4 ms·

Yeah... SSDs are so much faster than spinning disk it's not even funny. I literally refuse to run a machine that boots its main OS from spinning disk anymore.

Yeah... SSDs are so much faster than spinning disk it's not even funny. I literally refuse to run a machine that boots its main OS from spinning disk anymore. The 60 bucks to throw an SSD into it is so incredibly cheap for what you get. My wife's work gave her a (fairly basic but still fine) thinkpad - except they left the main drive as a fucking 5400rpm hdd. Then acted like assclowns when we repeatedly showed them that the machine is stalling on disk IO, while the rest of the system is doing diddly squat waiting around. I finally got tired of it and we "accidentally" spilled water on it, and somehow just the hdd stopped working (I left out the part where I'd removed it from the laptop first...). Then I just had her expense a new SSD and she no longer hates her work laptop. Long story short - Storage speeds are incredible compared to what they were when I went to school (when 10k rpm was considered exorbitant)

capitainenemo 5y ago
The living room media/gaming machine at home is an 8 terabyte spinning rust. I didn't bother with a separate SSD boot partition. It's currently been running for 23 days. Booting takes ~15 seconds even on spinning rust for a reasonable linux distro, so I'm not going to stress about those 15 seconds every couple of months. total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31Gi 4.6Gi 21Gi 158Mi 5.1Gi 25Gi Swap: 37Gi 617Mi 36Gi 5.1 gigabytes mostly just file cache. As a result, everything opens essentially instantly. For a bit better experience, I did a: find ~/minecraft/world -type f -exec cat {} > /dev/null \; to forcibly cache that, but that was all I did.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  Hah, if you can fit the whole OS plus running applications easily in RAM, and you don't boot often - fine. But you're basically doing the same thing but with extra steps :P
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    Well, RAM is significantly faster than even SSD, and now I don't have to muck about w/ a 2nd drive :) Not to mention the spinning rust is cheaper.
    - horsawlarway 5y ago
      Sure, but that RAM isn't :) I can get a 60gb ssd for under 20 bucks (I just checked 18.99 on amazon - even I'm a little surprised at how cheap that is) That 32gb of ram is at least a crisp hundred (which also - fucking mind blowing. First time I ever added a part to a PC, it was to add 256mb of ram, and that was huge deal)
      - capitainenemo 5y ago
        Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever random game is out there. So. A lot more useful than an SSD ;) Also I'd be concerned about any SSD you can get for that price. And, frankly, you don't need that much RAM to have a pleasant desktop experience. Most of that is just for the gaming. Just a gig or two of file cache for the hot stuff. Which is what your OS usually does anyway. The tower my workplace bought me is also spinning rust, and they for some reason put an enormous amount of RAM in it too. Only 5 gigs are actually being used for caching. The OS can't figure out what to do with the rest after having, I suppose loaded browser (few hundred megs), VMWare, OpenOffice etc. Even if I was running something more bloaty than Mate I doubt I could find a way to burn more than another gigabyte :)
        horsawlarway 5y ago
        I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw it on a spinning 2tb drive or something. I'm not saying don't use cheap storage, I'm just saying... try the SSD. It costs about the same as coffee for the week.
- andai 5y ago
  Linux still works OK on spinny disk (though exponentially worse every year as applications trend towards bloated Electron), but Win10 is nigh unusable on a spinny disk (technically works but very unpleasant). It works quite comfortably on ancient hardware though given a SSD and sufficient RAM.
  - wistlo 5y ago
dekhn 5y ago
(your hard drive story is the story of my life, up to about 10 years ago. I have eliminated all but one hard drive from my house and that one doesn't spin most of the time) Lately my vendor discussions have centered around how much work you can get done with a machine that has half a terabyte of RAM, 96 cores, and 8 NVME SSDs (it's a lot). my college box: 40MB disk, 4MB RAM, 1 66MHz CPU.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  I assume you meant half a terabyte of ram
mirker 5y ago
That’s fine until you have to store the whole world’s cat videos on Youtube at minimal cost.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  > boots its main OS Use cheap storage for when you want cheap performance (like those pesky dancing cats :) )
jedberg 5y ago
My wife was a teacher and we had a similar story. They gave her a perfectly fine MacBook with spinning disk and the smallest memory possible (this was about 10 years ago). I upgraded the RAM to max and the disk to SSD and just put the original pieces away. She was happy, and when it came time to turn it in, we just put the original bits back in.
wistlo 5y ago
You're a good husband. I did the same for my wife, and her 2012 core I7 HP Elitebook acted like it was ten years younger. But I went a step further: the mother-in-law. She had a lower grade I3 laptop from around 2008 that took 20 minutes to boot Windows 10. It now boots in 15 seconds with a stock 512GB SSD. I am being rewarded by both (but in very different ways).
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  >I am being rewarded by both (but in very different ways). I'm going to hell for this.
girvo 5y ago
Lusting after those 10k VelociRaptor drives back in high school... man I have a funny amount of nostalgia for, in hindsight, pretty average hardware once the world moved forward!

capitainenemo 5y ago

The living room media/gaming machine at home is an 8 terabyte spinning rust. I didn't bother with a separate SSD boot partition. It's currently been running for 23 days. Booting takes ~15 seconds even on spinning rust for a reasonable linux distro, so I'm not going to stress about those 15 seconds every couple of months. total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31Gi 4.6Gi 21Gi 158Mi 5.1Gi 25Gi Swap: 37Gi 617Mi 36Gi 5.1 gigabytes mostly just file cache. As a result, everything opens essentially instantly. For a bit better experience, I did a: find ~/minecraft/world -type f -exec cat {} > /dev/null \; to forcibly cache that, but that was all I did.

horsawlarway 5y ago
Hah, if you can fit the whole OS plus running applications easily in RAM, and you don't boot often - fine. But you're basically doing the same thing but with extra steps :P
- capitainenemo 5y ago
  Well, RAM is significantly faster than even SSD, and now I don't have to muck about w/ a 2nd drive :) Not to mention the spinning rust is cheaper.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    Sure, but that RAM isn't :) I can get a 60gb ssd for under 20 bucks (I just checked 18.99 on amazon - even I'm a little surprised at how cheap that is) That 32gb of ram is at least a crisp hundred (which also - fucking mind blowing. First time I ever added a part to a PC, it was to add 256mb of ram, and that was huge deal)
    - capitainenemo 5y ago
      Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever random game is out there. So. A lot more useful than an SSD ;) Also I'd be concerned about any SSD you can get for that price. And, frankly, you don't need that much RAM to have a pleasant desktop experience. Most of that is just for the gaming. Just a gig or two of file cache for the hot stuff. Which is what your OS usually does anyway. The tower my workplace bought me is also spinning rust, and they for some reason put an enormous amount of RAM in it too. Only 5 gigs are actually being used for caching. The OS can't figure out what to do with the rest after having, I suppose loaded browser (few hundred megs), VMWare, OpenOffice etc. Even if I was running something more bloaty than Mate I doubt I could find a way to burn more than another gigabyte :)
      - horsawlarway 5y ago
        I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw it on a spinning 2tb drive or something. I'm not saying don't use cheap storage, I'm just saying... try the SSD. It costs about the same as coffee for the week.
andai 5y ago
Linux still works OK on spinny disk (though exponentially worse every year as applications trend towards bloated Electron), but Win10 is nigh unusable on a spinny disk (technically works but very unpleasant). It works quite comfortably on ancient hardware though given a SSD and sufficient RAM.
- wistlo 5y ago

dekhn 5y ago

(your hard drive story is the story of my life, up to about 10 years ago. I have eliminated all but one hard drive from my house and that one doesn't spin most of the time) Lately my vendor discussions have centered around how much work you can get done with a machine that has half a terabyte of RAM, 96 cores, and 8 NVME SSDs (it's a lot). my college box: 40MB disk, 4MB RAM, 1 66MHz CPU.

faeyanpiraat 5y ago
I assume you meant half a terabyte of ram

mirker 5y ago

That’s fine until you have to store the whole world’s cat videos on Youtube at minimal cost.

horsawlarway 5y ago
> boots its main OS Use cheap storage for when you want cheap performance (like those pesky dancing cats :) )

jedberg 5y ago

My wife was a teacher and we had a similar story. They gave her a perfectly fine MacBook with spinning disk and the smallest memory possible (this was about 10 years ago). I upgraded the RAM to max and the disk to SSD and just put the original pieces away. She was happy, and when it came time to turn it in, we just put the original bits back in.

wistlo 5y ago

You're a good husband. I did the same for my wife, and her 2012 core I7 HP Elitebook acted like it was ten years younger. But I went a step further: the mother-in-law. She had a lower grade I3 laptop from around 2008 that took 20 minutes to boot Windows 10. It now boots in 15 seconds with a stock 512GB SSD. I am being rewarded by both (but in very different ways).

MonaroVXR 5y ago
>I am being rewarded by both (but in very different ways). I'm going to hell for this.

girvo 5y ago

Lusting after those 10k VelociRaptor drives back in high school... man I have a funny amount of nostalgia for, in hindsight, pretty average hardware once the world moved forward!