

Your hard drive is too big - stefankendall
http://www.stefankendall.com/2011/12/17/your-hard-drive-is-too-big/

======
bunderbunder
Unnecessarily trollish.

A 1TB, 7200RPM drive costs like 100 bucks nowadays. At that price being able
to store large amounts of crap is hardly a giant waste. Half the folks I know
have burned that much money on collecting cases for their iPhones. For that
matter, it might not even be necessary. Me, I've got a couple big disks,
because my test data sets alone consume nearly a terabyte.

Second, I agree that having an SSD can be really beneficial. Which is why I
got one. But that doesn't imply that the presence of a 1TB drive is harmful.
It's absolutely OK to have both. Even a good idea, since they have different
strengths. SSDs certainly have great bandwidth and latency, but price per gig
is another metric that's worth considering.

For that matter, if most the work you're doing is CPU-bound and the software
you work on already compiles in a second or two, there's a chance that an SSD
doesn't really provide much value anyway. Booting might take longer, but any
reduction in boot time below how long it takes to get my morning coffee is
meaningless.

~~~
stefankendall
Price per GB is a crap metric; price per _used_ GB would be more relevant. If
your test data is terabytes, you externalize to servers or lock yourself into
only being able to work off a desktop. I also question whether or not a subset
of that data could be run locally, and the CI system could run a full stack.

This just sounds like a justification of a bad test environment.

I also can't think of any project that compiles "in a second or two".
Compilation and tests usually run build time into the minutes quickly, and
time grows linearly, or possibly superlinearly with a project assuming even
mild test coverage.

If you're locked into a desktop, you're locked into a network, and you can
stick big data on a NAS or centralized server for re-use and testing. Or do
you copy and paste the terabyte of data to every new developer?

~~~
bunderbunder
The latency and bandwith of a hard disk is unacceptable, but then you suggest
using a NAS instead?

Interesting.

------
derobert

        $ iostat -kx sda sdb sdc sdd
        Linux 3.1.0-1-amd64 (Zia)       12/19/2011      _x86_64_        (8 CPU)
        
        avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
                   0.93    0.02    0.72    0.25    0.00   98.08
        
        Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
        sdb               7.41     2.00    1.48    5.06   547.46    67.40   188.21     0.31   46.80  129.57   22.66   7.51   4.91
        sdc               7.40     2.01    1.47    5.16   547.20    77.23   188.43     0.33   50.02  164.44   17.34   6.75   4.47
        sdd               7.42     1.87    1.42    4.51   546.97    45.87   199.69     0.39   65.07  211.90   18.71   7.67   4.55
        sda               7.37     1.86    1.46    4.42   546.57    36.04   198.25     0.26   43.54  122.63   17.52   7.18   4.22
    

OK, that's 4 7200 RPM SATA disks, definitely not SSDs. They're in RAID10, so
definitely better than 1 drive, but still, all under 5% utilization.

Big builds, etc. pretty much are CPU bound, even on a quad-core i7.

That's true on my single 5400 RPM disk laptop, too (though it has a much
slower CPU).

These both run Linux—maybe Windows has ineffective disk caching; I don't know.
But please avoid calling people who have actually bothered to measure such
things and make decisions on it "fucking idiots".

(Disclaimer: no ridiculously expensive graphics cards here)

------
MrEnigma
The title really should be 'Your hard drive is the bottleneck/too slow, spend
money here for an SSD'

My work laptop came with a 5400rpm 750gb drive, however they provide a stipend
for hardware/software I need. First thing I did, 120gb SSD, optibay (removed
optical drive, put 750gb drive there), and 8gb of RAM (not near as important,
especially with an SSD, but still cheap).

~~~
sp332
Exactly. I've spent about $1600 so far on this PC, I have 6 hard drives and
about 7 TB of disk space (plus 2x1TB external drives). One of those drives is
an SSD, so all my programs launch fast and the documents I'm working with all
open and compile quickly.

------
teilo
Yes, I am a developer. I'm also a photographer. I shoot in raw. Therefore this
argument is invalid. When Macbooks can have dual hard drives, then this will
make sense.

~~~
ryan_s
Oh but they can. <http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/>

~~~
teilo
Awesome.

------
mbailey
I have burned through 8 SSDs in VM hosts. Using TRIM. I am not ready to trust
them yet.

