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The Curious Case of SSD Performance In OS X
mr_sifter writes "As we've seen from previous coverage, TRIM support is vital to help SSDs maintain performance over extended periods of time — while Microsoft and the SSD manufacturers have publicized its inclusion in Windows 7, Apple has been silent on whether OS X will support it. bit-tech decided to see how SSD performance in OS X is affected by extended use — and the results, at least with the Macbook Air, are startling. The drive doesn't seem to suffer very much at all, even after huge amounts of data have been written to it."
The rain was getting harder. It was now precisely 11:51 PM, and Mark was into his fifth beer. He was feeling pretty invincible but the night was young, and he intended to get wasted before it was all over. He had put in a rough week at work and he deserved it.
He lit another cigarette. He and his drinkin' buddies sat in their traditional circle, in Ian's apartment. The talk wandered from sex to work, back to sex, to basketball, finally settling on sex. Mark had eaten lunch at Taco Bell, and had drunk four cups of coffee between lunchtime and quitting. In addition, the beers were beginning to settle in. And now, at 11:51 PM, Mark had to take a shit. He stood up. "Shit break," he announced. It was customary among this group to make such an announcement.
Mark walked to the bathroom. As he locked the door behind him, thunder boomed. It was storming out there.
He pulled his pants down and sat on the toilet. Ian's bathroom was a mess. He counted five empty toilet paper rolls, two paperbacks, and yesterday's newspaper. His friends laughed about something. The lights flickered for a moment, and the pre-shit growl came from within. He could feel the product lined up inside him for disposal. Then, he began to push.
Plop. The first piece fell to the water. Then some movement, and Mark felt the main feature inside him, the mother lode. He grunted softly as he squeezed it out. It crackled past his sphincter, and splashed neatly into the bowl.
Then another one queued up, and came out. It was almost as big as its predecessor. Mark would have well-purged bowels tonight, he realized with a smirk. He heard thunder again, closer this time.
Another one? Jeez, he thought. When was my last shit? It ventured forth, Mark's muscles helping it out. It was the biggest one so far. The shit's passage through his anus, that rarest mix of pain and pleasure, was longer than any he could remember. Ahhhh...the stout log advanced with conviction. This was definitely going to be his finest creation; this was a huge one. Still grinning, he wondered if Ian had a camera.
He pushed. Peering between his legs, past his genitals, he saw that it had reached the water. This was like seeing the longest freight train ever. Damn, it was a wide one. And it was still attached! And there was more! He pushed more, harder. It kept coming. He couldn't even feel the end of this one yet; soon it was bending, folding on itself like a sundae topping. Mark stopped pushing and caught his breath. He was sweating; he realized that however long this piece of shit was, it wasn't nearly all the way out yet. He still couldn't feel the end.
He pushed, he strained, it kept coming. His intestines couldn't be that damn long, but this shit just wouldn't quit. In fact, he was feeling the diarrhoeal urgency of *having* to shit. He dutifully answered nature's call, and pushed harder. His efforts were rewarded with more shit. His sphincter was too strained to even pinch the loaf off. It was whole and complete.
He couldn't feel the end.
Fear now came to Mark. He flushed the toilet to make room for more. Even as the bowl refilled, the cramps rose up, and he pushed. Within seconds, the shit extended from his anus to bottom of the bowl. The harder he pushed, the more he had to shit. And it was getting worse. He scarcely had time to catch his breath; his face was quite red as he grunted and struggled to keep up. The shit seemed endless. He looked between his legs again, and gasped as he saw that the bowl was fully a quarter filled with his product, the water dangerously high. The tank wasn't even done filling, but he flushed again. Unfortunately, the plumbing was unable to handle the volume of feces, and the toilet backed up. Mark jumped when the cold water touched his buttocks.
It was now 11:57. Thunder roared outside as water and shit particles flowed onto the tile.
Mark's pants were bunched about his ankles, and he was in pain. The shit advanced relentlessly as he stumbled into the bathtub. He was almost panicking now, and
Uh-huh. Can I point out though that whilst such stuff may well be for nerds, normal users are the first to complain when their system is slow or it keeps crashing, etc.
Did You Know? After maintaining a vow of silence for almost 7 years, Red Hat Linux founder Marc Ewing now freely admits that he named Red Hat Linux after Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst's trademark red New York Yankees baseball cap.
Durst and Ewing met in Ewing's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina (Durst was raised in Gastonia, NC), where they became fast friends, sharing the same passion for low-level system programming.
Durst collaborated with Ewing on the first preview beta of Red Hat Linux before the demands of his rocketing stardom forced him to abandon his hobby and tour with his band.
Durst's position on the development team was filled by Damien Neil, and not many know of his contribution to the popular Linux distribution; however, a google search through the source code on Redhat.com (http://www.google.com/search?q=wfd+site:redhat.com) reveals many snippets of code authored by 'wfd', Durst's initials (William Frederick Durst).
Durst asked Ewing to keep his 'geeky' roots a secret as it would not lend itself to Durst's bad boy image, but as Ewing points out, it was "only a matter of time" before the origins of his NASDAQ-100 company's name were uncovered.
You know what? I took the plunge and installed Linux today. Top Hat or some hat version. But now I have a problem. Im getting these big red lesions all over me. Im not allergic to anything that would cause that, and I havent become infected with any diseases, my doctor checked me out fine. Then I figured out what Linux really is. Open Sores. Linux is killing me! Help!
"Guess who really owns America? Hint hint, it isn't the Americans."
Even bigger hint: it's not the Jewish either. It's China.
8am - Wakes up outside the Center for Marxist Education in Cambridge as another bum shits on him. Thinks this sucks and that he would like an apartment, but can't find a landlord with an apartment that is free as in speech and beer. Falls back asleep.
9am - Wakes up again.
9:15am - Goes to men's room at MIT to wash shit off. Gives himself sponge bath. Shit comes off (somewhat), but he really isn't clean since he refuses to take a shower.
9:45am - Decides to shave 2 inches off beard after someone in MIT restroom mistakes him for Osama Bin Laden.
10am - Goes to McDonalds for breakfast. Gets into arguement with workers behind counter after they refuse to give him a free as in speech and beer breakfast. Also gets into arguement with the manager about why McDonalds should be called GNU/McDonalds due to the fact that he eats there.
11:30am - After being thrown out of McDonalds since the staff doesn't want a DGH deterring lunch rush, RMS goes to the McDonalds' dumpster to find food. Eats a "GNU/Quarter Pounder" and "GNU/fries" covered with "GNU/mold". He consideres the food better since it is free as in speech and beer.
12:30am - Goes back to MIT to recruit MIT students into writing free software. RMS is unable to enter anyone's office since everyone has placed spider plants in their offices. (He has a phobia a spider plants.)
1pm - RMS protests GWB (George W. Bush) for not being GNU/GWB and believing in copyrights. Wanders out of Cambridge and into Waltham. Police find RMS and arrest him for violating the ordinance that says he is not allowed to enter Waltham. (All towns surrounding Cambridge have this ordinace.) Police beat him and deport him back to Cambridge.
3pm - Goes back to MIT and creates a plan for dealing with overpopulation by killing everyone who uses non-free software. Writes code into next version of emacs to implement that feature
5pm - Tries to read email. RMS finds out he is dangerously over quota due to an email from Doctress Neutopia. This email is 65 megabytes of nothing but ASCII text. It is similar to an email he gets everyday since 1995 when he and Docress Neutopia had a brief fling. The email says that she would like to have a relationship with him, but he needs to accept her lovoution, stop his polygamous goat fucking and clean off the hair, dirt, food, and feces off his keyboard. RMS responds with a 9 megabyte email (of nothing but text) explaining that he could only consider getting into a relationship with her if she changed her name to GNU/Doctress Neutopia.
5:30pm - Reads rest of his email. His email is bombarded with trolls and goatse. RMS is turned on by the goatse and beats off to it.
6pm - Still beating off to goatse
7pm - Still beating off to goatse
8pm - Still beating off to goatse
9pm - Breaks into MIT vending machine to have a free as in speech and beer snack.
10pm - Breaks into a liquor store for free as in speech and free as in beer beer. Gets drunk.
10:15pm - Walks around drunk yelling, "Use free software!!!!", "It's GNU/Linux you capitalist pigs!!!!" and "I am a goat fucker!!!!".
11:45pm - Collapses in front of the Center for Marxist Education. Goes to sleep.
I've been running Windows XP since beta2, and it really kicks ass. I don't
have to recompile my kernel when I want to install an ethernet card, it
automatically detects it and installs the drivers no matter who the
manufacturer is. Dual monitors? No chore with windows, get two video cards,
two monitors and it's set up! I don't need to edit config files with editors
that are 20 years old, and show it. Intellimouse custom buttons? Piece of
cake, with my Intellimouse software.You want to run games? Great! Choose
from an array of tens of thousands of games that run great under DirectX and
the NT subsystem. Stability got you down? Not in this version, I have had
uptimes of over a month (and then the damn power goes out). Good internet
browser? No need for Kommunist shit, you've got the great Internet Explorer
6 a click away. Doing some development? Nothing but the best for Windows
users, choose from a suite of Visual Studio products that suits your needs,
with one killer IDE. Or, pick up a beta edition of Visual Studio.NET if you
have 200 megs of RAM to spare! You Linux faggots can keep rooting for your
piece of shit operating system that Windows 3.1 tops in terms of
compatibility, all the while hindering your experience for something else
you could be doing, while I use the operating system of choice (or by
default) for over 200 million others in the world. Anti-Microsoft zealots
piss and moan all you want, but your queer little OS won't be the reigning
desktop champion anytime soon.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Fucking wow. Just wow, dude. You must expend a boatload of energy trying to hate that much. Me, I'm too lazy to hate anyone or anything that much, unless it gets in my face. Who pissed on your Cheerios this morning?
The Jews.
I second that. But will remain cowardly and anonymous.