramdrive isnt software using ram its a driver
 
because as fas as the o/s is concerned it isnt ram its a drive,
the ramdrive isnt software using ram its a driver

You're right, but it's odd that driver memory usage would be hidden from process explorer, or atleast the ought to be an option to see this.
 
That RAMMAP application shows the ramdisk allocation as "Driver Locked" memory in the Active column. I just bought 16Gb of ram for the laptop and may consider upping this ramdrive to 4Gb depending on how it works out with my VM's.
 
The free version of the ramdisk software limits you to 4Gb, and I don't want to pay for more ;)
 
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