Saturday, April 05, 2008 7:17:12 PM
"The reason why I haven't bought one yet it was because the speed advantage was there but not anywhere near the "several hundred times faster" that now Intel is talking about."
of course there is! current SSDs can give you performance that is several hundred times faster. but note, this involves ONLY things that require access to a disk drive. if you have several GB of memory, then you're not really talking about the speed of your applications. basically it affects startup. unless you're a video editor, e.g.
note, ANY SSD is replacing a *mechanical" read head in your hard disk with electronic switching. ANY SSD is hundreds of times faster, or more, for applications that seek all over a disk (like booting up your machine.)
i'm not saying Intel's stuff isn't good or great. i'm saying that its not the productivity leap you think it is: any SSD provides that. the gains in productivity - i can't imagine what those would be, unless you do massive database work on small databases. the main impediment to adoption has been supply/cost. the fact that this is all very novel to you shows that there's really nobody out there that would rather have the benefits of a 64GB SSD over, say, a 180GB hard drive if the cost of those benefits is an additional $1000.
"The next time you do anything with your computer think the time you spend waiting after you click or do something or load a big file. Every day things. Not just loading the OS that you might do once a day or even once a week."
only happens for me with Photoshop, and that's not work, its play. nevertheless, there are lots of things that you can do to speed up disk access with traditional disks. you can buy a RAID. you can buy a faster disk. you can reorganize your disks. (Some OSs will do that, to improve startup time.)
not knocking SSD. you seem to think i am. i'm saying Intel's work is just incremental improvement, not a revolution.
"But what Intel is claiming here is a gargantuan leap in performance. Several hundred times faster can not just be dismissed as merely "yes, it's faster"."
um, yeah i can. intel is claiming 50x faster, not hundreds. the hundreds come from the other guy who is comparing SSD to harddrive.
look, you access data on a hard drive, and it takes milliseconds. if its big and stored sequentially, it loads pretty quickly, but if your disk is disorganizes, that's lots of little millisecond seeks, and those add up. you replace a harddrive with an SSD and you get seomthing that hundreds of times faster than that, cool. now your disk accesses are lots faster. no mechanical arm to move. so what took 30 seconds before now takes a fraction of a second.
now intel makes that process 50x faster. hmm. so what took a fraction of a second now takes an even smaller fraction of a second. that's cool. but at that point, your enthusiasm is getting pretty geeky. and once the response gets below 50ms, it probably doesn't even matter, since humans will invariably percieve the response as instantaneous at that point.
"That kind of performance is a paradigm shift."
no, it is not. even SSD is not a paradigm shift. the main benefits of SSD are light weight and low power. good for laptops. speed is nice but for most, it won't be noticed and will have almost no impact on productivity. if it does for you, perhaps you need to change your OS.
of course there is! current SSDs can give you performance that is several hundred times faster. but note, this involves ONLY things that require access to a disk drive. if you have several GB of memory, then you're not really talking about the speed of your applications. basically it affects startup. unless you're a video editor, e.g.
note, ANY SSD is replacing a *mechanical" read head in your hard disk with electronic switching. ANY SSD is hundreds of times faster, or more, for applications that seek all over a disk (like booting up your machine.)
i'm not saying Intel's stuff isn't good or great. i'm saying that its not the productivity leap you think it is: any SSD provides that. the gains in productivity - i can't imagine what those would be, unless you do massive database work on small databases. the main impediment to adoption has been supply/cost. the fact that this is all very novel to you shows that there's really nobody out there that would rather have the benefits of a 64GB SSD over, say, a 180GB hard drive if the cost of those benefits is an additional $1000.
"The next time you do anything with your computer think the time you spend waiting after you click or do something or load a big file. Every day things. Not just loading the OS that you might do once a day or even once a week."
only happens for me with Photoshop, and that's not work, its play. nevertheless, there are lots of things that you can do to speed up disk access with traditional disks. you can buy a RAID. you can buy a faster disk. you can reorganize your disks. (Some OSs will do that, to improve startup time.)
not knocking SSD. you seem to think i am. i'm saying Intel's work is just incremental improvement, not a revolution.
"But what Intel is claiming here is a gargantuan leap in performance. Several hundred times faster can not just be dismissed as merely "yes, it's faster"."
um, yeah i can. intel is claiming 50x faster, not hundreds. the hundreds come from the other guy who is comparing SSD to harddrive.
look, you access data on a hard drive, and it takes milliseconds. if its big and stored sequentially, it loads pretty quickly, but if your disk is disorganizes, that's lots of little millisecond seeks, and those add up. you replace a harddrive with an SSD and you get seomthing that hundreds of times faster than that, cool. now your disk accesses are lots faster. no mechanical arm to move. so what took 30 seconds before now takes a fraction of a second.
now intel makes that process 50x faster. hmm. so what took a fraction of a second now takes an even smaller fraction of a second. that's cool. but at that point, your enthusiasm is getting pretty geeky. and once the response gets below 50ms, it probably doesn't even matter, since humans will invariably percieve the response as instantaneous at that point.
"That kind of performance is a paradigm shift."
no, it is not. even SSD is not a paradigm shift. the main benefits of SSD are light weight and low power. good for laptops. speed is nice but for most, it won't be noticed and will have almost no impact on productivity. if it does for you, perhaps you need to change your OS.
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