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Can SSDs Be Used For Software Development?
hackingbear writes "I'm considering buying a current-generation SSD to replace my external hard disk drive for use in my day-to-day software development, especially to boost the IDE's performance. Size is not a great concern: 120GB is enough for me. Price is not much of a concern either, as my boss will pay. I do have concerns on the limitations of write cycles as well as write speeds. As I understand, the current SSDs overcome it by heuristically placing the writes randomly. That would be good enough for regular users, but in software development, one may have to update 10-30% of the source files from Subversion and recompile the whole project, several times a day. I wonder how SSDs will do in this usage pattern. What's your experience developing on SSDs?"
Whatever the differences a few of us might possess, we certainly can strive to find some common ground. No doubt all of us can easily acknowledge the plain truth that in the balance *BSD would have to be considered a failure. So why did *BSD fail? What is at the root of *BSD's colossal miscue?
Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personae?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
Would be 2 overclocked ATI HD4870s in crossfire mode.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *SSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *SSD community when IDC confirmed that *SSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *SSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *SSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *SSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *SSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *SSD because *SSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *SSD. As many of us are already aware, *SSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeSSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeSSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeSSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenSSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenSSD. How many users of NetSSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenSSD versus NetSSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetSSD users. SSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetSSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SSD/OS. A recent article put FreeSSD at about 80 percent of the *SSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeSSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeSSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeSSD went out of business and was taken over by SSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now SSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *SSD has steadily declined in market share. *SSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *SSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *SSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *SSD is dead.
Fact: *SSD is dying
Python is hard. Let's use Visual Basic.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Then forget the SSD drive, unless you are worried about head crashing during a fall. Get yourself a 4+ bay ESATA enclosure and do a Raid 1+0. You will pin the bus for throughput and have fault tolerance out the wazoo. I would recommend larger drives, simply for the larger outer tracks (Larger, meaning high density, not necessarily greatest total capacity).
VB is hard, lets outsource it.
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I found it to lack very important functionality. Like access control of class functions from other class functions. Or implicit instance variable inside methods. of much other stuff. It really is a language for simple quick scripting. But when you start to do serious work, better use a real programming language like Haskell for high-level, or C for low level stuff.
And while Ruby is much stronger typed cleaner, and hat a prettier syntax, it's still only a slow scripting language. Or a bad imperative implementation of Haskell/OCaml/Lisp. ^^
Don't ask about PHP. We keep it in the basement, right next to the mutated guy from the Goonies.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I find the contributions of Anonymous Coward to be most valuable. I can't imagine that anyone exists who thinks otherwise. /. and certainly to all its users if he were to unbookmark /. /. as well should Anonymous Coward disappear, as will probably half the /. population.
/. user
It will be a big lose to
I for one will unbookmark
Best Regards,
A very concerned
ps: Power Point is hard, Let's use notepad
You speak London? I speak London very best.