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The WD Green (and similar) disks are great for backups, as "download" disk or other storage of large bulky data. Its less suitable as a system disk to install applications to and such, because of its lower spindle speed the latency is higher. So MB/s will be high (~100MB/s) but random IOps performance will be a tad lower.
I recommend them whenever their usage is suited - because they consume only half the power of normal disks causing them to be very cool and reliable storage mediums.
I recommend them whenever their usage is suited - because they consume only half the power of normal disks causing them to be very cool and reliable storage mediums.
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Difficult!
Because reviews have to justify their results, and work quickly as well, so they won't install a fresh Xp on each drive to measure boot time... They use standard benchmarks which are "more or less" adequate.
Yes, green disks are very slow, with slower rpm and slow arm.
- May be necessary to increase density, because of signal-to-noise ratio when reading
- Or manufacturers consider SSD will win the fight for speed, hence they concentrate on capacity. Then I want to testify that I WANT fast disks!
Be careful that Samsung doesn't produce fast disks recently. Seagate uses less agile arms (2ms worse) on their latest "fast" disks. Hitachi has still a combination of 320GB per platter at 7200rpm and some 12.7ms random access time. WD and Maxtor probably as well - I just dislike them, maybe for unfair reasons.
Because reviews have to justify their results, and work quickly as well, so they won't install a fresh Xp on each drive to measure boot time... They use standard benchmarks which are "more or less" adequate.
Yes, green disks are very slow, with slower rpm and slow arm.
- May be necessary to increase density, because of signal-to-noise ratio when reading
- Or manufacturers consider SSD will win the fight for speed, hence they concentrate on capacity. Then I want to testify that I WANT fast disks!
Be careful that Samsung doesn't produce fast disks recently. Seagate uses less agile arms (2ms worse) on their latest "fast" disks. Hitachi has still a combination of 320GB per platter at 7200rpm and some 12.7ms random access time. WD and Maxtor probably as well - I just dislike them, maybe for unfair reasons.
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Well considering the alternative is forum posters who quite often give advice on "brand loyalty" rather than any "real" data. It' also important to look at a variety of benchmarks as the one you are looking at may not be representative of what you do with the PC.
I'm gonna disagree with the " they won't install a fresh Xp on each drive to measure boot time" statement though. just about any review site I visit specifically states that in the intro. In fact if ya think about it, when the drive arriuves in the mail, how they gonna get the OS on it. Most copy an standard image right into the drive with all the drivers for their test system right on it. This way, each one has a level playing field,
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All the speeds of mechanical drives belonging to the same generation class are very comparable. The only really deviation are Solid State Drives, who themselves can be faster than over 100 mechanical drives working in RAID0.
So why do you care about performance of your mechanical disk? If you want speed you'll get it once you get your first (real) SSD. After that only thing that matters is copying data which is sequential and HDDs are decently fast in this; they just don't cut it to be the system disk. Their ~10ms latency makes the CPU wait for eons with tens of thousands of CPU cycles "wasted" because it has to wait on the disk all the time. Mechanical drives just will never be fast - ever.
So why do you care about performance of your mechanical disk? If you want speed you'll get it once you get your first (real) SSD. After that only thing that matters is copying data which is sequential and HDDs are decently fast in this; they just don't cut it to be the system disk. Their ~10ms latency makes the CPU wait for eons with tens of thousands of CPU cycles "wasted" because it has to wait on the disk all the time. Mechanical drives just will never be fast - ever.
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Very few actions on a PC are bottlenecked by a HD. Of course the most obvious is boot time, but in many cases that doesn't matter:
-Joe Enthusiast who has defrag / AV & malware scans as well as backups run at night, never turns off his PC.
-Joe Officeworker who arrives at work, flips the button on his PC and then heads to the office coffee urn returning to find the start button ready and waiting on the screen.
Storage bottlenecks while actually working are a rarity, reserved fro database manipulation, file searched, CAD rendering, video editing and the needs of this small group have left SSD's as a niche product as yet.
SSD's are wonderful the day they arrive but few are handling the TRIM thing well at this point. Many are promising new firmware soon, but that involves a disk wipe. The industry is a still at the "bleeding edge" and there will always be factions who don't mind shedding a little blood and those that do. With all the R & D costs necessary to lick the TRIM thing as well as other unanticipated bugaboos, vendors are going to need to ship large volumes post holiday season.....I'm thinking this spring will see some drastic changes. I think at that time, prices will drop, the TRIM thing will be firmly licked but mechanical HD's will remain the storage medium of choice for large storage.
With many families having 5 or more PC's in a house....a series of laptops / desktops with SSD's and a NAS w/ 5+ TB of mechanical storage will be the "thing to do".
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If the HD is no bottleneck, why do people want fast HDDs or SSDs? According to your advice, they might as well have floppy disks instead of harddrives. I'm sure you'll love the performance, but i'm also extremely sure i will not.
In virtually all cases where the computer is 'slow' and the user has to wait for the computer, instead of the other way around like it should be, is due to harddrive latency. The whole computer is doing nothing but waiting on the disk.
Since most of you run Windows you won't get to see the IOwait percentage, which can tell you instantly if the disk is the current bottleneck or not. In many cases where the user has to wait for the computer, this is the case.
In virtually all cases where the computer is 'slow' and the user has to wait for the computer, instead of the other way around like it should be, is due to harddrive latency. The whole computer is doing nothing but waiting on the disk.
Since most of you run Windows you won't get to see the IOwait percentage, which can tell you instantly if the disk is the current bottleneck or not. In many cases where the user has to wait for the computer, this is the case.
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For a large percentage, because putting 3d Marks in their forum sigs makes them cool.
What is it that you are doing where the disk is bottling up your progress. How many minutes per day ? When you type a letter, are the characters appearing on screen slower than your typing ? When you access a web site, does it have anything to do with how fast web pages appear ? When you are watching video, is the HD not keeping up with you ?
Keep in mind that you are talking to a guy who has used 15k SCSI disks and been quite willing to pay the price premium for them for the last 15 years. I bought these because CAD was always disk intensive (page file mostly) but now it has become much less so due to access to large amounts of memory. I have Task manager monitor my I/) and looking at it, the numbers are quite puny and my laptop's been on for 42 hours straight.....biggest I/O was the nightly AV scan.
Of course this is all user dependent but even as a daily CAD user, and nightly gamer, these days disk usage is really "not that bigga deal" except when booting or loading programs. And when I am doing that, I am usually assembling my paperwork (the sheets I am going to take the numbers off to input into my spreadsheet) or getting my goodies (snacks for and references I'll need during gaming session) while those few seconds or ambling by. Of course, since my machines never get shut off, boot time isn't really an issue.
Like I said, if you are in a niche that requires frequent loading and unloading of large amounts of data, it's cost effective it makes sense. Most people simply are not in that category.
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You made some good points, but much of your story seems focuses on the idea that most people don't need a fast computer anyway. They could as well use an old Pentium 4, reinstall the OS and it should work perfectly for instant messaging, web browsing, text processing and emailing; basically what the better part of average people does with a PC.
The problem in your argument, is that while computers are fast enough for simple tasks, they are not yet at the point where they are so fast that the user doesn't have to wait for anything, but would respond virtually instantly to user-input. This already works for cases where only your CPU + RAM memory is involved, things that are cached. But whenever the (mechanical) disk is involved - the user probably will notice a delay.
So my point is not that HDDs are too slow to be usable, its just that with SSDs the storage subsystem will run 'on par' with the CPU and RAM, so system performance can be upgraded to allow even snappier experience to user input, whenever disk I/O is involved.
Though ultimately, the key lies in software design. Many of the slowness of HDDs can be 'masked' and hidden from the user, by reading (caching) stuff in advance and reduce the dependency of disk I/O. Basically, whenever a user clicks or does something, all data that's needed to process should be in RAM already, if possible.
Unfortunately, many software is single-threaded so if the disk should respond slowly any application with open I/O requests will hang and be unresponsive to user input. Though this is a software weakness, the problem is less severe on fast solid state disks.
Remember that in many common cases, people are running windows with alot of software installed without proper maintenance; it gets a mess. This will lead to slower disk performance where you'll experience interruptions or sluggish performance more easily than with a cleanly installed Windows; sure its snappy and quick to respond. But it won't stay that way. Ultimately because the disks will be too slow to handle a bloated OS including all running software.
So i think especially in common cases the best buy a consumer can do these days is invest in an SSD. They don't need a Core i7, they don't need DDR3 xTREME whatever, they probably will never notice anyway. But they might and very likely will notice the investment of a an SSD, including the reliability, longevity, sound and power benefits it offers.
So i agree with you if you say that for simple tasks you don't need high cost hardware; very cheap hardware is fast enough for common tasks. But for a higher level of user experience i would say that investing in an SSD makes more sense than buying an even faster CPU.
For gamers though, the GPU remains their bottleneck as disk I/O isn't too important; Games can't afford to wait on the disk anyway so most stuff takes place in RAM. The loading screens are the only interruptions. Online gamers may find SSDs of use though, because it gives them a time advantage in certain situations.
Still i remain that if you look at system bottlenecks, it's much more likely to be the disk than the CPU for many common and less common tasks. If it takes place in the domain of the CPU and RAM memory, the performance should fast enough to provide minimal interruption to user input. In other words: the cpu and memory are already so fast; it's the disk performance that's lagging behind many orders of degree in comparison.
The problem in your argument, is that while computers are fast enough for simple tasks, they are not yet at the point where they are so fast that the user doesn't have to wait for anything, but would respond virtually instantly to user-input. This already works for cases where only your CPU + RAM memory is involved, things that are cached. But whenever the (mechanical) disk is involved - the user probably will notice a delay.
So my point is not that HDDs are too slow to be usable, its just that with SSDs the storage subsystem will run 'on par' with the CPU and RAM, so system performance can be upgraded to allow even snappier experience to user input, whenever disk I/O is involved.
Though ultimately, the key lies in software design. Many of the slowness of HDDs can be 'masked' and hidden from the user, by reading (caching) stuff in advance and reduce the dependency of disk I/O. Basically, whenever a user clicks or does something, all data that's needed to process should be in RAM already, if possible.
Unfortunately, many software is single-threaded so if the disk should respond slowly any application with open I/O requests will hang and be unresponsive to user input. Though this is a software weakness, the problem is less severe on fast solid state disks.
Remember that in many common cases, people are running windows with alot of software installed without proper maintenance; it gets a mess. This will lead to slower disk performance where you'll experience interruptions or sluggish performance more easily than with a cleanly installed Windows; sure its snappy and quick to respond. But it won't stay that way. Ultimately because the disks will be too slow to handle a bloated OS including all running software.
So i think especially in common cases the best buy a consumer can do these days is invest in an SSD. They don't need a Core i7, they don't need DDR3 xTREME whatever, they probably will never notice anyway. But they might and very likely will notice the investment of a an SSD, including the reliability, longevity, sound and power benefits it offers.
So i agree with you if you say that for simple tasks you don't need high cost hardware; very cheap hardware is fast enough for common tasks. But for a higher level of user experience i would say that investing in an SSD makes more sense than buying an even faster CPU.
For gamers though, the GPU remains their bottleneck as disk I/O isn't too important; Games can't afford to wait on the disk anyway so most stuff takes place in RAM. The loading screens are the only interruptions. Online gamers may find SSDs of use though, because it gives them a time advantage in certain situations.
Still i remain that if you look at system bottlenecks, it's much more likely to be the disk than the CPU for many common and less common tasks. If it takes place in the domain of the CPU and RAM memory, the performance should fast enough to provide minimal interruption to user input. In other words: the cpu and memory are already so fast; it's the disk performance that's lagging behind many orders of degree in comparison.
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You arguments are perfectly on target....but the qualifier you added is the key. As you said .... "so system performance can be upgraded to allow even snappier experience to user input, whenever disk I/O is involved. "
That is the issue then, just how often is I/O involved and the answer is very rarely. before SSD's the enthusiasts clamored for twin Raptor's in RAID 0. The problem is after that rather huge investment all they say was a gaming benchmark increase from 519 to 529.
That was a lot of $$$ to pay for a 1.9% improvement.....and improvement that was only observable with a benchmark. I am an AutoCAD user and I can think of no program which historically has been more disk intensive. I always opted for 15k SCSI drives because I saw a measurable increase in productivity and had this same argument with many users here on THG 15 years ago about this practice but from your side of the fence.
But today, AutoCAD 2010 doesn't work like AutoCAD 14. Today with cheap RAM available, and software vendors recoding to sue it and force less disk writes, storage has been rendered much less of an issue. Yes, there are niche users who may see actual gains but for the most part the only gains, other than boot times, are in synthetic benchmarks.
Now AutoCAD does incremental saves in the background when CPU activity is low. I used to see hourglasses on screen when this occurred, now nothing. And alot of people are limiting their SSD usage to OS only....even moving temp file and page file storage somewhere else.....which is kinda "killing the whole advantage" as most I/O activity on a machine, poast boot and program load is right there.
The argument is kinda like saying your car won't go fast cause the starter is undersized. Once running, the car doesn't use the starter. While the analogy isn't all that great because a PC will use the HD it just won't use it 98% of the time. I started my laptop on Thursday evening and it's now been running for 60 hour straight with my at the keyboard for about 20 hours.... in that time, I have less than 27 GB of read activity....or about 13.5 seconds of read activity every hour....less than 1/4 sec per minute over those 20 hours.
Even disk intensive stuff like copying a DVD the HD can't go any faster than the optical drive. The real question is can you see a measurable increase in productivity that is enough to offset the extra cost in a production environment ? Let's look at a real word application, say graphics shop importing pictures. The SSD kills at 235 Mb/sec to 68 for the top HD a resounding win. So I want to import 24 MB of pictures.....one does it in 0.35 seconds, the SD does it in 0.10 seconds ... it takes longer than that to move the mouse to take the next action.
Perhaps the better car analogy would be akin to me claiming I need to go out and get a Porsche so I can get to work on time. That's only gonna work if I can somehow avoid traveling on roads with speed limits. Today, in most cases it's not a machine bottleneck at all but user I/O which is the limiting factor in PC performance.
Now on a laptop, where the machine is constantly being turned on and off and rebooted several times a day, the criteria changes a bit. One bit of travel where you booting / rebooting in terminal on plan, after takeoff, at layover, on plane, after takeoff, you can see some real time savings. But on a desktop left on 24/7 w/ all the programs you regularly use loaded and waiting for you the cost, outside of niche markets, is hard to justify.
Certainly when capacities increase, firmware improves, TRIM 2.0 arrives and prices drop, it will be a viable option for most people but at $659 for 160 GB
That is the issue then, just how often is I/O involved and the answer is very rarely. before SSD's the enthusiasts clamored for twin Raptor's in RAID 0. The problem is after that rather huge investment all they say was a gaming benchmark increase from 519 to 529.
That was a lot of $$$ to pay for a 1.9% improvement.....and improvement that was only observable with a benchmark. I am an AutoCAD user and I can think of no program which historically has been more disk intensive. I always opted for 15k SCSI drives because I saw a measurable increase in productivity and had this same argument with many users here on THG 15 years ago about this practice but from your side of the fence.
But today, AutoCAD 2010 doesn't work like AutoCAD 14. Today with cheap RAM available, and software vendors recoding to sue it and force less disk writes, storage has been rendered much less of an issue. Yes, there are niche users who may see actual gains but for the most part the only gains, other than boot times, are in synthetic benchmarks.
Now AutoCAD does incremental saves in the background when CPU activity is low. I used to see hourglasses on screen when this occurred, now nothing. And alot of people are limiting their SSD usage to OS only....even moving temp file and page file storage somewhere else.....which is kinda "killing the whole advantage" as most I/O activity on a machine, poast boot and program load is right there.
The argument is kinda like saying your car won't go fast cause the starter is undersized. Once running, the car doesn't use the starter. While the analogy isn't all that great because a PC will use the HD it just won't use it 98% of the time. I started my laptop on Thursday evening and it's now been running for 60 hour straight with my at the keyboard for about 20 hours.... in that time, I have less than 27 GB of read activity....or about 13.5 seconds of read activity every hour....less than 1/4 sec per minute over those 20 hours.
Even disk intensive stuff like copying a DVD the HD can't go any faster than the optical drive. The real question is can you see a measurable increase in productivity that is enough to offset the extra cost in a production environment ? Let's look at a real word application, say graphics shop importing pictures. The SSD kills at 235 Mb/sec to 68 for the top HD a resounding win. So I want to import 24 MB of pictures.....one does it in 0.35 seconds, the SD does it in 0.10 seconds ... it takes longer than that to move the mouse to take the next action.
Perhaps the better car analogy would be akin to me claiming I need to go out and get a Porsche so I can get to work on time. That's only gonna work if I can somehow avoid traveling on roads with speed limits. Today, in most cases it's not a machine bottleneck at all but user I/O which is the limiting factor in PC performance.
Now on a laptop, where the machine is constantly being turned on and off and rebooted several times a day, the criteria changes a bit. One bit of travel where you booting / rebooting in terminal on plan, after takeoff, at layover, on plane, after takeoff, you can see some real time savings. But on a desktop left on 24/7 w/ all the programs you regularly use loaded and waiting for you the cost, outside of niche markets, is hard to justify.
Certainly when capacities increase, firmware improves, TRIM 2.0 arrives and prices drop, it will be a viable option for most people but at $659 for 160 GB
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Well i guess any further comment should be about whether disk I/O happens frequently for the majority of users.
Honestly, computers of regular users (not computer wizz') are a mess. Even if they buy a brand new one; it has about ~100 running processes and just booting windows and doing nothing you'll notice the HDD being lit alot of times.. It'll calm down but even then you'll see frequent HDD usage. That's when you're doing nothing.
Now the user does something, he clicks his browser. He has to wait 15 seconds before his browser loads and all the tabs are restored from his previous session. This task is likely 90%+ disk bound.
I'd like to do some profiling benchmarks in the future though; recording what I/O hits the disk. But i think its safe to say that the only bottleneck in modern PCs is the disk; the CPU is so fast its hardly a bottleneck - maybe with 'tasks' like compressing etc. And gaming is kind of a separate topic; as GPU performance is still the major bottleneck here.
I guess i could make my argument better by making a youtube movie.
It shows what i find frustrating about disk I/O and in what way slow HDDs contribute significantly to overall system bottleneck.
Since i have an I/O monitor running 24/7, i can instantly see what the disk activity is. Never in a moment is it fully empty. Even now i see writes and reads going on. Sometimes even enough to make the text in my window appear a fraction later. This PC features an HDD; the SSD workstations i have are just instant response, exactly how i want it to be.
Its not about saving 0.2 seconds. I'd say of all the work i do on PCs, the pure waiting time me staring at the screen waiting for it to be done is more than 50%. So the PC is slower than my (re)actions. Whereas the PC should be so fast that it shouldn't be humanly possible to notice any slowness. That's already possible with the hardware available today. But both software defficiencies and I/O design make this impossible with current implementations of the technology.
Still, if a PC is 'slow' - its virtually always the fault of the disk.
Honestly, computers of regular users (not computer wizz') are a mess. Even if they buy a brand new one; it has about ~100 running processes and just booting windows and doing nothing you'll notice the HDD being lit alot of times.. It'll calm down but even then you'll see frequent HDD usage. That's when you're doing nothing.
Now the user does something, he clicks his browser. He has to wait 15 seconds before his browser loads and all the tabs are restored from his previous session. This task is likely 90%+ disk bound.
I'd like to do some profiling benchmarks in the future though; recording what I/O hits the disk. But i think its safe to say that the only bottleneck in modern PCs is the disk; the CPU is so fast its hardly a bottleneck - maybe with 'tasks' like compressing etc. And gaming is kind of a separate topic; as GPU performance is still the major bottleneck here.
I guess i could make my argument better by making a youtube movie.
It shows what i find frustrating about disk I/O and in what way slow HDDs contribute significantly to overall system bottleneck.
Since i have an I/O monitor running 24/7, i can instantly see what the disk activity is. Never in a moment is it fully empty. Even now i see writes and reads going on. Sometimes even enough to make the text in my window appear a fraction later. This PC features an HDD; the SSD workstations i have are just instant response, exactly how i want it to be.
Its not about saving 0.2 seconds. I'd say of all the work i do on PCs, the pure waiting time me staring at the screen waiting for it to be done is more than 50%. So the PC is slower than my (re)actions. Whereas the PC should be so fast that it shouldn't be humanly possible to notice any slowness. That's already possible with the hardware available today. But both software defficiencies and I/O design make this impossible with current implementations of the technology.
Still, if a PC is 'slow' - its virtually always the fault of the disk.
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The CAD boxes I build are usually in the $3k category so you know I ain't skimping. But there are some functions in AutoCAD 2010 that I just can't explain. For example, the one thing that I wait for is so ridiculous it will make you laugh. If I rt click on something to change the properties of an object....say change text size from 3/8" to 1/4", the time it takes that dialog box to close is about 3 seconds....this seems GFX glitch related. Any other normal drafting action or editing action goes like wildfire, happens as soon as I complete the action.....of course if I manipulate a large CAD image, that's gonna bottle up the CPU for and GFX for a bit and I can get in a sip of coffee or two while it repaints the screen.
Now opening AutoCAD is a 10 - 20 second thing (750 MB program) which could go down to maybe 3-6 seconds with an SSD. However, I open it maybe once a week....the actual files are on an NAS and the local SSD isn't going to help me there. But still, opening a file even over the network is just 2 - 6 seconds depending on file size. Even w/ that ya have to look at the reality of hat you are doing. In that instance I am obviously beginning work on a new drawing. Does the 2-6 seconds hold me up ? No. because if I am starting an new drawing, I need to assemble the paperwork that I am going to be moving from paper sketched to CAD. So while my machine is taking that 2-6 seconds to load the drawing, I am taking 10 - 90 seconds unrolling the drawings, reviewing the comments and edits and figuring out what I am gonna draw 1st.
Browsers are another story, that's all network load trying to load all those tabs. Database manipulation is about the biggest storage related issue but given the sizes, SSD's aren't an option there.
Also, good HD setup and management is important. Partitioning the drive so as to keep all OS and swap files / temp files on the outer 5% of the disk is key. Getting all your programs in the next 15% will do a lot to keep speeds up. Minimizing fragmentation also keeps speeds up.
Here's another way of looking at it. According to a survey by Professional Services Management Journal, the average white collar worker spends only 35% of his time actually working. Now howz a faster PC gonna improve on that ?
Now opening AutoCAD is a 10 - 20 second thing (750 MB program) which could go down to maybe 3-6 seconds with an SSD. However, I open it maybe once a week....the actual files are on an NAS and the local SSD isn't going to help me there. But still, opening a file even over the network is just 2 - 6 seconds depending on file size. Even w/ that ya have to look at the reality of hat you are doing. In that instance I am obviously beginning work on a new drawing. Does the 2-6 seconds hold me up ? No. because if I am starting an new drawing, I need to assemble the paperwork that I am going to be moving from paper sketched to CAD. So while my machine is taking that 2-6 seconds to load the drawing, I am taking 10 - 90 seconds unrolling the drawings, reviewing the comments and edits and figuring out what I am gonna draw 1st.
Browsers are another story, that's all network load trying to load all those tabs. Database manipulation is about the biggest storage related issue but given the sizes, SSD's aren't an option there.
Also, good HD setup and management is important. Partitioning the drive so as to keep all OS and swap files / temp files on the outer 5% of the disk is key. Getting all your programs in the next 15% will do a lot to keep speeds up. Minimizing fragmentation also keeps speeds up.
Here's another way of looking at it. According to a survey by Professional Services Management Journal, the average white collar worker spends only 35% of his time actually working. Now howz a faster PC gonna improve on that
?
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Its certainly not network load trying to load the tabs; don't you think i analyzed that with my I/O monitor? The firefox 15-second wait is about 90% disk bound. It can also clearly be seen the IOwait skyroofs during this period.
And its logical, since the HDD has to perform non-sequential I/O, which its very slow at. And if you only want to use 5% of your HDD; then you can throw away every "HDDs are cheaper" argument, then a $60 500GB drive will be actually 25GB and that comes pretty close to the SSDs offered in this price range.
So i don't see a good defense for the HDD here. That in your case caching provides for most of the performance you need and you hardly launch/exit/reboot that's good for you, but in no ways applicable to the average computer user.
Maybe in your case an SSD isn't the greatest thing you could buy to speed up your kind of work. But i would say that in more average cases the SSD is the best buy to enhance performance - because the difference is so great and many average computer users have "too powerful" CPUs already; they just combine that with a very slow disk so picking an SSD here yields much more benefit than an even faster CPU.
People buying expensive Core i7 systems without considering an SSD is kind of like buying a ferrari but wanting to fuel it with BIO-diesel because its less expensive.
And its logical, since the HDD has to perform non-sequential I/O, which its very slow at. And if you only want to use 5% of your HDD; then you can throw away every "HDDs are cheaper" argument, then a $60 500GB drive will be actually 25GB and that comes pretty close to the SSDs offered in this price range.
So i don't see a good defense for the HDD here. That in your case caching provides for most of the performance you need and you hardly launch/exit/reboot that's good for you, but in no ways applicable to the average computer user.
Maybe in your case an SSD isn't the greatest thing you could buy to speed up your kind of work. But i would say that in more average cases the SSD is the best buy to enhance performance - because the difference is so great and many average computer users have "too powerful" CPUs already; they just combine that with a very slow disk so picking an SSD here yields much more benefit than an even faster CPU.
People buying expensive Core i7 systems without considering an SSD is kind of like buying a ferrari but wanting to fuel it with BIO-diesel because its less expensive.
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How does the data on those web pages get from the server to the machine w/o going through the ISP and the home / office network ? I just opened a tab and watched task manager as another THG tab loaded. Took about 1.5 seconds on my laptop, the I/O stopped a half sec or so before the page finished being painted in screen. I forget what OS you are using but Win7 is supposed to make this go away.
By the way I am wondering if one of the things you may be seeing is prefetching of things the OS thinks you are going to load or the browser thinks you are going to look at next.
http://msftmvp.com/Documents/BestPrac_SSD.pdf
You don't throw it away. How do you store stuff in your kitchen cabinets ? Most people put the stuff they use every day within easy reach and the stuff they bring out only rarely in the harder to reach spots. Same thing. If you open a file and work on it for an hour, almost all of your HD activity will be related to swap and temp file usage. So making the OS place those files on the fastest part of the drive is just good management. It's not wasting the other 90% of the drive. My laptop's OS partition takes up 16 Gigs, swap partition 8 and Programs partition has a whopping 4 Gigs of files on it's 32 GB partition....on a 200 GB drive, that's only just over 14% of the drive. The rest has data and a full backup of my office NAS.
Ok , make your case. I have 3 CAD users who work on maybe 3-4 files a day. Machines are on when they arrive in the am. They come in, start AutoCAD and then run over for a cup of coffee. At 9 am, 11 am, 1 pm and 3 pm, they are going to open a file from the slow part of the drive. It takes 6 seconds to get off the HD. Justify the cost of a SSD. How long will it take for productivity gains to offset that purchase ? I am counting 4 seconds x 4 files = 16 seconds a day. So let's multiply that by 10. In a real world, will these 3 guys push any more work out the door if their PC's would allow them an extra 160 seconds per day ? If they waited 60 seconds per file, again, will my firm make more money so I can pay for those SSD's ? Or will they just go home 1.5 minutes later than they would if they had an SSD
Again, people do not work in a laboratory. The question is:
-Will my CAD users complete any more work w/ an SSD as compared to a HD ?
-Will my secretaries type any more letters w/ an SSD as compared to a HD ?
-Will I get any more designs done w/ an SSD as compared to a HD ?
If not, then the cost can not be justified from a business perspective. Here's perhaps a better way to explain how people work. last week I had to make 6 copies of an environmental impact statement on CD. Each one took about 2 minutes on my 12X drive. Question, would I have gotten anyhting else done that day if I used a 24X drive ? Now here's where we are looking at things differently.
a) Your answer - yes, that's obvious, the job would have been completed faster, in fact twice as fast on the 24X drive.
b) My answer - no, I popped the CD in, pushed RECORD and hit the new messages button on my e-mail.....CD took 2 minutes to complete....I got 6 e-mails answered in that time. Popped 2nd CD in, pushed RECORD, returned knocked off 4 more e-mails. No matter whether I had a 12X drive or a 24X drive, I still finish returning my e-mails and the CD';s in the same amount of time.
So if you are going to stare at the bar moving across the screen until it finishes each recording, yes faster hardware will help you. If you are going to multitask and use the time for other things you have to do, then any delay has no relevance.
Well I have both a Porsche 930 and a GMC Envoy and oddly enough whichever one I use it takes me the same 35 minutes to get to work. It's not the speed of the car that matters it's what I have to go through and what outside limits are imposed on it. No doubt the Porsche is faster, problem is will I ever be in the position to take advantage of it. The computer isn't the bottleneck, I think for most of us, our ability to input the on the purchase, into it and read the data coming out of it and handle all the non PC related multitasking that goes on in our everyday jobs is.
A big $$ investment in a SSD might relive some frustration on those rare occasions when I am sitting at the screen waiting for something to happen...but unless there's a way one can make a business case and show a ROI,
da boss isn't going to approve that purchase....not at 35 times the cost per GB. When it drops to under a buck a GB, I think uptake will be faster.
Looking at market penetration, SSD's are expected to reach 1.5% penetration in the notebook market in 2009
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/print/20090625222922_SSD_Penetration_Rate_in_Notebooks_to_Reach_1_5_in_2009__Analysts.html
At $3 a GB, it's just a bit to expensive for most tastes ... drop to $ 1 / GB, up those warrantees a bit, iron out the firmware issues and wait for Win7 SP1 or TRIM 2.0 and I'm sure I will have 500 GB in every box. Right now 4 of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227450
at a cost of $1,340 is just a bit much....though on a laptop w/ 250 MB, I'd be almost tempted.
BTW, one of the things I was wondering about is failure concerns with SSD's and RAID....what's the thinking behre as compared to HD's ?
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Sure there is network I/O but that causes very low CPU; it may delay load times of pages ofcourse if the server or ISP is slow. But the issue i described was that with launching Firefox, it instantly had to restore 15 pages, where it has to do disk I/O. Before those are finished, the thread is stuck in IOwait state; frozen until the disk responds or a timeout occurs after a very long time. That will also let the animation of the tabs freeze for periods of time. This is clearly a sign of disk latency; caused by non-sequential access patterns. If the access was sequential, the IOwait percentage is actually very low even though the disks are being consulted heavily.
Worse, during these periods of IOwait the browser is unresponsive, not accepting user input. So if i open firefox and want to instantly load a tab to check some things, while at the same time its restoring 15 tabs, that's not possible. Even with firefox loaded i have to wait until the disk I/O settles down after a few seconds, and it becomes responsive again so i can open a new tab. These issues are gone if you look at two options:
1) SSD (low read latencies mean no interruption humanly noticeable attributed to disk I/O)
2) multi-threaded software design. there is plenty cpu time available - its just not used. With threading at least i can use firefox to open a new tab without any visible interuption, and a smooth animation of the other tabs loading in the background
I can't do option 2) of my own within any reasonable time, but i can choose for option 1, if i think its worth the money.
Yeah what does windows call it? Looked it up.. Superfetch, quoting MS:
"SuperFetch monitors which applications you use the most and preloads these into your system memory so they'll be ready when you need them."
That's a nice feature, though for SSDs it might not be required and adds to boot times. But for HDDs generally this means you don't have long application load times after a cold machine start, which is good.
Well as long as you don't use large data partition at the end of your drive, it won't hurt of course. And no you're right you shouldn't throw it away. But if you're going to use it actively you lose the benefit of short stroking.
I can't, only you can. Your situation is different from other people, i was trying to talk in general and to a wider range of people. If you only use one application and read a large file sequentially then HDDs are more value for your money and SSDs would only attribute in reliability and uptime, but not in overall cost or significantly add to performance.
The application data remains in system RAM assuming its large enough (4GB+, preferably more), so any disk I/O is only from large data files. So your access is highly sequential, while SSDs distinguish themselves from HDDs by also adding high non-sequential I/O performance. But as you described to me, that's not what you need. But as i said, other people have different situations and they are the ones who should judge whether the investment of an SSD or any product outweighs the costs.
That's kind of an odd remark to be honest, since you appear to be describing the (lack of) benefit of SSDs totally from your personal situation, while i'm trying to describe the benefit to a more wider audience of people.
Then clearly you do not appear to have any computer performance problems. As i said, other people's situation may vary.
SSDs don't fail in the way HDDs fail. If SSDs fail it should either be external influence (power, fire, physical trauma, extreme temperature, EMI) or a predictable end of lifespan - where the SSD has consumed most of its write-cycles and write-errors begin to occur. After this, the data on the SSD should still be recoverable.
Another benefit is that this type of failure (end-of-lifespan) is predictable, as opposed to HDDs who can fail suddenly and/or rapidly without lifespan predictability being reliable. With an SSD you can just look at the % of average write cycles, where 100% is the maximum write cycles. Normally with good wear-leveling, no flash cell ever is more than 2% more written to than any other sector; so they all differ by a maximum of 2%. This allows for very relaxed lifespan indiction and generally is no issue for all but the most extreme cases involving excessive non-sequential writes.
So generally, SSDs do pretty good as far as reliability goes.
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Even if you did, what's the impact ? Open a file, work on it for an hour, close the file....that area gets accessed twice in an entire hour.
Perhaps I explained poorly....what I mean is people don't single task....they are answering the phone, have people popping into their office, need to retrieve papers from files or lost on their desk, need to pee, get coffee ... any PC delay accompanied my a non PC related multitask does not slow anyone down. These interruptions are far more of an impact than and PC related delay.
Then clearly you do not appear to have any computer performance problems. As i said, other people's situation may vary.
I'm drawing on the experience associated with having to handle IT issues in two offices and I don't have any users complaining about I/O delays. I also build a lot of boxes for clients, friends and associates and no one there running into any issues as yet. CAD users wine about about CPU related things under certain tasks but these tasks are not done very often. For most business office related work, a $450 PC can do just fine and I have many users asking for $200 netbooks. Open office really isn't that big of a strain.
Of course, as Joni Mitchell sang, "you don't know what you got til it's gone", maybe if they ahd SSD's they'd be ragging me if they had to use a machine that didn't. My biggest complaint remains network speed as I have too many users violating office policies and playing internet radio.
Which basically points to my concern, when they do go, it's likely that in an array, they all gonna go at about the same time. So the idea of keeping a spare HD around for the inevitable HD failure won't suffice as if one goes, you can expect another SSD might go before a replacement arrives.
I'm also thinking of my experience w/ USB sticks where for whatever reason, I have people handing them to me saying that "they were readable last nite and today I can't read anything". A little more prodding and I ask "did you perhaps remove it before disconnecting it w/ the tray icon and I get a "maybe" .....
I also have had one of my own (Corsair 16 GB) go when connected to my laptop during a power outage. The laptop was plugged into a quality UPS when the lights went dark and yet, immediately after the drive was unaccessable. One would think two batteries would insure no power loss but some kind of quick mini spike musta made it thru and "upset" the thing. No other damage to anything else in the 11 PC office.
I have tried the standard methods of recovery on these things even buying a few recovery programs but none of them was worth a turdlet. Reformat them though and they are good as new.
So I gotta wonder, what happens to a desktop when power goes out with these things ? Are they as iffy as USB drives or are additional protections provided ? Once it becomes cost effective to use them and TRIM issues get straightened out, it would be nice to have a strategy in place which accounts for the changes in technology.
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