[OFB Cafe] SSDs

[Fred A. Miller]

On 11/28/2011 12:50 AM, Jens Benecke wrote:
> 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.
If needed, yes.
>
> 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.

Quite right. Even with a Core i7 over-clocked to 4.3Ghz. and 16G of RAM, 
I can bury the CPU long before hard drives are a factor, if I work at it.

>
> 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).

True. Another factor is security. HDDs can be low-level formatted to 
wipe them clean. To my knowledge, there's no way to low-level format any 
SSD, thus for some sites, they can't be used.

Fred

-- 
Liberal ideology and political correctness, infused with
public policy, begets social insanity. - Michael Savage