6 ms·

The switch from a mechanical HDD to a SDD was the biggest gain in performance I've seen from any piece of hardware. I still remember the time when HDDs were the

The switch from a mechanical HDD to a SDD was the biggest gain in performance I've seen from any piece of hardware. I still remember the time when HDDs were the norm and the agony of waiting on loading/accessing something from disk was real.

heywire 5y ago
I do a lot of work with virtual machines at <dayjob>, and don’t have enough room on the internal ssd to hold them all. I usually swap them in and out as I work on different projects, but every once in a while I’ll boot one direct from an external usb3 HDD. I can’t believe we used to work that way. I couldn’t imagine going back. An SSD can breathe new life into a 10+ year old system easily, too.
- ColonelPhantom 5y ago
  What OS are you running inside the VM's? I was quite late with upgrading to an SSD, and Windows 10 was unusably slow, while Linux was quite usable. Sure, it still got quite a bit faster with an SSD, but it was far from as life-changing as it was for Windows.
dlhavema 5y ago
I cannot agree more. This switch breathed new life into my home ( Windows 10 ) computer. If only i did it with a larger drove though... Im atruggling through my system drive on a 90gb ssd...
- stevezsa8 5y ago
  Given how cheap SSDs are now, unless you are living below the poverty line, buy a 500GB MX500 for ~60USD. You deserve it :]
- pmarreck 5y ago
  this is waaaaaay too small. you can definitely afford something larger now
myfavoritedog 5y ago
SSDs gave my laptops longer effective life. Turns out that the main reason my laptops felt so slow after a few years wasn't software bloat. It was cruft in the file system.
washadjeffmad 5y ago
Good solid-state storage has been the biggest quality of life improvement you can make to a single-disk device for the past decade. I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases: The hard drive, RAM, and CPU are like the fridge, the prep table, and the stove. In the days of high storage latency and low throughput mechanical storage, it took a few weeks to gather ingredients from the fridge and bring them back to your prep table, so it made sense to buy the largest prep table you could afford to save yourself the trip. However, your stove only had one or two burners, so you were still waiting around for one thing to finish cooking one thing so you could move on to another. Today, high bandwidth, low latency storage like NVMe means you have an always-on instantaneous portal to the ingredients realm so there's no real need for the extra-large prep table. It's usually better to spend the money on more burners for the stove so you can keep it as busy as possible and get the most work out. It's a vast over simplification, but I can't help but sigh when someone says they literally cannot do their job without 64GB of RAM and then choose a quad-core or some low-power series laptop.
- maccard 5y ago
  > I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases: Industry dependent, of course. Desktop processers are getting more and more parallel, and more cores requires more ram. I have a 32 core Threadripper in my workstation with 128GB RAM, and on full compiles I still OOM. My next upgrade to this machine will be 192GB.
  - shaky-carrousel 5y ago
    Can I ask you which motherboard do you have? I'm thinking on building a PC, but the last time I did that was twenty years ago, so my knowledge is slightly obsolete.
    - maccard 5y ago

heywire 5y ago

I do a lot of work with virtual machines at <dayjob>, and don’t have enough room on the internal ssd to hold them all. I usually swap them in and out as I work on different projects, but every once in a while I’ll boot one direct from an external usb3 HDD. I can’t believe we used to work that way. I couldn’t imagine going back. An SSD can breathe new life into a 10+ year old system easily, too.

ColonelPhantom 5y ago
What OS are you running inside the VM's? I was quite late with upgrading to an SSD, and Windows 10 was unusably slow, while Linux was quite usable. Sure, it still got quite a bit faster with an SSD, but it was far from as life-changing as it was for Windows.

dlhavema 5y ago

I cannot agree more. This switch breathed new life into my home ( Windows 10 ) computer. If only i did it with a larger drove though... Im atruggling through my system drive on a 90gb ssd...

stevezsa8 5y ago
Given how cheap SSDs are now, unless you are living below the poverty line, buy a 500GB MX500 for ~60USD. You deserve it :]
pmarreck 5y ago
this is waaaaaay too small. you can definitely afford something larger now

myfavoritedog 5y ago

SSDs gave my laptops longer effective life. Turns out that the main reason my laptops felt so slow after a few years wasn't software bloat. It was cruft in the file system.

washadjeffmad 5y ago

Good solid-state storage has been the biggest quality of life improvement you can make to a single-disk device for the past decade. I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases: The hard drive, RAM, and CPU are like the fridge, the prep table, and the stove. In the days of high storage latency and low throughput mechanical storage, it took a few weeks to gather ingredients from the fridge and bring them back to your prep table, so it made sense to buy the largest prep table you could afford to save yourself the trip. However, your stove only had one or two burners, so you were still waiting around for one thing to finish cooking one thing so you could move on to another. Today, high bandwidth, low latency storage like NVMe means you have an always-on instantaneous portal to the ingredients realm so there's no real need for the extra-large prep table. It's usually better to spend the money on more burners for the stove so you can keep it as busy as possible and get the most work out. It's a vast over simplification, but I can't help but sigh when someone says they literally cannot do their job without 64GB of RAM and then choose a quad-core or some low-power series laptop.

maccard 5y ago
> I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases: Industry dependent, of course. Desktop processers are getting more and more parallel, and more cores requires more ram. I have a 32 core Threadripper in my workstation with 128GB RAM, and on full compiles I still OOM. My next upgrade to this machine will be 192GB.
- shaky-carrousel 5y ago
  Can I ask you which motherboard do you have? I'm thinking on building a PC, but the last time I did that was twenty years ago, so my knowledge is slightly obsolete.
  - maccard 5y ago