[OFB Cafe] SSDs

[Jens Benecke]

Am 28.11.2011 um 06:19 schrieb Fred A. Miller:

> On 11/27/2011 11:23 PM, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
>>> Thoughts on capacity and, most importantly, brand? Would the Crucial
>>> >  drive be a good choice?  Circuit City has the 512 GB one for $729.  I've
>>> >  seen the 256 GB one for well under $400...
>> I have an IBM 120gb sata6 in my recent desktop and in March it was +$400.
>> I only use it for system, everything else is on mirrored sata3 2T drives.
>> Go for the 256gb but take care what you put onto it, ie: system files,
>> executables and temp and log files.  That will give your system the
>> greatest lift  :^)
> 
> TigerDirect has 1T SATA (6G) drives from Seagate and WD for under $100. I have 1 of each.....BOTH are "screamers."
> Fred


Hi,

SSDs will kill them anyway. :-)

The point with SSDs is not that they excel in throughput (200-400MB/s can be achieved by a good SATA RAID setup with traditional hard disks, though probably not in a notebook) but that they also run circles around traditional HDDs's access times and *random* seek times, finding and transferring millions of randomly scattered small bits of data, which is a much more realistic usage scenario.

I have a 256G SSD in my Macbook Pro and Lion installed on it in 8 minutes, it boots in 8 seconds (to the desktop) and I have yet to find an application that appears more than one second after clicking on its icon. With the SSD, the FileVault encryption bottleneck is actually the CPU, not the disk any more.

That said, I also have a Time Machine setup running regularly. I’m not 100% sure how far I would want to trust SSDs not to fail suddenly and completely. With HDDs, you usually get some advance warning (SMART).


Jens

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