
24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds - darragjm
http://i.gizmodo.com/5166798/24-solid-state-drives-open-all-of-microsoft-office-in-5-seconds
======
patio11
That gives some interesting possibilities for computers in a few years -- one
relatively expensive drive for code, another cheap drive for data, for
example.

Probably 80% of your hard drive is stuff where the access speed is irrelevant
-- movies, for example, since your capability to read from the disk far
outstrips your eyes' capability to watch the movie. Photos, Office docs,
email, ditto ditto ditto.

Then there are programs -- or even a subset of programs, really -- that
actually have appreciable startup times. Office, Eclipse, etc, I'm looking at
you.

You could put those programs on the "fast" disk (along with most of the OS,
presumably) then make it as big as you pleased with cheap spinning platters.
With a little bit of software trickery, you could present the two disks as one
physical drive to the operating system (or to the end user) and shift data
between them using some sort of caching policy (LRU, whatever).

It sounds like a sexy idea for servers too -- can't afford to keep the entire
working set in RAM? No problem -- back up the RAM with solid state and only
write to spinning magnetic media when you need long-term non-volatile storage.

~~~
Encosia
That's the way to do it today too. In my machines, I use a smaller 10K RPM
drive for OS/programs and a large drive or two for data. It does make a
significant difference in performance.

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DanielBMarkham
Wow. Simply -- wow.

I was amazed at really seeing the HD bottleneck minimized this way. I always
knew about it, but -- wow.

~~~
jwilliams
Would be interesting to see a baseline against a RAIDx24 with conventional
HDDs.

~~~
tvon
Agreed. I wouldn't go so far as to call it meaningless without something to
compare it to, but I'd imagine conventional disks would still be very fast in
that setup.

~~~
jwilliams
Yeah - and perhaps for certain scenarios it might be faster? (Pure conjecture
on my part).

So - if seek time wasn't a big factor, a fast conventional drive could be
faster? And if you have a very high level of striping (ie. 24 drives), seek
time might be significantly mitigated.

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adamt
It's actually quite clever marketing on behalf of Samsung, and impressive to
seek them using 'geek marketing' in this way.

However, given that a 64GB Samsung SSD drive goes for about $500, 24 of them
(plus RAID card for that many) is still looking quit steep!

~~~
lionhearted
Sold state is pretty new - I'd expect the price to come way down. I know I'm
constantly looking at hardware from a years ago, thinking, "We were paying
hundred/thousands for _that_ back then? Damn, we've come a long way."

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whughes
Reddit thread:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit_samsung_gave_me_24_new_ssd_drives_to/)

The IT guy from the video is a poster there, so there is some useful
information if anyone is interested.

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iamwil
And then software will expand to make everything slow again.

~~~
dmix
Not if you consistently have $25,000 to spend on a computer.

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marketer
It's funny how they never say how much RAM this computer has.

Vista has a feature called 'superfetch' which pre-caches applications in
memory so they're never actually loaded from disk. Also, it's hard to tell,
but if this computer has sufficient RAM, you could conceivable load everything
directly from memory.

Also, the fragmentation test was a little dubious. A computer that new would
have very little file fragmentation, so of course defragging would be fast.

That said, it was an entertaining video!

~~~
jerf
If superfetch explains that, than surely anyone with 4GB can replicate the
performance within a factor of two or three. Can anybody with Vista replicate
that? (I don't have Vista and have never used it, so I have no idea, though
honestly, if Vista is superfetching 53 programs I'd be a little annoyed.)

Fragmentation test... well, it is a _marketing_ video, after all. The real
question is "why defragment an SSD at all?"

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jrnkntl
Although I understand the awesomeness of this video I don't get that a
marketing company comes up with this video. The nerd community is already
familiar with the potential of SSD's and their speed increase. I think that
the consumer market should be steamed ready for the 'next-gen' in hard disks
via a video that's not focused on RAID configs, 6 TBs, a benchmark of 2GB/s
and stuff. Focus on things like homevideo editing or working office, photo
apps, mediaplayer and stuff all at once.

More exposure, more familiarity with the hardware and advantages, more
potential buyers.

~~~
pilif
well... the video made me feel the urge to replicate the findings. At least to
some scale.

So they may have sold an SSD or two.

But then again, I'd probably go Intel and not Samsung.

Still. They got people talking and the video probably wasn't all to expensive
to produce, so they got at least SOME value for their money.

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ShabbyDoo
Desktop performance with solid-state drives is less interesting to me than
server performance -- specifically databases and other services where seek
time is more important than throughput.

Has anyone done performance tests with MySQL on low-latency storage devices?
As another commenter suggested for the desktop, strategies of using solid-
state for latency bound activities and traditional disks for throughput
intensive stuff might be an interesting hybrid to explore.

~~~
Encosia
Currently, SSDs' limited number of rewrite cycles make them unsuitable for
that type of server application.

~~~
wmf
That's a myth. Enterprise flash drives are rated for years of constant writes.

~~~
Encosia
The problem with those ratings is that you're only exposed to one side of the
potential deviation from the mean. A MTBF without standard deviation is
meaningless.

To put those ratings in context, consider that a Western Digital VelociRaptor
has a 160 year MTBF.

~~~
wmf
The good news is that the wearout of an SSD is a gradual, measurable,
monotonic process (because at every point you know how many spare blocks are
left), while the failure of a hard disk is a random process.

~~~
sketerpot
I had another hard drive fail on me last week. At this point I would give part
of my soul for SSD-style failure properties with sizes and prices comparable
to conventional hard drives. (I mean, assuming partial souls regenerate,
Xanth-style.)

I'm sure it will happen in a few years. I wonder if there's some starup
opportunity here: are there any ways to take advantage of fast, reliable,
cheap, flash-like storage becoming ubiquitous?

Probably you could add more fine-grained extension hooks to programs without
them becoming bloated, by having plugins loaded lazily at run-time from a
solid state drive. I'm convinced that the next big thing will be software that
quietly integrates with other software, so you don't even have to click on an
icon to use it.

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mcav
So, given that demo, does a single SSD perform substantially better enough on
a normal laptop to warrant the expenditure yet? (Last I heard, standard advice
was to wait until the price drops.)

~~~
old-gregg
Only if the drive is based on Intel's MLC or, even better - Samsung's SLC
flash.

Regular (cheap) MLC-based SSDs are good only at reading big sequential files
and lose out to 7200rpm drives when it comes to many small writes.

I can't find a ling to a guy who blogged about his disappointing experience
compiling C/C++ sources on a regular MLC drive, but I googled Linus Torvald's
experience with Intel:

[http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-
of-...](http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-
ssds.html)

I personally find that I just have all my software open all the time, most of
what I need gets pre-cached in 4GB of RAM I have, and I never reboot, i.e. no
need to restart anything [unless, of course, freaking Adobe Flash freezes my
Mac]

~~~
sho
This anandtech review was very helpful to me:

[http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34...](http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403)

Gives a lot of detail about the various types of SSDs and why the intel is
currently the best bet. Warning, reading it might cause you to go into a "gear
lust trance" and spend a lot of money.

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10ren
This should work with USB thumbdrives too.

The ones I've tested are faster than a HDD (and faster than the SSD in a eee
PC). They're also cheap.

Bottleneck would shift to USB bandwidth (60 MByte/s) and the PC itself.

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pchristensen
_The complete system defrags in about 3 seconds._

This part impressed me most.

~~~
MaysonL
Although I do wonder what the point of defragging an SSD is...

~~~
comatose_kid
There is none. Even if there were some advantage with sequential blocks, SSDs
should employ wear leveling, thereby spreading your bits across random blocks
anyways.

