[OFB Cafe] SSDs

[Jens Benecke]

Am 28.11.2011 um 07:07 schrieb 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.

Hi Fred,

loading operating system files, accessing emails, writing temp files etc. are all more or less random accesses.


>> 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.

With Filevault only?


>> 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.

If security is any concern, then the disks will be physically destroyed (crushed) anyway, so this is not an issue.

For myself, I have my home directory on a FileVault 2 partition (the system is unencrypted) and I have Prey installed on the notebook. This is enough for my taste.


Regards

-- 
Jens Benecke - jens at spamfreemail.de - www.jensbenecke.de
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