How is it going with the Solid State Disk revolution? Are you already using SSDs? If you are what is your experience so far? Happy with the performance? Happy with the price/performance?
I've got an SSD in my macbook, and would recommend it to anyone who wants a faster machine. While expensive, SSDs are still worth it in my opinion - in many cases, putting an SSD in an existing machine makes a bigger difference than replacing the machine, and is cheaper.
My desktop and my netbook both run on Intel 40GB SSDs. Of course, the desktop also has two 1TB normal HDDs (Samsung F3s) for storage. / and /home are on the SSD.
My netbook is the System76 Starling netbook, and my desktop is custom built. The netbook takes about 15 seconds from Off the the Web. The desktop takes about 10 seconds from Off to the Web.
Launching Eclipse takes about 3 seconds (on the deskop; never tried on the netbook). Everything is incredibly fast.
Same experience here, got a 80MB Intel SSD for my desktop, and being able to start apps in windows the second login is completed is awesome. With a regular disk, you know you're waiting for all the background services and startup apps to launch before the app you actually wanted gets its slot in the I/O queue.
I did some tests on having my local repository on the SSD, but it wasn't substantially faster than my regular HDD, probably because working with it is sequential and heavily cached.
It will be nice when SSDs are price competitive enough to be the only storage in a desktop computer, if only for getting rid of the heat and the noise.
I'm a bit confused by this poll's "in production" wording. I have a SSD in my laptop, but I read "in production" as "in use in the server room" (maybe that's just my background in web hosting coming out.)
I'll answer "in production" with the caveat that important data should never be stored on ANY single disk or in any single location. (You'd think that would be obvious, but unfortunately, it's not, or else hard drive recovery services wouldn't do such a great business.)
I'm quite happy with the SSD in my laptop. I don't get any better battery life, but it does make the laptop "feel" faster.
Anyone who can afford it and knows about it has an SSD for their boot disk nowadays, including me. I just wish I could get a VPS with SSD storage, then my life would be complete.
I would absolutely recommend SSDs. It's one of the few times you can swap out a component in your computer and notice a performance boost. They are getting better very quickly though, so one big decision is when to pull the trigger. Every few months a new generation of SSDs with better firmware seems to come out. I've switched my laptop and home computer to SSDs.
Me either. This is the single best improvement I've made in the last 4 to 5 years. My MBP is awesome with this X25-M. I have adapted myself to use this little 160gb space very confortably using some external storage at home. This is great! I sure do recommend this to anyone!
They're just another product on the Moore's Law trajectory. Treat them the same as you do computers and phones -- plan to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and plan on only having the latest and greatest for about 12 minutes after you get it.
Wrong. HD speed improvements have been pretty flat, and has been far outpaced by HD capacity which is closer to Moore's Law. SSD offers a nice boost in speed. Don't just throw around Moore's Law as if you know something.
It would be stunning for SSDs to take off with exponential speed improvements. Sure, I expect them to get faster and faster, but I have no doubt that there's no Moore's Law at work in this case. I stand by my original comment.
kbob was replying to a post about a "performance boost" and then claimed without qualification that HDs were "on the Moore's Law trajectory"... I didn't invent anything here.
It really depends. Taking a hard black&white stance on other side is just silly.
Say you have an SSD that consists of 8x16GB chips. Internally it's implemented in something like a RAID0 array, which is why they're so fast. If the capacity doubles / size shrinks by a factor of 2 and someone decides to stick 16x16GB chips in the next gen SSD then you will see a speed increase. On the other hand if they go for 8x32GB you won't.
Moore's Law, as originally stated, is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. Flash memory is definitely on that trajectory, and SSD controllers look like they can make good use of increased transistor counts for a few generations.
My comment was directed to Matt_Cutts' complaint that he didn't know when to buy an SSD. I don't think it matters exactly when you buy one. (Though I personally am waiting to see how Intel's 25nm SSDs compare to those based on the SandForce SF-2000 controller around Jan/Feb 2011. Maybe I should practice what I preach.)
I switched over to a SSD (from a 5400 rpm drive) in my new laptop and didn't notice much difference at all. Everything was instant before, and it's still instant now.
This may be because I have a lot of ram, because I mostly work with small files, or because I'm using Linux which seems to be more resistant to bad disk IO speeds.
you never load a large program like gimp? The speed difference is huge when loading up gimp on a rpm drive vs ssd. It's also pretty big when doing something like a "select count(*)" over a huge un-indexed table.
Correct, that was my intention, but it's nice to have the data either way. I thought 2010 would be the 'year of the solid state revolution', and even though there seems to have been a shift it's nowhere near as dramatic as I expected it to be.
I've got an SSD in my dev machine. It's an earlier intel drive and I'm using WinXP. It has really fast read performance, making otherwise slow svn operations on my working copy effectively instant. The write performance is atrocious. When doing any significant writing, it tends to hang my whole system for 30 seconds out of every 90. I can't even move the mouse when it happens. Compiling does it, so I tend to do builds on a normal HDD. I suspect if I had trim support and plenty of empty space it wouldn't be a big deal.
I've been using the Intel X-25m G2 on my macbook pro and it's the best hardware investment I've made in years. The computer feels zippy all the time, and you feel like you actually use more of that CPU horsepower because your CPU isn't waiting on IO.
I started with an Intel G2 SSD in my MacBook Pro, then I added an OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E SSD to my desktop PC. My work laptop has an Intel SSD, and I'm considering picking a few more up for my servers at home and my media center PC as prices plummet. I can definitely say that they make a noticeable difference in perceived computing speed, and I'd never go back to regular hard drives if given the choice.
I have a SSD on my Macbook Pro. Totally worth it. Definitely snappier in booting up, starting up apps, and any disk i/o-intensive operations. It's certainly noticeable.
Also, you don't need to sweat the higher price per byte, because more and more of my files (and I would assume yours?) are on the cloud every day anyways, so 256GB or even 128GB is fine for me these days.
I did the same thing... and it was great. I added a 128GB SSD, but unfortunately, I needed more space for media and work files (large datasets). So, I ended up removing the DVD drive and replaced it with the old hard drive. I never need the DVD drive outside of the house, so this ended up working great for me.
I'm planning on doing the same thing with my Macbook when the new Intel 24nm SSD's come out in Q4 '10 or Q1 '11. The new drives will bring down prices on the 128GB drive to <$200.
For me, media files were a killer too, so I simply put my media collection on an external HDD, "cached" my favorite 20GB or so of content on my SSD (the stuff I put on my iPhone, essentially), and started relying more on streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Hulu, etc.
I did this in July and I haven't used the external drive even once...
There are several comments about people putting them in MBPs, but I guess I'll ask you... since OS X doesn't support TRIM have you seen any degradation in performance? I've been on the fence for a while due to the cost and OS X being behind the times.
I also haven't had any problems (though only after 3 months). I am both aware and a little nervous about the issue, though, so I've run a few benchmarks, and so far, so good. I'll be sure to tell HN if this changes.
I would like to make the switch but am currently broke. I can get 2x2TB for the price of a 128GB SSD and RAID them. The price still doesn't justify the "snappiness" in my opinion since RAID'd drives provide a pretty good performance increase as well as a size benefit. Keep in mind that size is important to me right now as I use my PC as a media server to my house and also a development machine.
I did this, and boy do I wish I would have added a second raid, or even single drive, for my OS. My computer becomes unusable when I thrash on the drives by unraring a large archive or something. I am going to toss in a mid-level SSD for the OS so I can avoid this hit.
Yeah I actually have 3x750gb right now for media storage and a 500gb drive for OS. I get a performance boost from the RAID, and don't have it impact my OS. Ideally I would toss in another 500gb and RAID for performance on my main drive, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. SSD would be nice, but 500gb HD for $60 is hard to beat.
Thought about buying one for some time, but after reading of the OCZ HSDL ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/30/ocz_hdsl/ ) i'll wait for the next generation hoping in bigger/faster disks, atm the size/price ratio is not yet good enough.
From what I gather HSDL is proprietary to OCZ, and unlikely to come to laptops.
Like many I've come to accept that SSD's will be roughly $2-3/GB for a while to come. I'd hate to spend all that time waiting while my spinny drive churns away valuable seconds of my workday.
I think this is an area where legacy support is really holding us back. I'd love to see us get to the point where we can just have a simple NAND controller attached to the PCIe bus. But doing that requires a flash-aware filesystem like UBIFS, and if you want to boot from it, bootloaders/BIOS that know how to read it.
We're currently stuck with PCIe->SATA controller->SATA attached NAND controller devices that implement their own wear leveling and bad-block management with degree of effectiveness widely varying among manufacturer's implementations. We have to use post-hoc benchmark results to attempt to reverse-engineer the the performance/price/longevity tradeoffs that were baked into the device.
I suspect that no mass-market ASIC company will be willing to get this on the market until Microsoft ships an OS with a native NAND controller driver and flash-aware filesystem and a system OEM contracts with their BIOS vendor to allow booting from the thing.
Don't wait. There's always something better coming, but the benefit from going from HD -> SSD is so much more massive than going from 2010 SSD -> 2011 SSD. (2008 SSD is a different story).
I think it's the other way around. I had a classifier in python hitting a sqlite db for every new training instance and it was taking forever, with the SSD it was done in 20% of the time. So developers these days are in danger of presuming that the deployment platform i/o is as fast as their development machines and shipping slow apps to users (or to their servers that are still on mech drives).
It's noticable in all sorts of things beyond startup times when you swap over to a SSD drive. Even something simple like browsers; browsers speed up because whatever they are using to store history and the currently open tabs for crash recovery doesn't have an i/o lag and so the interface becomes much more snappy and pleasant to use with a solid state drive. Should your app write such small things immediately, and slow down the UI for a fraction of a second, or cache the writes in memory a little longer for not-so-critical data and write at an opportune moment? Depends on the app, but people should be wary.
That said, I will echo everyone else who uses them and say it's the single best investment you can make in your machine. Especially with 40 gig drives around $100, even if that requires a bit of juggling when you fill it up and have to move some of your data from your OS drive to your legacy drives/backup solution.
I guess the general setiment is that even after a while of using it the ssd will still be orders of magnitude faster than your spinning disk. Doing an Xbench report on my ssd and my 7200 500gb seagate is laughable. One thing you should worry about is the damn thing being too fast and saturating the sata channel. I have a late-2009 15" mbp and it has a poorly implemented sata. If you do the fw upgrade to 3Gbps your drive will most likely not work unless you either get lucky and have a newer revved logic board or downgrade the fw to 1.6. I had to go this route. Email me if you need the link to the fw.
TRIM's primary value is preservation of performance as the disk fills. If your environment doesn't support it yet, you can stop-gap it by leaving a few percent of your disk space unallocated, giving the internal block allocators breathing room.
It's not perfect, but it is easy to configure and can make some difference without the reformatting hassle.
We have one database server with SSD (we need more speed than room) and are pretty happy with them.
On a more personal note I use a Seagate Momentus XT in my Macbook Pro and this is the single best investment I made in years! This thing cost a third of a "real" SSD of the same capacity and for what an SSD is shining (boot time, application launch, ...) it's on par. The 4GB SSD cache is really improving the experience (they should offer an 8GB version though).
I can't recommend this enough if an SSD is too expensive or not capacious enough.
I can second this. I bought the 500 GB version (currently $115 on Amazon). Boot times and launch times for common applications are much faster compared to a standard drive, but you also have the capacity of a standard drive.
If you have a laptop as your primary machine and need to store music and photos, SSDs with sufficient capacity are prohibitively expensive, which is where hybrid drives are ideal.
Seagate Momentus XT hybrid is very cool. But people not in a hurry perhaps should wait for Seagate to do write caching in SSD too. It will probably happen in the next few months.
I was hoping there would be observations here about this line.
The one thing that's given me hesitation with regard to it, is the reliability problems Seagate was running into a while back, e.g. the "click of death" (very) premature failures on some of their 1 GB drives.
If anyone has appropriate experience/observations, has their reliability trended back towards its old, high levels?
I will probably swap out my two 1TB HDDs when there are reasonably priced SSD equivalents. Right now, there's still way too high of a pricing premium and way too few choices for terabyte SSDs
We are using 4x 512GB SSDs (boy, these were expensive!) in a 16-core i7 computer, running in production using PostgreSQL 9.0.0, Glassfish 3.1 and ActiveMQ.
Works great, and we do heavy queries at lightning speed. We currently run Ubuntu Linux on it but would switch to FreeBSD 8.x if the Java support was better.
What I'm interested in is the effect of SSDs on compile time, which is the biggest bottleneck to my productivity. In my case, the build time for Java projects in Eclipse. I've read conflicting stories of how SSD affects this. Over here:
I use a SSD in my laptop, but our servers haven't made the move yet. So, this is an important thing to remember. Once, I needed to write a program to deal with large DNA sequencing files (10-100 GB per sample). On my laptop, the program worked great, but on the server it sucked due to the disk IO. I ended up needing a completely different algorithm, but this wasn't at all clear when using my SSD. If only we could afford a few terabytes of SSD...
152 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadMy netbook is the System76 Starling netbook, and my desktop is custom built. The netbook takes about 15 seconds from Off the the Web. The desktop takes about 10 seconds from Off to the Web.
Launching Eclipse takes about 3 seconds (on the deskop; never tried on the netbook). Everything is incredibly fast.
I did some tests on having my local repository on the SSD, but it wasn't substantially faster than my regular HDD, probably because working with it is sequential and heavily cached.
It will be nice when SSDs are price competitive enough to be the only storage in a desktop computer, if only for getting rid of the heat and the noise.
I'll answer "in production" with the caveat that important data should never be stored on ANY single disk or in any single location. (You'd think that would be obvious, but unfortunately, it's not, or else hard drive recovery services wouldn't do such a great business.)
I'm quite happy with the SSD in my laptop. I don't get any better battery life, but it does make the laptop "feel" faster.
Say you have an SSD that consists of 8x16GB chips. Internally it's implemented in something like a RAID0 array, which is why they're so fast. If the capacity doubles / size shrinks by a factor of 2 and someone decides to stick 16x16GB chips in the next gen SSD then you will see a speed increase. On the other hand if they go for 8x32GB you won't.
My comment was directed to Matt_Cutts' complaint that he didn't know when to buy an SSD. I don't think it matters exactly when you buy one. (Though I personally am waiting to see how Intel's 25nm SSDs compare to those based on the SandForce SF-2000 controller around Jan/Feb 2011. Maybe I should practice what I preach.)
This may be because I have a lot of ram, because I mostly work with small files, or because I'm using Linux which seems to be more resistant to bad disk IO speeds.
However I do like the gain in battery life.
Also, you don't need to sweat the higher price per byte, because more and more of my files (and I would assume yours?) are on the cloud every day anyways, so 256GB or even 128GB is fine for me these days.
For me, media files were a killer too, so I simply put my media collection on an external HDD, "cached" my favorite 20GB or so of content on my SSD (the stuff I put on my iPhone, essentially), and started relying more on streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Hulu, etc.
I did this in July and I haven't used the external drive even once...
When there are physical reads, the response time is awesomely fast. An IO is less than 1ms. For the drive included with my machine an IO was ~10ms.
It's response time (not throughput - as seen in many benchmarks) that makes you want an SSD on your desktop.
Like many I've come to accept that SSD's will be roughly $2-3/GB for a while to come. I'd hate to spend all that time waiting while my spinny drive churns away valuable seconds of my workday.
We're currently stuck with PCIe->SATA controller->SATA attached NAND controller devices that implement their own wear leveling and bad-block management with degree of effectiveness widely varying among manufacturer's implementations. We have to use post-hoc benchmark results to attempt to reverse-engineer the the performance/price/longevity tradeoffs that were baked into the device.
I suspect that no mass-market ASIC company will be willing to get this on the market until Microsoft ships an OS with a native NAND controller driver and flash-aware filesystem and a system OEM contracts with their BIOS vendor to allow booting from the thing.
It's noticable in all sorts of things beyond startup times when you swap over to a SSD drive. Even something simple like browsers; browsers speed up because whatever they are using to store history and the currently open tabs for crash recovery doesn't have an i/o lag and so the interface becomes much more snappy and pleasant to use with a solid state drive. Should your app write such small things immediately, and slow down the UI for a fraction of a second, or cache the writes in memory a little longer for not-so-critical data and write at an opportune moment? Depends on the app, but people should be wary.
That said, I will echo everyone else who uses them and say it's the single best investment you can make in your machine. Especially with 40 gig drives around $100, even if that requires a bit of juggling when you fill it up and have to move some of your data from your OS drive to your legacy drives/backup solution.
Some blogs says that the "easy fix" for lack of TRIM is to just backup/reformat/restore your SSD every X months. Eeech
It's not perfect, but it is easy to configure and can make some difference without the reformatting hassle.
On a more personal note I use a Seagate Momentus XT in my Macbook Pro and this is the single best investment I made in years! This thing cost a third of a "real" SSD of the same capacity and for what an SSD is shining (boot time, application launch, ...) it's on par. The 4GB SSD cache is really improving the experience (they should offer an 8GB version though).
I can't recommend this enough if an SSD is too expensive or not capacious enough.
If you have a laptop as your primary machine and need to store music and photos, SSDs with sufficient capacity are prohibitively expensive, which is where hybrid drives are ideal.
The one thing that's given me hesitation with regard to it, is the reliability problems Seagate was running into a while back, e.g. the "click of death" (very) premature failures on some of their 1 GB drives.
If anyone has appropriate experience/observations, has their reliability trended back towards its old, high levels?
Works great, and we do heavy queries at lightning speed. We currently run Ubuntu Linux on it but would switch to FreeBSD 8.x if the Java support was better.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499889/ssd-and-programmin...
its mentioned that CPU is by and large the bottleneck but over here:
http://javamoods.blogspot.com/2010/04/hdd-ssd-battle.html
the author mentions that the SSD gives big speedups to compile time.
Anyone has any data to share in regards to this?
When you compile, does your computer's hard drive thrash, or is the CPU pegged at 100%?
It won't make purely random reads fast, but it makes my workloads scream.