4 ms·

It sounds like a bunch of people who havent experienced the difference first hand, trying to convince themselves that they dont care.

by lparry 15y ago

city41 15y ago
I do care and I have no doubt that SSDs are faster and better. I too am holding off until their reliability improves. But I just tested starting my iMac with a 7200 RPM drive in it and it took 31 seconds from the startup chime until I was able to fully use it. So I can also understand people's hesitation. And besides, if I booted over to Windows 7, it'd take about 4 minutes until this machine was usable, so it's all a matter of perspective. EDIT: to be fair I just measured Windows 7 and it took 1:30 before the machine was usable.
- ericd 15y ago
  The boot time is just a convenient "wow" factor, the real benefit comes from the thousands of little everyday tasks becoming CPU-bound instead of IO-bound. A 7200 RPM drive is absolutely not comparable.
  - cubicle67 15y ago
    I recently replaced the 5400rpm drive in my macbook with a larger capacity 7200rpm drive, and the difference in performance was quite noticeable. Of course no where near the jump from 7200 to SSD, but still a decent jump. Downside is that the new drive is loud enough to hear, whereas the original drive was dead silent
    - ericd 15y ago
      Yeah, I did the same before jumping to 100% SSD. Also, heat/power consumption. If you need the storage of a spinner and can't afford a big enough SSD, running a small SSD for the system/apps with a 7200 RPM as a storage drive in the place of the optical drive works pretty well. Look for the cheaper versions of the OptiBay (which is a bit of a ripoff).
wallywax 15y ago
I have a laptop with SSD at work and an almost identical laptop at home, except it has a hard drive. There are unquestionably a lot of operations that the SSD makes much faster. But in normal day to day use, I can barely tell the difference. Booting is fast as hell, but how often do I reboot? I don't compile much on either machine, but neither do most normal users. I don't think the average laptop user is i/o bound most of the time (unless they're swapping, and then the solution is more RAM not an SSD). To me, the biggest benefit SSD gives is battery life. I like that it's quieter too. But neither of those is worth the price premium. Which is why I haven't stepped up for my home machine even though I get to compare it on a daily basis.
- frankwiles 15y ago
  SSDs aren't going to help you compile faster anyway... Other than network I/O, disk I/O is the slowest operation on a computer, speeding that up does speed up most operations for most people. Everyone is I/O bound all of the time.
otterley 15y ago
For many, it's simply that the increased initial load time isn't worth our time/money. The biggest bang for the buck comes in the form of added RAM, which augments the kernel's buffer cache on any modern OS. Many of us rarely shut down our hosts (perhaps to update the kernel, but that's about it) so we rarely have a cold buffer cache. For the average desktop/laptop user, unless your memory usage patterns involve allocating massive heap sizes for fun and profit, or grepping through every file in your filesystem, it's extremely likely that any application you launched or document you opened in the past few days is already in the kernel's buffer cache. And the buffer cache is much faster than any SSD.

It sounds like a bunch of people who havent experienced the difference first hand, trying to convince themselves that they dont care.

by lparry 15y ago

It sounds like a bunch of people who havent experienced the difference first hand, trying to convince themselves that they dont care.

city41 15y ago

I do care and I have no doubt that SSDs are faster and better. I too am holding off until their reliability improves. But I just tested starting my iMac with a 7200 RPM drive in it and it took 31 seconds from the startup chime until I was able to fully use it. So I can also understand people's hesitation. And besides, if I booted over to Windows 7, it'd take about 4 minutes until this machine was usable, so it's all a matter of perspective. EDIT: to be fair I just measured Windows 7 and it took 1:30 before the machine was usable.

ericd 15y ago
The boot time is just a convenient "wow" factor, the real benefit comes from the thousands of little everyday tasks becoming CPU-bound instead of IO-bound. A 7200 RPM drive is absolutely not comparable.
- cubicle67 15y ago
  I recently replaced the 5400rpm drive in my macbook with a larger capacity 7200rpm drive, and the difference in performance was quite noticeable. Of course no where near the jump from 7200 to SSD, but still a decent jump. Downside is that the new drive is loud enough to hear, whereas the original drive was dead silent
  - ericd 15y ago
    Yeah, I did the same before jumping to 100% SSD. Also, heat/power consumption. If you need the storage of a spinner and can't afford a big enough SSD, running a small SSD for the system/apps with a 7200 RPM as a storage drive in the place of the optical drive works pretty well. Look for the cheaper versions of the OptiBay (which is a bit of a ripoff).

wallywax 15y ago

I have a laptop with SSD at work and an almost identical laptop at home, except it has a hard drive. There are unquestionably a lot of operations that the SSD makes much faster. But in normal day to day use, I can barely tell the difference. Booting is fast as hell, but how often do I reboot? I don't compile much on either machine, but neither do most normal users. I don't think the average laptop user is i/o bound most of the time (unless they're swapping, and then the solution is more RAM not an SSD). To me, the biggest benefit SSD gives is battery life. I like that it's quieter too. But neither of those is worth the price premium. Which is why I haven't stepped up for my home machine even though I get to compare it on a daily basis.

frankwiles 15y ago
SSDs aren't going to help you compile faster anyway... Other than network I/O, disk I/O is the slowest operation on a computer, speeding that up does speed up most operations for most people. Everyone is I/O bound all of the time.

otterley 15y ago

For many, it's simply that the increased initial load time isn't worth our time/money. The biggest bang for the buck comes in the form of added RAM, which augments the kernel's buffer cache on any modern OS. Many of us rarely shut down our hosts (perhaps to update the kernel, but that's about it) so we rarely have a cold buffer cache. For the average desktop/laptop user, unless your memory usage patterns involve allocating massive heap sizes for fun and profit, or grepping through every file in your filesystem, it's extremely likely that any application you launched or document you opened in the past few days is already in the kernel's buffer cache. And the buffer cache is much faster than any SSD.