4 ms·

I still think the SSD requirement doesn't make sense. RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.

by jokoon 6y ago

Jtsummers 6y ago
Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer (after accessing remote systems over the network). It usually becomes the bottleneck after increasing RAM for most users, in my experience. The bus that transfers data from your hard drive to the CPU is much faster than what many spinning disks can actually manage. Address that, and many performance issues go away and you approach the essential limit of your system (bus speeds). Of course, I say this primarily from the perspective of a developer, where hard drive access is frequent when building systems. But a lot of workloads are similarly HDD dependent, but maybe not to the same extreme.
- jokoon 6y ago
  > Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer I guess the SSD is also slower than the RAM, so generally, storage is always slower. Ethernet/wifi is generally as fast as a HDD, in order of magnitude. There are many possible ways to avoid accessing the HDD, by buffering things and storing them on ram as often as possible. If HDD worked well on windows 7/xp/linux desktops, there are no credible arguments why it would not work properly on windows 10. Again I would say the problem is Wirth's law, which here easily benefits SSD. At one point, for an OS like windows is becoming so much complex that it becomes just impossible to optimize things appropriately for something else than a HDD. Backward compatibility and hardware compatibility might be one source of the problem, but I'm sure there are other things at play. I'm suspecting that in the end, the hardware people and people at microsoft decided to abandon the idea of having an OS that works well on a HDD, because the SSD industry would obviously benefit from this. Wirth's law has completely replaced Moore's law, in my view. I say this over and over, but when climate problems will cause economic problems, computing will return to an era of lightweight software and hardware.

I still think the SSD requirement doesn't make sense. RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.

by jokoon 6y ago

I still think the SSD requirement doesn't make sense. RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.

Jtsummers 6y ago

Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer (after accessing remote systems over the network). It usually becomes the bottleneck after increasing RAM for most users, in my experience. The bus that transfers data from your hard drive to the CPU is much faster than what many spinning disks can actually manage. Address that, and many performance issues go away and you approach the essential limit of your system (bus speeds). Of course, I say this primarily from the perspective of a developer, where hard drive access is frequent when building systems. But a lot of workloads are similarly HDD dependent, but maybe not to the same extreme.

jokoon 6y ago
> Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer I guess the SSD is also slower than the RAM, so generally, storage is always slower. Ethernet/wifi is generally as fast as a HDD, in order of magnitude. There are many possible ways to avoid accessing the HDD, by buffering things and storing them on ram as often as possible. If HDD worked well on windows 7/xp/linux desktops, there are no credible arguments why it would not work properly on windows 10. Again I would say the problem is Wirth's law, which here easily benefits SSD. At one point, for an OS like windows is becoming so much complex that it becomes just impossible to optimize things appropriately for something else than a HDD. Backward compatibility and hardware compatibility might be one source of the problem, but I'm sure there are other things at play. I'm suspecting that in the end, the hardware people and people at microsoft decided to abandon the idea of having an OS that works well on a HDD, because the SSD industry would obviously benefit from this. Wirth's law has completely replaced Moore's law, in my view. I say this over and over, but when climate problems will cause economic problems, computing will return to an era of lightweight software and hardware.