4 ms·

5400 rpm disk Even with a perfect scheduler you're going to have to wait on I/O. Disk speeds are the limiting factor on most machines, and this goes double for

5400 rpm disk Even with a perfect scheduler you're going to have to wait on I/O. Disk speeds are the limiting factor on most machines, and this goes double for laptops. I highly recommend getting an SSD.

zemanel 16y ago
yes, i'd like that very much but the current prices are too high for me.
- AngryParsley 16y ago
  You can afford a MacBook Pro but you can't afford an SSD that costs 25% of that? (A really fast expensive SSD is around $400.)
  - jseliger 16y ago
    Bingo: if I used a MBP as my main computer, I'd take out the optical drive and put in something like this: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extr... for $99. Or the 60GB version for $149.
  - zemanel 16y ago
    erhm yeah basically :) recently said "no more", quit my job, bought a MBP and struggling to get bootstrapping work. One wave short of a ship wreck? Yes. Free to be creative, free from LAMPish crappy apps, free to hack away Dojo/Django/Postgres apps, free from bosses who don't code? Fuck yeah
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    Spending a thousand or two on a computer is a hell of a lot easier to justify than spending several hundred on a harddrive. Particularly when you can find less fancy harddrives for a fraction of that. SSDs are far more of a luxury item than laptops.
    - teyc 16y ago
      Agreed. My lizard brain tells me that too. When we buy a faster processor, we are valuing our time against the cost of the processor. I just have to convince the lizard inside to do the same with disk wait times.
      - moe 16y ago
        For most desktop workloads the disk wait times exceed the processor wait times by orders of magnitude.
acdha 16y ago
But not anywhere near what we see: BeOS on my 1999-era system handily trumped Linux, Windows or Mac OS on 2010 hardware (non-SSD) when it came to interactive performance, solely because it had a better I/O scheduler. Back then, I could surf the web without being constantly reminded that I had Mozilla compiling & DV streaming off of a camera; today I'm regularly reminded that work is happening in the background. This isn't to say that there aren't real limits or that BeOS was perfect (far from it) but simply that there's considerable room for improvement before we start hitting theoretical limits.

zemanel 16y ago

yes, i'd like that very much but the current prices are too high for me.

AngryParsley 16y ago
You can afford a MacBook Pro but you can't afford an SSD that costs 25% of that? (A really fast expensive SSD is around $400.)
- jseliger 16y ago
  Bingo: if I used a MBP as my main computer, I'd take out the optical drive and put in something like this: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extr... for $99. Or the 60GB version for $149.
- zemanel 16y ago
  erhm yeah basically :) recently said "no more", quit my job, bought a MBP and struggling to get bootstrapping work. One wave short of a ship wreck? Yes. Free to be creative, free from LAMPish crappy apps, free to hack away Dojo/Django/Postgres apps, free from bosses who don't code? Fuck yeah
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  Spending a thousand or two on a computer is a hell of a lot easier to justify than spending several hundred on a harddrive. Particularly when you can find less fancy harddrives for a fraction of that. SSDs are far more of a luxury item than laptops.
  - teyc 16y ago
    Agreed. My lizard brain tells me that too. When we buy a faster processor, we are valuing our time against the cost of the processor. I just have to convince the lizard inside to do the same with disk wait times.
    - moe 16y ago
      For most desktop workloads the disk wait times exceed the processor wait times by orders of magnitude.

acdha 16y ago

But not anywhere near what we see: BeOS on my 1999-era system handily trumped Linux, Windows or Mac OS on 2010 hardware (non-SSD) when it came to interactive performance, solely because it had a better I/O scheduler. Back then, I could surf the web without being constantly reminded that I had Mozilla compiling & DV streaming off of a camera; today I'm regularly reminded that work is happening in the background. This isn't to say that there aren't real limits or that BeOS was perfect (far from it) but simply that there's considerable room for improvement before we start hitting theoretical limits.