Why are you not using a SSD yet?

http://debuggable.com/posts/why-are-you-not-using-a-ssd-yet:4d64ad6f-22d8-4eca-99e8-765acbdd56cb

by trustfundbaby • 15 years ago

49 95 15 years ago

ENOTTY2• 15 years ago

Because it costs an outrageous amount of money. I'm waiting for further development of hybrid drives, which are SSDs combined with a traditional hard drive for mass storage, but seen as one drive by the OS. The SSD is basically used a huge read cache. Current models of hybrid drives from Seagate have only 4 GB of SSD cache, which I don't feel is large enough.

ctide4• 15 years ago

Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?

shin_lao2• 15 years ago

It's more than $ 200. It's more around $ 300 per computer and in a laptop it's an incredible amount of money ($800+ if I'm correct) if you have a Sony or an Apple one.

Additionally the performance increase is important, but doesn't matter for everything network related.

In other words I'd say it's almost worth what you pay for it.

acqq2• 15 years ago

Since when it's a "serious" performance increase when "it boots faster"? Or if the first grep after the boot is faster (others must be fast since the file cache kicks in for every next one, unless you have, say, 128 MB RAM). Really not worth to mention.

masklinn7• 15 years ago

Hybrids are nowhere near the orders-of-magnitude improvements SSDs provide. And neither can they be.

You won't see a hybrid able to saturate a 6Gbps SATA connection on random-access any time soon.

janjan2• 15 years ago

No it's definitively not an outrageous amount of money.

I have a 3 year old Thinkpad T61p with a still decent Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. After three years it felt kind of slow so I had two options: 1) Buy a SSD for 250 Euro or 2) buy a completely new laptop for > 1000 Euro.

I went the first route and after working with the SSD for half a year I'm pretty sure that an expensive new laptop with a traditional hard drive would not have resulted in such a tremendous speedup as the SSD did.

So please don't think of the 200$ for an SSD as "these 200$ will buy me a new hard drive" but instead think of this investment as "these 200$ will buy me an awesome new computer".

artaxerxes• 15 years ago

Tried the Momentus XT. It was good... But they have been on 500/4 for a year now. Also have an optibay enroute for the MacBook.

For my desktop I have gone for the Highpoint Rocketraid 1220. it's a two port SATA III <£50. Add a HDD of your choice and an SSD and you have your own hybrid logical disk. I am testing with a 500gb caviar black and an old OCZ Vertex 30gb.... Arrives today!

Andys• 15 years ago

The seagate hybrid drive is a scam; it scores worse on some benchmarks than seagate's own normal laptop HDD.

It also only uses the cache for reads, and not writes. Writes is where the magic happens! If I wanted more read cache I'd just get more system RAM.

mvkel• 15 years ago

It's already been proven that hybrid drives perform as good as, or in some cases _slower_ than traditional platter drives. The SSD part is a marketing gimmick.

ENOTTY2• 15 years ago

Wow, okay lots of replies and I'll address them here.

First, a lot of people are talking about using two drives. On Windows this model does not work. Moving programs from C: to D: will often screw up registry settings and other crap like that. On OSX and Linux, thanks to a single root filesystem and symlinks, this model might work better. Furthermore, I have to manage moving files back and forth. This is a problem algorithms should take care of and no OS does this yet.

Secondly, a lot of people are saying the Momentus benchmarks are terrible. This seems obvious. Any standard benchmark does not take advantage of a large read cache. You have to use some sector of data over and over again in order for the drive's algorithms to put it into the SSD cache. Read real world benchmarks here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-revi...

dlsspy• 15 years ago

I'm on my second in this machine. Burned through the first one. It had a rough death.

WalterBright• 15 years ago

Because I'd have to reinstall my OS from scratch, then all my apps, etc. It's a full day of work.

ctide4• 15 years ago

I can't speak for Windows users, but on my Mac, I didn't have to do any of that.

masklinn7• 15 years ago

I don't think you need to do so under Windows either, just clone from disk 1 to disk 2, maybe fiddle a bit with the drivers, and you should be done.

jonah2• 15 years ago

Oh, but installing apps is so much faster on an SSD, it'll only be 1/2 of a day of work. ;)

Adobe CS5 < 15 minutes onto an SSD vs. 45 minutes onto an HDD.

beedogs2• 15 years ago

On the Mac, all it took was half an hour waiting for SuperDuper to finish copying files to the new SSD disk and making it bootable. Reinstalling? What?

It couldn't have been any easier.

janjan2• 15 years ago

Yes, in the worst case it's a full day of work, but your computer will be much faster for _every_ day afterwards so the invested day is more than worth it. Just give it a try, I'm 99% sure you will not regret it.

radu_floricica2• 15 years ago

Well, there's cognitive dissonance. After spending $2-300, you'd better not regret it :p

rickmb• 15 years ago

Here's a tip for getting lightning fast boot times without investing in overpriced SSD's: Stop shutting things down in the first place.

patio11• 15 years ago

My SSD has been the single biggest win for hardware for me in the last decade. Dell quoted me $600 on putting one in my new laptop. It would be cheap at twice the price.

In addition to my perhaps unprofessional weakness for playing games, the huge win for me is that it slashes boot times for hefty programs, most noticeably the VMs that I do all my development in and, of course, browsers. Chrome boots practically instantaneously -- I often have to wait for my wireless to come up so that it has something to do right after a system boot.

My other suggestion, which combos well with SSDs and is ridiculously cheap to implement these days: get more memory. I have 8 GBs. If there were a convenient option for getting 16, I'd be all over it -- I never find myself thinking "Dang it all, I have too much stuff in memory, why don't I page out some to disk".

Raphael• 15 years ago

Chrome opens fast on slow hard drives too.

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

$600? Wow. You can get them for under $100 now, I got one for my dad for 60 GBP and it's made my 5-year-old macbook faster than my brand new macbook pro.

Seriously, if you don't have an SSD yet, go now and order one. Otherwise you're just wasting your time.

vegai• 15 years ago

Because I'm on a platform that doesn't require massive IO performance on A FREAKING DESKTOP.

How could we implement a tax on horrible programming?

andreaja4• 15 years ago

I'm amused at how strongly the for/against sides are arguing in this thread. This is a case where the cost benefit analysis is quite simple. I used to start my day at work by doing git status on my project repos to warm up the disk cache, then go get coffee. Now I just dive straight into whatever's on my plate. Then there's the 20 seconds I save whenever I start up Eclipse. The 2 minutes I save on every reboot. It all adds up.

What I'm interested is why people are so adamantly against. People drop huge amounts of money on RAM for their development rigs, but making the slowest I/O device faster and more predictable is a bad idea?

I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but is there a backlash because the people who are happy about their SSDs are so enthusiastic about them? I realize this is the internet and spending energy wondering why people are so angry is pretty futile, but what's the point?

elliottkember• 15 years ago

The people who have them are for them. The people who don't are against them. I have yet to see a comment from someone who bought one and regrets it.

andreaja4• 15 years ago

I noticed that, I just don't understand why people who don't have them are so negative about them.

khafra• 15 years ago

Is it costing you any midmorning mental energy not to have that initial dose of caffeine?

andreaja4• 15 years ago

Nowadays I pick up the coffee on my way in ;)

keyle• 15 years ago

I'm all SSD now. I've been telling my friends "This is as big as the floppy disk, get one".

Corsair SSD are like $250. And don't tell me you need 1.5TB in your desktop! You'd be a lot smarter to have 180gig hdd and all externals.

When I jump on someone's machine who has spinning disks and do a build in visual studio, I feel like time stopped. I keep moving the mouse "is it frozen? What's wrong?"

chrisjsmith3• 15 years ago

That's a problem with Visual studio. It doesn't do incremental builds. You basically have to create an entire assembly from scratch every time you build.

masklinn7• 15 years ago

Kinda missed the point, replace "do a build" with "do a full build" and you get the same thing, I used to have the exact same issue when installing lxml via easy_install/pip in a virtualenv (which entails a full compile from a source tarball) on an MBP with a factory drive (5400rpm), I could just go and grab myself a coffee because it would pretty much slow the machine to a grinding halt.

Nowadays, I don't even notice I'm doing it (replaced factory drive with an x25M g2.

wladimir• 15 years ago

I'm using a SSD for the operating system and 'hot' files that I'm currently working on, and a harddisk for bulk storage.

This works very well, and is much cheaper than going 'full SSD'.

I do agree that SSD is the single greatest advancement of computer technology the last 10 years. It's such an awesome speedup. And nicely silent.

tlrobinson3• 15 years ago

I do this too. The SSD is effectively another layer of cache, but one that has to be managed manually. I wonder how difficult it would be to write a filesystem that does this automatically.

rdl• 15 years ago

I just switched my mid-2010 17" mbp to 300gb intel 320 SSD in the drive bay and a 7200rpm 750gb spinning rust seagate drive in the optibay (for mp3, infrequently used vms, etc).

Advice: do it, but make sure your homedir from your old drive, if you use file vault, is smaller than the new drive. Manually mounting the sparse bundle later to copy files is a big pain.

cafebabe2• 15 years ago

As a developer, I'm more concerned about the lifespan of a SSD than a 'usual' user. That's why I didn't get a SSD, yet. I probably would, if the SSD will last long even when thousands of files change on a daily basis (compilation etc). But maybe my concerns are unnecessary...?

phamilton2• 15 years ago

If it's replacement cost you are worried about, I think an SSD will last on average about as long as your system, assuming a max 3 year upgrade cycle.

If it's data preservation you are worried about (ie, if I wear it out and lose everything) then remember than flash memory, unlike spinning disks, is fail on write. That means that even if the drive dies, it can still be read. Compare to an ever so slightly misaligned platter getting a big scratch from a drives head.

cafebabe2• 15 years ago

I do daily backups for data preservation. So my concern was more for the point where writes may fail (of course the controller will care about it). You're right. As they get cheaper, I'll probably buy one this year.

AngryParsley• 15 years ago

Hard drives are much more likely to fail without warning than SSDs. Modern SSDs use wear-leveling along with spare flash cells to increase reliability. To give one example: Intel warranties their X25-Ms for 3 years. They claim you can write 100GB/day for 3 years without exhausting the flash cells.

The typical failure mode for a hard drive is for it to work fine and then completely die. No reading or writing, just dead. Flash cells usually become "stuck" after too many writes, turning an SSD into a read-only drive. Compared to hard drives, SSDs are much more tolerant of vibration and shock. I've had several hard drives fail, but no SSDs die on me.

Most importantly, I cannot overstate the performance benefit. Any machine without an SSD feels broken to me. Considering how much time most of us spend on our computers, $300 amortized over the life of the SSD is completely worthwhile.

dawkins• 15 years ago

That's not my experience. I bought a 128GB Patriot Torx some time ago and one day it stopped working completely. I lost all my data. They gave me a new one and 7 months later I started having data corruption problems. Now I can't even format it from Windows.

Maybe it was bad luck twice but I'm sticking with hard drives for now.

phamilton2• 15 years ago

I'm on a "crippled" Macbook Air 11". 1.4Ghz C2D, 2GM RAM, and a 64 GB SSD. The SSD makes this machine snappier than my previous 2009 macbook pro. As far as living my life on 64GB, I have room for development (Rails), I keep my music on Amazon Cloud, and any movies on my linux server. It's my portable workstation and it zings along.

dexen5• 15 years ago

For a desktop, a 147GB, 15k RPM harddrive, bought second-hand, is the price-performance-reliability sweet spot. For example, a Seagate Cheetah one generation older than the current.

Also, because I've been using XFS on it. With journal on another drive, performance is blazing fast -- and yes, including mass deletes of small files.

XFS used on the only SSD (cheapest one, admitably) I have was performing terribly -- because it has to do lots of random writes

And no, a 15k RPM is not noisy -- both thanks to good bearings and human ear not being very sensitive at that frequency.

For a laptop, sure, the available harddrives (7.2k at best, often even 5.4k) have terrible random access times; an SSD may be way better. But not on my desktop, not yet anyway.

slashclee2• 15 years ago

Some of the first-gen SATA SSDs (based on the JMicron 601 and 602 chipsets) had nasty stuttering problems with lots of concurrent writes, but pretty much every SSD made in the past 12 months is going to blow away any spinning-platter disk when it comes to random writes. SSDs based on Sandforce's 1200-series controller can do 30,000 IOPS, sustaining more than 150MB/s with 4kB random writes.

You should probably investigate the current hardware (OCZ's Vertex 3, Crucial's m4, Intel's 510 series); it might surprise you just how much better it's gotten in such a short time.

dexen5• 15 years ago

Look, as an average individual, I'm not limited by drive interface (PATA, SATA and SCSI u320 are all OK for me), nor disk size (be it 2.5'' or 3.5'' or any other, really), nor capacity (I have a 1.5T drive for bulk storage, and only need about 20G for home & system & some breathing space), nor power usage. The only two real constraints for me are: 1) budget and 2) information on actual (``real-world'') performance of drives. As opposed to cute benchmarks.

> You should probably investigate the current hardware (...) -- that has never been an option to me, and probably won't be for some next 25 years. Budget, ya know.

TBH., I'm irritated by folks comparing top-of-the-line SSDs with slowest harddrives on the market (5.4k and 7.2k RPM, especially in 2.5'' form factor) and making a big woo about SSDs being faster. Get yourself a decent 15k harddrive, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps even short-stroke it if you are a racer.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

Why am I not using a $100-200 SSD?

Because my laptop cost $350, and my desktop cost $300.

SSD's amaze me, and I don't need an SSD larger than 64-128GB, but the performance boost just isn't as important to me as keeping my rigs cheap.

Oh, and when I need truly fast disk access? I use ramdisks.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Same here. I had a SSD for a week. It was absolutely underwhelming on my already lean and light Archlinux system. I returned it.

Mavrik• 15 years ago

Because the performance improvement still isn't significant enough (for me) to spent 200€ on a 64 GB SSD instead of 80€ for a 2 TB HDD.

This article is the typical case of buyers euphoria... he just got his brand new toy a week ago and now wants to push it on everybody else regardless of their preferences. And he doesn't even own the thing long enough to find the bad sides.

radu_floricica2• 15 years ago

On the subject, any tips on running a Mysql server on SSD? I've just taken the jump, and what I can find on the net seems more like opinions then solid info.

tlrobinson3• 15 years ago

RethinkDB's site has a good overview of the problems with traditional databases on SSDs: http://rethinkdb.com/learn-more/

ck2• 15 years ago

Because a $55 Samsung 1TB drive is 80% as fast as a SSD ?

http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/common_drives.html (HD103SJ)

I actually use the 500gb model @ $40 each, I have three that I rotate for full backups which take only 1 hour with a sector-to-sector based copy.

But seagate just bought samsung so best stock up on these drives soon as they are sure to disappear.

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

More like 1/8th. That benchmark isn't indicative of real-world performance.

jarek-foksa• 15 years ago

I remember hearing bad things about the usage of journaling file systems (Ext3, Ext4, NTFS) with SSD devices. Is this still relevant this days? Which Linux filesystem gives best long-term performance when used on SSD devices?

chrisjsmith3• 15 years ago

I don't use an SSD simply because the operating system block cache is good enough! More RAM is a better investment if you ask me. And I only reboot my laptop every month or so, so I don't notice the boot speed.

I use Windows 7 x64 with 8Gb of RAM on a cheap Acer laptop.

On a side note, developing software on the "best workstation you can get" is a really bad idea. You never get to see how the software will run on a piece of stink like the ones your client probably owns.

robotresearcher• 15 years ago

By your argument, shouldn't you toss out 3/4 of your RAM?

You should indeed test your code on a client-like machine, but for many if not most apps, building is much more demanding than running them. Developer time is expensive, so building on the fastest available machine is a good idea.

chrisjsmith3• 15 years ago

Picking the right tech and keeping your product size small is sensible.

config_yml• 15 years ago

I recently made the choice to put an 80GB SSD into my 2007 MacBook, instead of getting a new machine (and my RAM was already maxed out). It's amazing what this 4 year old machine still does, it feels so much faster, no more beachballs for me.

robgough2• 15 years ago

I did the same with my late-2008 MBP. First time I don't feel that I need to upgrade 2 and a half years later. Hell, it's the first time I didn't want to upgrade after that long.

kogir• 15 years ago

Can't agree with this enough. If your workload is IO bound, SSDs will make a world of difference. Measure before making a decision though. You'd be surprised what's bound by CPU (Loopt's iPhone and Android builds) and what's bound by IO (Loopt's server builds).

On Windows use perfmon or Resource Monitor to look for a disk IO queue frequently over 1. On Linux or OS X use iostat and/or Activity Monitor.

If you don't check before taking the plunge, you could be in for an expensive disappointment. On the same machine, Intel X25MG2s made a 2% difference in Loopt's Android build time, but a 50+% difference in Loopt's server build time. Don't spend the money if you don't need it.

Also, it may be worth it to spend the extra money on a reputable brand drive. Loopt has had 20+ drive-years on 15 drives without incident, but they're all Intel. In fact, we run our primary user database on 4 X25-Es striped in a RAID-0 configuration. I've heard horror stories second hand from friends who tried cheaper GSkill and Patriot drives and lost some or all their data.

Loopt server developers all get 80GB X25-M drives + 160GB RAID 1 platters. Totally worth it. Buy SSDs for your employees!

wil2k• 15 years ago

How about Trim support under OSX?

AFAIK it still isn't there.. is this (still?!?) a serious negative factor when considering a SSD in a MBP?!?

Certainly considering inserting a SSD. Once I played with an MBA in a shop, I could sooo feel the difference in speed compared to my MBP which has a much faster CPU.

andrewmcveigh• 15 years ago

I think Trim support will be in Lion. I'll get an SSD wedged into my iMac then.

sjs382• 15 years ago

Mainly because my primary (non-work) machine is a netbook and, from what I've read, it's unclear whether I'd see a performance boost.

geekam2• 15 years ago

What about the shelf life of an SSD? I have also heard that your system needs some kind of TRIM support otherwise performance slowly degrades. what's the truth in that?

geekam2• 15 years ago

I asked a question sometime back: http://superuser.com/questions/208560/hard-drive-question-ss...

eyeforgotmyname• 15 years ago

Would be tech writers need to learn that when you mention jargon like a solid state drive (ssd) you should define it in the beginning of the article, and it helps to explain what it is.

Why are you not using a SSD yet?

Related Stories