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Comparing Today's Computers To 1995's
An anonymous reader writes "A look back at two articles from 1995, touting high end computers and 'must haves.' How times have changed... ...'Memory (RAM): We seem to have convinced most manufacturers to adopt eight megabytes as standard, compared with four megabytes in 1994. Don't buy less than eight. The difference in performance between an eight megabyte machine and a four-megabyte machine can be dramatic.'"
My 486 only had four megabytes of RAM. I had to reboot and bypass CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to run Doom. The reason? My mouse driver took up too much memory. And this was in DOS, where you only had three or four drivers to begin with.
(Before any other old folks ask -- I already had other drivers in upper memory so the mouse driver wouldn't fit there.)
Visit the
Yep. And if you go with the informal version of Moore's law, "X doubles every year and a half" where X is just about any measure of computer capability, we're still almost on track. 2^10 = 1024, as /.er should know by heart; strictly speaking, this should mean about a thousandfold improvement between 1995 and 2010 rather than 2012, but everything you list was available two years ago, if at a somewhat higher price. And yes, X may just as well be boot time as RAM or processing power. ;)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A nice one from that era I liked was Descent
Nevermind, I was wrong about that. First service pack was 1996.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's OK. This is Slashdot. You'll be modded up to +5, Informative, anyway.
While you appear to have a solid technical knowledge base, it is clear you have little to no practical knowledge or experience with SSDs other than off the cuff comments you've read here or there.
Let's go through some of your misconceptions shall we...
Price. Yes they are more expensive than mechanical hard drives. But the speed boost is substantial and worth it. I remember paying $200 for a 30GB HDD a long time ago. Now I can get a 128GB SSD for $160. My 128GB Crucial M4 is limited by my 3Gbs SATA 2 connection. It maxes out at ~280MB/sec for reads due to the pipe. It is actually much faster than that (over 400MB/sec fast). Pretty amazing difference for the otherwise slowest piece of hardware in any computer. Plus with TLC NAND arriving drives are going to start getting cheaper. Pair the cheaper flash with more mature controllers and within the next year or so SSDs will be in their prime.
Yes they are not tolerant of vast amount of write cycles. That is what wear levelling and TRIM are for. Even if new 25nm MLC flash could *only* handle 3000 write cycles, do you think you will ever use it that much? Highly unlikely. New Intel drives in the worst case scenarios running MySQL databases are still expected to last for a few years. Are home users ever going to continuously do 1TB of writes per day on an SSD? Most enterprise systems won't even touch that.
Mostly wrong about the swap file. Microsoft recommends putting the pagefile onto an SSD. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx
Take a look at SSD caching. In particular Intel Smart Response. It's a great way to get the speed benefit of SSDs much of the time with a lower cost.
You are dead wrong about SSD speed. Where did you even come up with those numbers? My USB 3.0 32GB flash drive reads at over 120MB/sec. As already stated my SSD totally maxes out 3gb/sec SATA: something mechanical HDDs can only do in RAID. And that's only talking about sequential reads/writes. I dare you to open up firefox, photoshop, and start a 1080p movie off of a mechanical HDD, and then off of an SSD. Access times on SSDs are near instant. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/20
Yes SSDs are still relatively young and immature in some areas. That doesn't change the fact that support for them is substancial and they are above and beyond mechanical drives in anything related to performance.
if you believe Wikipedia, there were only 50 websites to visit
Did you read that page you linked to? "Of the thousands of websites founded prior to 1995, those appearing here are noteworthy for one or more of the following reasons..."