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SSD Won't Make Sense In Laptops For Two Years
kgagne writes "While solid state disk drives can vastly improve random read performance and are perfectly suited to most mobile devices, many operations are sequential in laptops and desktops and involve writes where SSDs most often lose to magnetic hard disk drives in performance. While introducing multi-channel flash memory controllers and interleaving the NAND flash chips increases performance, it will still be about two years before the cost versus benefit ratio will make sense to install SSD in your laptop or desktop PC, according to a Computerworld story. '"I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.'"
Try 16GB SDHC, available now for $50, delivered.
One for the OS and apps, one for the data. Need more? Put the other ones in your pocket.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The small increase in performance isn't worth the several hundred in cost it would add to my laptops. I bought my laptop for $650, and a better HD just isn't worth increasing that to nearly $1000. YMMV.
craptops I don't see going SSD for a long time.
ordinary decent laptops I see offering SSD as an option but I don't see it being popular in the near future.
Ultraportables on the other hand are already going ssd in many cases. Tiny hard drives tend to have terrible performance and a 2.5 inch 9.5mm high drive is pretty big for an ultraportable (though some ultraportables do use them).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Complexity, power, heat, and failure from kinetic shock. These are either reduced or zero with a flash device.
If you're looking for non-mobile, or a large storage application, then the disk makes sense.
While they vastly increase random read performance. Random write performance is currently no where near as good as a HDD.
People who want to know and those who have to know to make their work better will take the arrows and learn early and figure out how best to use them ... or not.
That is just the way it always is.
I will get one/them, hammer them and know what I can do early on.
The comment about sequential reads causing the SSD to lose on performance compared with magnetic drives caught my attention. Isn't this highly dependent on the filesystem you use and its strategy for block allocation ?
Wouldn't it be possible to design the block allocation algorithm to favour SSDs the same way previous generations of filesystems tried to put the next block on the disk to be the one under the head at the current moment (or whatever it was they did) ?
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
Well, I use Linux/Windows as my servers, and use a Mac mini/G5 as my development environment, and even though I do now own an SSD laptop I know it makes sense.
Uses less power and can be dropped. My laptop is a macbook (not pro) and I know it is overkill with what I do with it, so a macbook AIR would be just the right thing to do if it had the correct pricing with SSD. But it doesn't, at least not for me.
No optical drive, limited HDD? I do not really care. For my visits to clients (of web projects) could be done on a 5 year old crap (if it wasn't windows and had a battery live of 10 minutes) so for me an AIR would be just fine.
Ohh... does it makes sense on WINTEL? Do not know how Vista runs on an SSD and if you have any space on a 64GIG drive after installing VISTA. Not flaming, I really do not know.
I know, that if I had to travel more I would get an AIR with SSD, and it would perfectly satisfy my multimedia needs (just grab those 4-5 movies to HDD for the flight and you are set).
Just my 2c, but I am a (mostly web) developer, so all you sales people and myltimedia freaks might have a different viewpoint about the whole fuss.......
I think people are willing to pay a premium for extended battery life. If I can use my device more, it has more utility.
-Dave
I'm afraid they'll want to take my Eee PC back if they hear that.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It will be easy to sell the concept of SSD to pretty much anyone, particularly for a laptop. Here is the short list:
- Faster Reads
- Potentially faster to wake up from sleep
- More durable
- Less chance of sudden and complete data loss (e.g. A smaller portion of the drive would fail instead of a complete drive failure as with a magnetic disk)
- Consumes less power
- Quieter
- Cooler (also a power saving feature due to less fan running time)
SSD drives are very cool pieces of technology and I for one can't wait to be able to buy a superthin laptop with no magnetic disk.
"I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200"
The price needs to drop below equivalent rotational-based technology -currently $42.00 for 160GB- in order for it to become 'cost effective' to change.
Sig this!
it'll be two more years before people demand SSD in laptops so much that sales of traditional storage laptops falls off enough to motivate laptop manufacturers to a) switch fully enough to SSD models to gain economies of scale in production and b) to stop charging premiums for those models because they have to be competitive in the market.
I can verify that Openoffice starts much faster on my little eee PC than on my Desktop machine with 75 MB/S 7200 RPM WD7500AACS. Or any other desktop I have used for that matter.
It is not just Openoffice of course, but Openoffice being a big pig of an application makes a nice example.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
SSD HAS made sense in laptops for two years already. Things like the eeepc have brought it to the attention of the mainstream, but there were other things before it (expensive Toshiba machines etc). When you think about it the majority of tasks a laptop is used for involved changing mere Megabytes of information - it's usually a combination of a typewriter and an address book.
The greatest benefit of the SSDs aren't in what they do today, it's their future potential. For a long time HDD access has been one of the biggest bottlenecks. The best thing about SSD is that it _opens the door_ to persistent storage that is not limited by it's mechanical mechanisms. There will be a lot improvements that can be built on this path whereas the mechanical HDD has almost run it's course.
has "sense" ever trumped fashion? SSDs are fashionable and workable enough that the "lead the fleet" types will purchase, and hopefully buy enough that businesses will start producing enough to drop the prices for the rest of us.
Impetuous! Homeric!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux
It all depends on what you want to do with your laptop. My ancient 233 MHz Thinkpad has been running damnsmalllinux for years now. DSL fits on 50 MB of flash card. If I need to do something heavy duty, I SSH to my desktop. The two biggest battery eaters on the laptop were the hard drive and the display. Getting rid of the mechanical hard drive saved a lot of power.
OTOH, my daughter does heavy duty graphics on her laptop. For her, one file can be bigger than 50 MB. ie. YMMV
Maybe its just me, but I fully expect 128GB SSD to go for much less than $200 by the end of 2010.
How much HDD space will you be able to buy by that time for $200? I'd say easily 10-15x capacity.
I feel like TFA is trying to set you up to accept higher prices on the hardware for a longer period of time.
SSD is merging onto the superhighway that is Moore's Law for HDD and I can't see settling for lower capacity and higher prices for more than another year or so.
Cube On! (http://stores.ebay.com/PuzzleProz)
2010 is in less than a year and a half. Two years? Learn to count.
Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
MAGIC
Seriously, solid state electronics, even after years and years of being around them as an early 80's baby, still just seems like magic to me. I can't wait to get rid of every little motor whine in my computing world, even if it's another 10 years, that will be a happy day to have a powerful computer without any moving parts.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
oh my, it looks like twitter might actually be bringing one of his 14 accounts out of karma hell. that's impressive.
and scary.
It's not worth it for performance. It IS worth it for reliability, though. I'd really like to not to have to worry about my hard drive crashing every year, or every time it bumps something (especially in a laptop). No moving parts is a pretty big deal.
I don't respond to AC's.
Time to burn some Karma...
On a "News for Nerds" site, moderators should understand the sources of disk latency. Rotating Hard Drives have latency from the time it takes to move the head across the platter, and for the platter to rotate under the head. SSDs do not have these sources of latency.
One of the big problems is that current flash is just slow on writes. Some of them don't do DMA properly. If there are problems with block sizes, this can be adjusted easily. But the underlying technology has to improve, or manufacturers need to build SSDs with more parallelism and better features. Perhaps very parallel SSD architectures might need filesystems optimized for large block sizes.
One of the big potential benefits of flash is reliability. Imagine highly modular flash drives for servers with hardware RAID 5? Instead of a disk failure, you get a notification that a module needs replacing. In fact, you could build versions with an extra slot for a failover spare in-place!
Also, with wear leveling, there's the potential for hard drives that can warn you several days before they fail!
Should anyone really be surprised that SSD tech isn't quite mature and competitive yet? Hold your horses, it's coming! I'm absolutely thrilled that it's advancing as fast as it is, and in a few short years the vast majority of laptops and desktops will be packing SSDs that make hard drives based on spinning magnetic surfaces obsolete outside of a few niche purposes. Onwards!
IDE media already lies to the controller about where the content is on the drive to compensate for densities beyond the original design and bad sectors. There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
That handles bad sectors, wear levelling, bad block failover, and a number of other issues.
Now, about bandwidth. Solid State Drives are by definition, solid state. The way solid state devices work is that they are accessed and give up their data in real time. It takes a few nanoseconds to heat up the address lines and drag the data out of the hardware storage. If, for example, it takes too long to drag a sequence of bits out of the flash, there's no reason not to access many bits in parallel in the electronics on the device. So, given an infinite interface, how much data can you pull out of a properly designed SSD in a millisecond? All of it. And that should be fast enough for this decade, at least. The reason why many of these devices are bandwidth constrained is due to the limited thinking of the engineers who envisioned them as temporary storage for camera photos and external pen drives. No such limits are in fact present in the technology.
If you're an engineer and you're looking at these constraints, you need to ask: "Well, whose fault is that and what can be done to change it?"
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I've got a 30GB disk that's about full, with almost no music on it. A few years ago, disks jumped rapidly from 1GB to 2GB to 10GB then 30GB, so I've had enough space for quite a while, but I've finally caught up with Moore's Law.
My work laptop uses MS Windows, Office, and Outlook. My current Outlook PST file is ~2GB for the past year, and I've got a total of about 10GB including older mail - I've found that really valuable, though bloated. And there's all that Powerpoint bloated material from training, presentations, etc. (And of course there's swap space, another 2GB or so.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My familys three eeepc and the one i have at work would be utter pain if they had spinning disks and not SSD. Cheap laptop drives is terrible when it comes to sequential reads but even worse at access times.
Ubuntu runs faster in some areas on the eee than on my brand spanking new desktop.
What i long for is faster speeds and more write cycles. Servers is what i think would benefit the most from SSD and thats where i suspect it will take off soon.
HTTP/1.1 400
you should also link to twitter's attack journal:
http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/204737
http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/207689
http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/206773
when i grow up, I hope I can get away with shit like that.
Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage
For the consumers, or average Joe, there is no reason to pay more for less storage.
//.
The trade off is reliability. For 99%, if not more of the people using pc's today, a generic 120gb hd does the job just fine. On my desktop, I've never had any of the 3 hard drives fail in the last 12 years that I've been using them, or any time before that for that matter.
From a fundamental electronics standpoint, SSD is amazing. It's what I dreamed of making in the early 80's when I was first turned on to electronics by ham radio and Apple
As TFA states, it's not practical for now other than USB drives, which is fine. I just hope the development of these devices continue to recieve funding, because in the long run, it will be a boon to the PC industry.
I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200
Right. By the time the drives get to that price/capacity, SATA will be down to, what, 750g-1tb 2.5" drives for 50$-100$? Less?
From everything I've gathered, the only major benefit to an SSD is that I won't swear as much when I accidentally drop my laptop while it's running. That and given the alleged longevity, they'd make a great drop-in replacement for laptops that are notoriously painful to perform user maintenance on, like the 12" Powerbook G4 (ever try to upgrade or replace the hdd on one of those? Butthurt!). Otherwise, the price/performance trend looks like it'll be favoring Ye Olde Spinny Bits for some time to come.
One good reason for SSD would be the negative effects on
using hard drives at high altitudes.
They are not well documented either.
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6035_102-0.html?forumID=59&threadID=243684&messageID=2625001&tag=forums06;posts#2625001
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
It is good to see that the typical computer is closer to getting rid of moving parts. Currently we have HDDs, CD/DVD/BR/HDDVD players and fans. We know that the SSDs are replacing the HDDs and that the players will be wiped out by the internet, wireless and memory sticks. Now we just need something feasible to replace the damn fans to get the first true consumer notebook with no moving parts.
Full Tilt
If your laptop has lost three hard disk drives in one year, a solid state drive makes plenty of sense.
Last I looked 7200 RPM SATA drives easily perform above 20 GB/s real world usage.
The fastest SSDs are around 15 GB/s real world.
This isn't a huge difference, but the cheap SDHCs are about 4GB/s.
Cheap hard drives are still way faster than cheap SDHCs.
Cheap:
300 GB SATA ~ $70
16 GB SDHC ~ $50
Still, the claim that SSDs aren't ready for prime time is the same as saying Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Both are fallacies. Sure, SDHCs don't maker sense everywhere as a a solution.
I have no real need for a 300 GB drive.
I could squeak by on as little as 32 GB. But that'd be a real stretch. I'd be able to be comfortable with 3 16 GB SSDs and at about $150 for that would be a reasonable trade for me for the other benefits, even if it means a 6 GB/s throughput.
At the silicon level we're talking about wires that are maybe 45nm wide by perhaps 500nm long. We can afford the space they take up and the time it takes a charge to traverse them relative to the alternative we're talking about, which is a spinning physical disk with magnetic pattern on it read by a physical head that must overcome inertia to move back and forth.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Or is it a fantasy?
Your confidence in vaporware is disturbing and will be your downfall. Currently SLOW 32 GB SDHCs are selling at > $200. In two years (2010) we ***might*** see 128 GB SDHCs at ~ $300 capable of 8 GB/s throughput.
Yes, I do. Do you?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What I'd want:
Fanless processor
Fanless motherboard
- HW acceleration of H.264/VC1/MPEG2
- HDMI out with LPCM
- GigE to file server
Small SSD
Fanless case/PSU
The pieces are coming togeter but it's not quite there.... I guess it matters what you want, SSDs aren't unreasonably expensive if you're looking for something else than $/GB. For that, nothing will beat a TB+ size regular HDD...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not that it's not at least as post-worthy as half the other content on /. - but I find it "interesting" that a Computerworld employee/blogger submitted a Computerworld story with the impression that he was a neutral observer...
Oh well. As I said, still better than the average story, I probably shouldn't complain.
Turned out it didn't fully support DMA...??? Like they didn't complete all the traces properly...
This problem is rampant in many flash card models and brands - even ones that claim to support DMA or UDMA. Search around on the interweb using your Napster machine and you'll see many others with the same issues.
:)
After trying a Transcend 4GB 133x that would only work in PIO mode, I got my hands on a Ridata 4GB 266x that *does* work in DMA. So if anyone is considering that card, maybe that's a good sign.
Mechanical challenges turned out to be not the only ones waiting for me when I worked on connecting the CF cards to the camera. These cards were hanging when the CPU tried to read them using DMA mode (and the card identified itself as supporting DMA mode). I tried to find the problem, and used all the tools I had. I added a bunch of printk's to the driver source, tried different speed settings for the DMA, and finally used an oscilloscope to spy on the signals between the CF card and the CPU. What I found was that the card did actually send the data using DMA mode, but always only for two "sectors" (1024 bytes total), regardless of the number of blocks to transfer written to the corresponding register. Then it silently hung, without activating an IRQ line, even if it was asked to transfer just a single block. And the CPU was relying on that interrupt to continue with the processing of the data read from the CF card. Careful examination of the data on the IDE bus did not reveal any problems (I was expecting something specific to the ETRAX). The same CF card with the DMA mode disabled in the driver worked fine (but slower, of course), as did the IDE hard drive (or SATA through the bridge) with DMA enabled. Googling the issue showed that I'm not the first to have problems with CF cards and DMA. The driver itself had a blacklist for some of the devices that caused problems. -- http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5102023409.html
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
... typing this on an eee PC.
The article means"when it makes sense for most laptops/desktops to use SSD. The special advantages of SSDs - less power, lightweight and robust (no moving parts) - are especially attractive for mobile applications (e.g. ipod, sublaptop).
For GB per $, SSD will always be more expensive than HDD, even as both get cheaper. But if we assume that the demand for GB does not increase as fast, then eventually both will be affordable. The comparison then shifts to other considerations, and SSD wins.
"The innovator's dilemma" is based on similar shifts in HHD technology (as the size decreased).
Do you have a source for that claim? My brother has an EEE 900 and at least according to windows the drives are SSDs and everything I have read online says the same.
Tiny hard drives do indeed exist but my understanding is they are rather slow.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Already being sold in Japan, you can get a Raid 0 SSD laptop for about 4000 dollars. That is 2 SSD disks in a slick laptop for 4000 dollars, out of the box and ready to go. And the thing only weighs about 1.4kg (3lbs), has an LCD that does 1600x900, HDMI port (finally), and an NVIDIA GeForce 9300M.
photos:
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/gallery_window.html?phtNum=2&phtMax=14&phtSizeX=750&phtSizeY=500
product page:
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/
It makes sense to bring it into the products lines of today for these reasons. Early adoption brings quicker changes in technology, and brings more money into new technologies to help them develop quicker.
Thats my slightly intoxicated views on this subject, without reading the article. : )
I hope it's not something important in that outlook PST. Because PST files are a really ugly data format, that are horrifically prone to corruption and just generally 'not working'. If it's important to have archives, the tool for the job is archiving it. Not keeping it in massive piles of 'maybe I will need it' junk on your HDD.
...especially if the hard drive manufacturers are successful in their spurious patent infringement lawsuits against Flash RAM manufacturers. This could derail the process for years. I know that they are also using the International Trade Commission "double whammy" to attempt to clobber imports of Flash RAM independent of their (presumably Marshall TX) lawsuits.
Try installing something you can't buy. Not too easy.
IsnÂt one of the key advantages of SSD that it is less power consuming? I see increased battery life as the major factor when I look at SSD laptops. Complementet with an external drive at home the storage space isn't a problem, probably most laptop owners have an external drive at home alread. Wouldn't like to wander around with the only single copy of my documents I know that for sure, and a laptop wouldn't hold my media archived anyways.
I have the 20GB eee 901, and it makes a perfect laptop for my needs with it's solid state drive.
The drive is perfectly fast enough, and the size is more than adequate... I have my OS and apps on the first 4GB drive with space to spare, and the second 16GB drive is for my data... I can fit several movies and tons of music on there to entertain me while i'm traveling, and there's more than enough space for any documents and code i will typically be working on... And the eee screen is not big enough to justify HD movies.
There's also the SD slot for which 16GB cards are very cheap these days, so i can add more storage if needed, and being on little cards they can be pulled out.
When i've finished watching the movies on the laptop, i just hook up an external usb drive and replace the movies on the eee.
I have a set of usb drives (totaling several terabytes) at home with various data files, i don't need access to everything all of the time.
Solid state is perfect for me, it's quiet and low power, and won't get damaged by sudden jolts etc...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Is anyone else going to miss the tick-tick-tick of their hard drive when everything goes to solid state? I still miss the Whuuurrr Whuuuurrr of my 5 1/4 when I start my computer up (not that I want to go back to floppies, but I still miss it:) ...
Most use SSDs or 2.5" hard drives. Look at this table - they're all SSD or have HDDs whose capacity suggests a 2.5" form factor.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
So why not use RAM for your "virtual" memory.
Reliability and data protection may be more important.
What I'd love in a portable device where performance wasn't the overriding factor:
1) Temporary files stored on a media that doesn't wear out, e.g. RAM or HD
2) Permanent files that are not confidential stored on a media that's resistant to shock. Accelerometers help but silicon generally wins here.
3) Confidential files that are in a "2-part" format. This could mean an encryption key on a dongle, or it could mean encrypted files with some of the bytes on a removable media.
A two-bank silicon "drive" in a RAID-0-like format with one of the memory devices removable greatly increases security even if the data is not encrypted. If it is encrypted or even compressed using certain algorithms, it won't even be partially recoverable without both pieces. This is also provides "two-key" or even "3-key" access for sensitive operations: One person has the laptop, one person has the external half of the data, and a 3rd person has the encryption keys.
This also gets around the "search your laptop at ports of entry" problem - if one person carries the laptop, and the other half of the data is sent by courier or electronically, there's not much to search. Of course, this doesn't have to be a 50/50 proposition, with encrypted data it could be 90/10 or even 99.99/0.01, with the small part shipped over the wire and downloaded to a hotel courtesy computer and put on a USB key.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
As a ff/paramedic the laptops we use (both truck-mounted and toughbooks) get quite a bit of abuse... though the Solid state drives are smaller, we store all patient information on a server as the report is finished, so we really don't need that much space anyway. most failures are from HDDs.
solid state gets the rating of 'firefighter proof'
Why not just say, "Vista doesn't make sense." The relatively small capacity of SSD is not an issue for those of us who run Linux. The great thing about SSD is that I don't have to worry so much about shock, and if I need more space, I can always carry a conventional USB hard drive. That way, I can add capacity by simply buying a larger drive - no OS reinstall needed.
SSD is perfect for laptops. It solves the fundamental problems of durability and power consumption.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If you look at the current OCZ crop:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227345
Then admittedly, it still has some way to go in both price and performance, but at the current rate, I expect this capacity to hit the 200 mark within one year, not two.
Well, fragmentation isn't the answer. That seems to be what you're suggesting...
See, fragmentation introduces problems of its own -- for example, simple overhead of block allocation. If you've got a bunch of blocks that are sequential -- say, block 123, 124, 125, 126, and 127 -- you can say that a file is in an extent, from block 123-127. If, however, your file is stored in blocks 123, 259, 312, 567, and 964, you're going to have to store all of those addresses -- which means you're spending 250% more disk space simply storing addresses
I call bullshit. Nobody's filesystem is that stupid, not even FAT. Storing addresses means writing a couple more bytes to an inode or allocation table. It doesn't mean storing the whole damn block somewhere else. Flash block sizes are ~512 bytes, so what you're really looking at is a linear increase of disk space as the disk becomes fragmented, with a rather small constant (the size of a memory address, plus any alignment/padding/whatever the file system chooses to add). Fragmentation doesn't matter at all on a random access device (save cache performance, but we won't go there for now, things get too complicated), so it makes perfect sense to store Out Of Order on Flash.
Flash natively does this anyways, due to wear leveling. So it's even less of an issue than you'd like to think.
Also, Flash is written to (and read from) in rather huge blocks -- so you want a file to at least be contiguous on that level.
I just said they're written to in (approximately) 512 bytes (some companies go a bit more for parody checking, etc). That's not huge by anyone's definition. 8 would fit in your typical memory page. In fact, most hard drives use block sizes that are much larger than this, as do many file systems. (What's NTFS up to these days, 32k blocks? Yes, that's 64 flash nodes.)
No, I would say that the simple solution to Flash not appearing to perform as well (for sequential operations) is to defragment just as aggressively, and to increase readahead by a lot. Flash would work great for contiguous sequential reads, assuming that the filesystem (or block layer) are anticipating that you'll keep reading from the same file.
Except it doesn't matter. There's absolutely ZERO perceivable performance penalty in random access on memory cells. (What are we talking about, throwing three transistors to change the read lanes?) That's what makes random access so attractive. That's why Flash is so attractive.
But first, you need the flash disk itself to support simultaneous reads, and probably some OS support as well.
OSes already support multiple different read scenarios. It's no different than arranging N-memory geometries; it doesn't matter if they're laid out 8x16 or 16x8, you're trading a tiny fraction of throughput for a few transistors in budget. SD cards are particularly slow because they use a particularly slow interface, but there's nothing preventing you from wrapping Flash in any interface you want. That's what SSDs do; they're an (S)ATA controller wired directly to a multi-level memory controller. The OS sees it no differently than a disk, and the controller sees the RAM no differently than SD (well, okay, slightly differently, namely in timing details).
You move around full blocks. It's not a particularly fast endeavor, but most computers sit around idle for 99% of the time anyways, so it doesn't hurt them in real world performance.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
$39.99 for 16 GB CF * 5 = $199.95 for 80 GB.
Does the author seriously think the extra 48 GB is going to make a difference? And that it will take 2 years to get 48 GB more for $200?
Crack, meet author. Oh, I see you're already met. Long term relationship even. My bad.
When SLC SSDs become the norm and random read/write speeds are as fast as sequential, how would that effect database design or the preference of particular database types for many large web sites?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Best choice for performance magnetic drives are? The bankability of SSDs concern they with worry?
Well, if these manufacturers would spend the few frickin' dollars for a decent HEAT SINK, I wouldn't be so gung ho to replace them in all of there power-sucking heat-generating glory.
My laptop: WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [silence for three seconds] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [burns lap] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [drys wet clothes out of the washer with air stream from fans in three seconds flat.] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [scorches paint] WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [finally melts a hole in case]... WHIRRRR... [silence]
Guess the drive and the CPU are getting enough air now.
It seems IBM thought it was possible. And then they did it.
Maybe you'll get the next one. Good luck.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Try this external USB drive and put some velcro between it and the back of your display. When you don't need it, remove it. Problem solved.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I can't see "SSD" without it taking me back to X-Wing and TIE Fighter days.
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ssd.html
Oh, of course it's important - though things that are obviously extra-important get saved as individual files, and I try to take most of the bloated powerpoints and save them directly rather than leaving them to burn space. PST files have gotten much more reliable during the last couple of versions of Outlook, though they're still ugly, and I'd much rather have a better format for my email (even /bin/mail format :-) But typically I'll get a couple of ad-hoc queries a week along the lines of "hey, back when Customer X was your account, did they ever install that $foo or could they never get it working?" or "has anybody had a customer do $bar, and how did it work?" or "Customer Z finally decided their old system is broken enough they have to replace it, can you tell me whether any of the N different things we've proposed to them in the last 3 years that were all too expensive are better than the too-expensive system they're looking at this time?" And the way to answer them is usually to mount up last year's email box (stored in separate parts because Outlook chokes if mailboxes get too big) and wait for Outlook to search through them.
On the other hand, I also keep a number of my old Eudora mailboxes around, which are 10% the size, and easy to grep through. (I split off separate files when I'm doing a major backup round or when I upgraded software versions.) One of my antivirus programs thinks there's something dangerous in there, and won't tell me exactly what or where, but it appears to be random characters in a MIME header divider somewhere :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks