

A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too - startupcomment
http://www.slate.com/id/2266726/

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alabut
" _But it's probably not the processor that accounts for most of the speed
increase I've seen in my machine. The main help, I think, comes from the hard
drive._ "

He's totally right about using an SSD as the boot disk, I can't overstate how
much of a difference it makes, more than RAM, CPU or anything else. I've been
using one for a while and it made my secondhand 3-4 year old macbook pro go
from _barely usable for design work_ to _screaming top of the line_.

I'm probably going to switch to a hybrid drive soon though, like the 500GB
Momentus XT that comes with a 4GB SSD glued on. The big drawbacks of using a
pure SSD as a boot disk are that you'll either 1) run out of space on the SSD
and/or 2) forced to keep the data on a slower separate drive, assuming that
you're going with a moderately priced one and not spending a gazillion dollars
for one of the big ones with a lot of capacity. #2 might not matter to the OP
because he said he upgraded his rig just for the web browsing, but designers
like me routinely load up and work with large files, so I still get the beach
ball every time Fireworks tries to open a file or save it. This is where I
differ from the OP and the Jeff Atwood article he linked to: _I'd rather put
all of my data on just as fast a disk as the one with the OS and apps_. The
slowdown in opening large files is super annoying after you've gotten used to
the near instant times for booting the OS and starting up apps.

If I had one of the newer MBPs that came with a SATA interface for the optical
drive (instead of IDE like mine), I'd seriously consider splurging and going
with Stammy's dual RAID SSD setup:

[http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-
raid-0-arr...](http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-array-
with-2-intel-x25-m-ssds)

Even though I can't use it for RAID, I'm still going to swap out the optical
drive for an older IDE-compatible MCE optibay with a generic 500GB drive just
for backups with time machine and super duper. That way I can ditch the pocket
drive I've been carrying around this whole year and leave it at home for
nightly backups.

~~~
kscaldef
Not to knock the SSD, but I actually don't understand why it should help
significantly in the use case that the author was primarily talking about:
large numbers of tabs open in your browser. My instinct there would be that
more and faster RAM, and then to a lesser extent CPU cycles would be what's
important. Unless it turns out that you've got so many tabs open, and you're
cycling through them enough that you're going to swap and your swap partition
is on the SSD. But then, again, it seems like more RAM is at least as good a
solution as an SSD.

Can someone explain to me why an SSD should be a big win for web browsing?

~~~
chadaustin
Conventional drive: on the order of 800 IO ops per second.

Good SSD: on the order of 20,000 IO ops per second.

Now consider a hard page fault or disk access (browser cache, whatever) and
reverse the above numbers:

Conventional drive: ~1 ms / disk access

Good SSD: 50 microseconds / disk access

That adds up quickly.

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dasil003
Processor is hardly worth paying for top of the line.

I bought the new 15" MBP that was released this year with 2.4Ghz i5, and put
8GB plus an Intel X-25 SSD in there. Compared to my 2009 MBP w/ 2.4Ghz Core 2
Duo, 4GB and HDD, it's a bigger speed difference than I've ever gotten in any
upgrade ever. Definitely worth paying 40x for the drive space.

It's not that the top speed is faster... it's just that the beach ball is
_gone_. It's always responsive. I can be running test suites for a couple
Rails apps, watching an HD movie, and browser testing IE6/7/8 in 3 Parallels
VMs and it's always snappy. I'm totally spoiled for computers with the OS on
an HD. Using my wife's new MacBook for 30 seconds starts to make my blood
pressure rise.

~~~
barrkel
You'll notice the difference in CPU power if you ever do any video
transcoding. By my measurements, my i7 920 was around 3x faster than my Q6600.

------
photon_off
I purposefully use an outdated (3-5 years off the top of the line) machine to
ensure my web applications run well on anybody using a similarly outdated
configuration. I've considered upgrading and using a VM to emulate this, but
I'm not quite sure it'd have the same effect. I've found that what I have is
"good enough" to work on, but "not good enough" to run overly demanding
javascript and DOM riddled pages without noticing.

~~~
dingle_thunk
Actually, you will have a more accurate effect because most web servers are
VMs. Also, the ability to do snapshots/rollbacks/clones should _not_ be
underestimated. Upgrading from a dell E630 (T8100 2GB) to an E6410 (i7 8GB)
and buying a technet subscription has _doubled_ my productivity as a web
developer (not an exaggeration).

~~~
photon_off
How does a much faster computer _double_ your productivity? Other than booting
up programs, I'm rarely blocked by my computer being slow. The development I
do is mainly text editing with a browser to view results.

I could see this being different if I had to wait for things to compile,
though. But still, _double_ is a pretty large claim.

~~~
Groxx
How much time, focus, and motivation is lost due to slowdowns, though? Some
days, they certainly seem to take rather large tolls.

The little things matter.

~~~
photon_off
Little things certainly matter, but only a little. In my experience, the most
limiting factor in productivity is motivation and being healthy. These things
are orders of magnitude more beneficial, and rarely effected by, my machine's
speed. For the work I do (web development), the bottlenecks are _very rarely_
the machine itself. At worst, I need to restart Firefox once a day, which make
take up to a minute as I eat a banana.

------
Groxx
Ya know what helps a _lot_?

Reinstalling the OS (edit: from scratch. ie, format the drive + install). I
make a point to do so at least once per year. OSX has aged _significantly_
more gracefully than Windows, despite having several times as many files
(approached 3 million near the end), but a two-year-old install (I slacked) is
_nothing_ like a fresh one. Especially noticeable: Spotlight actually finds
what I'm looking for in less than a second again (vs upwards of a minute or
more).

It also highlights the differences between the OSes: OSX handles loads and
loads of applications at the same time with significantly less slowdown and
zero waiting on the UI. Windows launches and handles a single application
_much_ more quickly, but it's not uncommon to wait a significant amount of
time for a single click to register if I launch a couple large ones at once.
Just today I've had to sit for a couple minutes because a large compile+launch
decided to happen at the same time as a browser crash and an application auto-
updating. Win 7 utterly stopped responding, except for my mouse cursor's
movement.

edit: to all repliers suggesting Linux: yes it does, if you consider
reinstalling to be "reinstalling from scratch", which was what I had meant
(though not stated, apologies). Every OS slows with extensions + libraries +
millions of files + hundreds of compiled applications, and I'm likely a bit of
an edge case anyway. I pretty easily install 1000+ applications per year for
experimenting, many of which add extra cruft that no uninstaller removes
completely.

~~~
barrkel
Windows has historically been pretty poor at handling concurrent I/O to the
same device. I've seen circa 200M/sec sequential disk throughput fall to
10M/sec or so simply by trying to run another operation concurrently. The I/O
scheduler seems heavily weighted for latency rather than throughput.

~~~
rphlx
Maybe they optimize for latency because NTFS still fragments really badly.

------
DavidAdams
What this guy doesn't realize is that all the extra speed he's enjoying is
probably mostly a function of his new computer having a brand new Windows 7
install on it, that hasn't been crufted up by all the various crap that
eventually gets installed on it and slows everything down. If he had just
reformatted and installed a fresh Windows install on his old machine, he'd be
enjoying virtually the same "speed boost."

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eliben
What will help even more is becoming a bit more organized. Having 200 tabs
open simultaneously sounds like a lot of lost effort to me. Learn to use
bookmarks, history and especially the smart bookmark & history search
available in the address bars of Firefox and Chrome, and you won't need to
upgrade the PC just to support messiness.

------
MichaelApproved
"Will I ever outgrow my speed demon of a computer? At this point it's hard for
me to see how. Even at my peak usage, my processor never goes above 10 percent
capacity, and most of the time I'm using just 1 or 2 percent. I'm confident
this rig will last me at least five years, and probably more."

The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced.

It would be nice to know how much ram he had in the new vs old machine. I bet
the SSD + more RAM was probably where most of the performance gain came from.
He might have seen similar performance gain by just upgrading those two
components.

~~~
gbhn
Yes, I think for browser-heavy computing (the author mentioned opening
hundreds of tabs) a ton of ram and a fast ssd cache are doing a a lot more
than a fast cpu (and indeed, the author reports the cpu is usually operating
at 1 or 2 %). CPUs today are so fast and cache-sensitive that hard drives
basically amount to off-site backup. Unless you have a lot of ram, they'll
just starve and idle in I/O for most end-user types of compute loads.

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defdac
What I find interesting is that the best programmers among my friends usually
have very outdated systems. They can do anything with a computer and can
afford top of the line stuff, and still have over 5 year old hardware.

I was like that too and then got a fairly high end laptop with a fast 7200 rpm
harddrive and 4 gigs of RAM which made the concept of "swaptime" when booting
up my programming environment or compiling or doing both programming, music
and graphics - a mere memory.

I've never been more creative.

~~~
heresy
My 3 year old MacBook Pro with an SSD runs circles around my girlfriend's 2
month old version with a 7200 RPM drive.

Ditch the 7200RPM, get an SSD.

It is that big a difference.

------
DrewHintz
A screaming-fast PC changed my life. I now play 3D games all day long.

~~~
Groxx
Like a Rubiks cube?

------
mkramlich
not a good use of money just so you can have 200 browser tabs open -- you can
only look at one at a time anyway, for example. It's a bit like noticing your
house is overflowing with a trash and deciding that the solution is to buy 50
large trash cans, placing several in each room of your house. rather than, you
now, create less trash in the first place and/or take it out more frequently.
:)

~~~
acqq
Even worse, the author claims that faster work with 200 opened tabs _changed
his life_. How?

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kia
The same thing happened to me when I bought a new laptop. I realized how
terribly slow was my previous one. I also changed my priorities. Now I value
bigger ram and CPU performance instead of Graphics performance. Maybe that's
because now I have a constantly running VM with linux in background and don't
play games anymore.

