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An SSD for Your Current Computer May Save the Cost of a New One (Video)
Obviously, the first performance enhancement you do on any computer you own is max out the RAM. RAM has gotten cheap, and adding more of it to almost any computer will make it faster without requiring any other modification (or any great skill). The next thing you need to do, says Larry O'Connor, the founder and CEO of Other World Computing (OWC), is move from a "platter" hard drive to a Solid State Drive (SSD). Larry's horse in this race is that his company sells SSDs, mostly for Macs. But he's a real evangelist about SSDs and computer mods in general, even if you buy them from NewEgg, Amazon or another vendor.
A big (vendor-neutral) thing Larry points out is that just because you have a Terabyte drive in your computer now doesn't mean you need a Terabyte SSD, which can easily cost $500. Rather, he says, all you need is a large enough SSD to contain your OS and software and whatever data you're working with at the moment, so you might be able to get by with a 120 GB SSD that costs well under $100. Clone your current main drive, stick in the new SSD, and if your need more storage, get another hard drive (or use your old one). Simple. Efficient. And a lot cheaper than buying a new computer, whether we're talking about home, business or even enterprise use. (Alternate video link.)
A big (vendor-neutral) thing Larry points out is that just because you have a Terabyte drive in your computer now doesn't mean you need a Terabyte SSD, which can easily cost $500. Rather, he says, all you need is a large enough SSD to contain your OS and software and whatever data you're working with at the moment, so you might be able to get by with a 120 GB SSD that costs well under $100. Clone your current main drive, stick in the new SSD, and if your need more storage, get another hard drive (or use your old one). Simple. Efficient. And a lot cheaper than buying a new computer, whether we're talking about home, business or even enterprise use. (Alternate video link.)
YEAH WE KNOW
Soo this is Slashdot, not "Mom Computer Consumer Weekly".
HyperDuo is not a comic book, it is a nifty technology that allows one or more SSDs to be coupled to a standard HDD and treated as a single drive, with the hot data residing on the SSD storage.
Almost every failing of a computer can be related to where the OS sits. I have replaced/installed over 50 new/used computer platters with SSDs as the primary and a platter as the storage. Not only does boot time vanish, but just about everything under the sun is improved. I could ramble on but I think that's what the video does. Basically it's just smarter regardless of whether you use Win/Mac/Linux etc.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
There are many times "maxing out your RAM" is a complete waste of money, and does NOT lead to any measurable performance increase. Case in point: my gaming rig can handle 64GB of RAM. I have 32 on it. It BARELY uses 3 of that most of the time. I seriously doubt it ever uses even 8.
Most laptops don't come with the ability to put in two drives so you can't have an SSD and platter. You'd have to have an external USB drive which most users would not want to lug around.
Many people I've known with 128GB SSD run out of space fast. I'd recommend at least 240GB. Another option for light users would be a hybrid SSD.
Guess I'm out -- my current main drive is 1.5 TB.
clone tools exist and no one needs to 'ask MS'.
worst case, you find a copy of windows 'loader' and you're done.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
1TB for $500? Remember when the 16gb ones were expensive as hell just a few years back?
I guess they're bound to replace platter based drives even for storage by the end of the decade, since that just really budged in capacity significantly in years.
Right now doing fine with a 256gb one. 128gb ended up cramped far too often with os/apps and normal downloads.
Depending on what you use to do the clone it'll do it as long as the used space (rather than the drive size) will fit on the SSD. I did it to my laptop, going from a 750 GB HDD to a 120 GB SSD. Need to tell it to go proportional on the partition sizes, or some cloning software has an SSD migration tool.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
... the problem with buying a small SSD is that you'll just want to upgrade anyway later. So you should just take the plunge and get a reasonably sized SSD so that you can run common intensive apps off the SSD. Traditional HD's are just for storage/movies/big stuff. Most people only use a few common programs at a time so having enough space on an SSD for things you use frequently is a must. It just makes your life that much easier and you won't have to upgrade until many years later when program sizes or some new tech forces the issue.
Have 32 GB of ram 18 GB of which currently used by OS disk cache. There is no disk delay to do anything. A week after starting a VMware workstation image it is always still cached in ram and resumes instantly. All of my apps and everything load instantly with no disk related delay.
Given that reality $130 for 3TBs of platters is still a much better deal.
My machine suspends to ram when not in use and reboots less than once a month to install patches. Boot times are irrelevant as is time needed to initially load applications and datasets.
People keep saying crap like this, but it's nonsense. I hate MS as much as anyone, but a lie's a lie. I've never once had to reauthorize Windows (XP or 7), even after replacing or adding hard drives. Hell, I've changed the motherboard a couple of times and it didn't complain.
It depends on your use case. If you just surf the web and do email then no, you don't need to max out. I often run multiple VMs while also compiling code, etc. The more RAM for me the better.
They may have fine SSDs, but the ones I bought to add to 2 mac minis were ridiculously slow for SSDs. Around 80 MBps read/write according to BlackMagic's disk speed test. Not faster than the original normal drive that came with the machines. In one of the Mac minis, I replaced the OWC with a Samsung, and it's much faster (I forgot how much, but certainly over 120 MBps).
So in conclusion, yes, SSD may improve performance, but only if they are fast SSDs. Some aren't and won't make a big difference. (and when they fail, they tend to do so without warning and completely, so be sure to always have backups).
Ah yes... I remember those. I had to buy an external Mac drive for the company I was with at the time and couldn't for the life of me think of a reason the "Mac" version cost more money. So I got the "PC" version and when it arrived, it was preformatted for Macintosh. Fun times.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Yes, because Windows makes it oh so easy to move user profiles to other volumes.
For Linux users, it's really easy:
mount -o rw /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp /home/. /mnt/tmp/home /home #to make sure everything moved. /dev/sdb1 /home (ideally, add ,acl to enable access control lists)
mv
ls -lh
mount -o rw
. . . then add it to fstab to make it permanent.
On Windows, each user has to go to each individual folder and move it - and only lets you move certain folders. To do it globally it requires registry edits, which Joe Sixpack will inevitably screw up.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Seconded. 2-4 GB is enough to turn off your page file in Windows, and that's where performance improvements for normal desktop apps ends for me. I have 16 GB for gaming, but I'm not sure I've ever used more than 8.
Visit the
all you need is a large enough SSD to contain your OS and software and whatever data you're working with at the moment,
Can the Linux kernel be configured to use a SSD as a 2nd-level disk cache, behind the RAM cache, so that you don't need to manually put your working data in the SSD?
I disagree on 'maxing' it out. ... 8 GB will be fine for the next 4-6 years at least.
And 640k ought to be enough for anyone.
"Enough" RAM is not noticeable. "Not enough" is very noticeable. What "enough" is is likely to continue to increase. More than enough RAM can also improve disk caching, though this has diminishing returns.
Also, Lorizean said:
Put the 64GB in and use it as a ramdisk. Be blown away by the speeds.
Which is better than caching for something like a temp directory.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Who visits this site and doesn't already know this? I've been salvaging laptops (for a fee) by putting in SSDs for years. As long as it has SATA, slap one in (sure, they made PATA SSDs but why?). And no, a RAM drive is not the same unless you have external power for the RAM or you never turn you PC off. Disks have been a bottleneck since the invention of the PC. Only now can you have an average PC where the CPU is (sometimes) the largest bottleneck. Next up, you can speed up your computer by removing HPs bloated all-in-one software suite. No shit.
Uhh...not exactly. In fact, his subsequent logic about why lots of people don't need terabyte magnetic disks applies directly to this point about RAM. If your system supports 16GB of RAM but all you ever do is browse the web and check email then you almost certainly don't need to max out your system's RAM. In fact, you could probably make do with 4GB.
The historical reason to max ram within 18 month of purchase is that's when it's easiest and cheapest to do, at least retail. A few years back, was looking for ram for a 6 year old system (not that I bought a cpu/motherboard type that just came out either, mind you, so add 2 years to that for model age) and it was pretty much impossible. Places that had it charged way more per/gb than ram for recent systems. Could either waste time on craigslist salvaging old computers or take chances on buying used on the shitbay.
Though I agree, now max ram on many systems are passing actual need. Something that started around mid-00s for some low-end users and is spreading upward.
Unless you're rendering or the like, the bottleneck now is internet connection.
Screw an SSD, just get 100 gigs of RAM and never turn your computer off.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
SSDs aren't actually very good for caching. (Though they sell drives and software specifically to do that.) They're better at WORM (Write Once Read Many) or Write Rarely Read Many (WRRM?) tasks. Like installing an OS and other programs there and not modifying them often. (Where "often" = "every few minutes".)
That said, I do have my computer's swapfile on my SSD. But only because I only have 4GB RAM and can't upgrade.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
This is a non-issue. It takes a lot more than a new harddrive to make it re-activate. And even then, it will almost always let you re-activate using the original key. And on the rare chance that it doesn't calling the 800 number has always got me back in business.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
"Obviously, the first performance enhancement you do on any computer you own is max out the RAM"
What kind of clueless moron wrote that nonsense?
SSDs are the next cache layer.
Also, make sure you've got a 6Gb SATA capable motherboard, or you're essentially wasting half your money putting a hot new drive into a slow bus.
It should read; If you don't have a 6Gb SATA capable motherboard don't buy a SATA3 ssd. Save some money and buy a SATA2 ssd. In any case, depending on what you do, you may or may not benefit from the increase in sequential speed the new SATA III drives offer. For some people, it is very significant for most is not noticeable.
Already do a Ramdisk on my mac (minecraft server, can't grief a server that only exists in Ramdisk!) and have a few VMs. I still have 8-10 GB sitting idle and have for years. My money would have better served going with 8 GB and upgrading if absolutely necessary.
P.S. I carefully phrased my response just to avoid the 640k troll. The 640k statement was an absolute, for all time. I put a specific limit on mine, not to mention im speaking from direct experience. Also, your quote is probably apocryphal.
http://www.computerworld.com/s...
You would do well to just forget the phrase entirely.
Good-bye
my HD died in my macbook last year
it was out of warranty so i bought a hybrid drive at best buy. 1TB with 32MB of flash and it made a huge difference in speed.
pure SSD is most likely faster, but not enough for me to shell out all that money for a second here and there
a clone tool like what?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There's a few methods to do this. The first is bcache which allows an SSD/Flash memory to be combined to form a hybrid volume. Another is Flashcache which is a little more transparent (as I understand it) with respect to the file system.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Well, you're wrong. 4GB is enough for almost every average user. Gamers need 8GB but no game I've ever heard of uses more than 5GB of total space while running. 16GB is basically video editing only. So no, don't max out the RAM just for the fun of it. Going from 4GB to 8GB won't do a thing for you if all you do is web browse. It would have absolutely zero impact on performance at all.
The only company I've ever had to contact for authorization from "installing too much" was Apple to activate iTunes. Microsoft hypothetically has a limit, but given the number of times I've reinstalled I'm pretty sure they only keep records going back a certain amount of time.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
This post probably deserves an off-topic mod. I know. With that out of the way...
I'll admit, since my comment on the last video, I've been curious what the next would be like. Roblimo, I don't know if you saw or cared about my comment, but I notice that this story is far better. As of this writing, there is not a single comment complaining about advertising, even though there's still only a single company directly involved. The focus is more general, and that makes the whole thing much more appealing. Kudos to you. It makes me happy to think that I might be improving Slashdot in some small way.
Granted, the subject is a bit under the typical Slashdotter's level of expertise, but that's beside the point. This would have been really nice when I was explaining to a former boss how SSDs should properly be used. He thought I was crazy for suggesting that the documents he wanted to have instant access to should be on the slower drive.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
EaseUS Disk Copy (http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/home-edition/) has worked great for me on several occasions.
Theoretically the disk controller could initially access only the spinning platter, and then only the frequently-accessed blocks (reads or writes) would get relocated to the flash drive.
This tool is great and well worth the $20. It will clone the boot as well as do the 4k SSD alignment automatically. Not a shill, just a happy customer.
http://www.paragon-software.co...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
But then I do OpenStack development.
Spinning up VMs on qemu via OpenStack running on Virtualbox instances. Whee!
I do not game, but I run Linux and have to run Windows VMs for certain user tasks that cannot be run natively in Linux. I have 8GB and I'm glad that I do, as running even a single VM with only 4GB wasn't so pleasant.
On the flip side, the computer that I use when lounging on the couch has only 2GB RAM and a single-core "Mobile" processor, and it's fine for browsing the web. It was a little slow when it had only 1GB, but thankfully I was able to locate a couple of cheap 1GB DDR2 SODIMMs to upgrade. The bigger problem is that web designers aren't designing for variable-width pages anymore, so some pages require horizontal scrolling on the 1024x768 screen.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It depends. I just had to replace the motherboard, processor and RAM in my desktop recently and while I had to reactive windows, windows 8 was able to do it without a full reinstall. This was an AMD to Intel switch too.
It probably wasn't as clean as a fresh install, but it worked fine.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I tested and windows had no substantial improvement booting from SSD, nor working on my usual apps. Windows must do a lot of writing during boot compared to most OS.
Linux benefited tremendously, from 90 second boot to 13 seconds. Usual apps were loading in less than three seconds.
Actually no, only access to the hot data improves, but it's not a cache in the strict sense of the word, it's a striped set where the hot data is determined in real time and stored on the SSD part of the stripe. There is no fetching "off the actual spinning storage drive" for data that's stored on the SSD, since, well, that data isn't ON the HDD. This is assuming a person is using the recommended "capacity mode" (striping) and not the mirror mode. However, even for the mirror mode you're perfectly wrong in that reads come from the SSD and WRITES are slow because they have to write through to both drives.
You browse or use an app with 50+ tabs open at any given time ... true story my co-worker does this in almost every single app he has open that has tabs. It is sad ... that is all.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
Full subject: An SSD for Your Current Computer May Save the Cost of a New One
Yippee!! Free SSD!!
If only there was a controller card with a co-processor (maybe a little ARM SoC) that could determine dynamically which was which and then assign the hot data to the SSD and the other data to the HDD automatically, constantly reevaluating which was which and making it all transparent. Oh wait, that's EXACTLY what HyperDuo is .....
Unless you're rendering or the like, the bottleneck now is internet connection.
I have 100 Mbps, you insensitive clod!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I'm actually embarassed for you, /.
wth..
I'm from an era when computers cost $3k for a POS that got obsolete within 18 months.
Anyway, I was talking relatively.
My laptop has 4GB and I notice. Luckily it has a 256GB SSD, but it's not as fast as my other machines with 8GB.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
As always, it's a matter of tradeoffs.
I run a small lab of computers, and I decided to try upgrading them to 128GB SSDs. The fast computers with Windows 8 became even faster. The slow computers with Windows Vista did not improve dramatically.
Especially the small desktop with the 1.6GHz Core Duo. A lot of time is spent on hard disk access, but get slow enough and a huge amount of time is actually waiting on the CPU. Chrome opens pretty quickly, but Firefox still takes several times as long to launch. LibreOffice still takes a long time to install or open, though appreciably less time than on HDD.
It all depends on the use. No storage upgrade is going to make your Internet connection faster, or allow your computer to play 1080p video if it doesn't have the GPU decoder or CPU power for it. If you upgrade to an SSD, you'll see some improvement, but you'll get the most benefit if your other hardware is still adequate and you're mostly waiting on the HDD. To determine whether that's so, you really should be doing measurements.
Have a nice time.
My thanks to you and the AC above.
Both those Wikipedia pages linked to this benchmark, that showed Dm-cache is another option that gives very good performance in write-back caching mode (adequate for most desktop machines),
Let's just say that you were lucky. I have re-authed Windows many times, just for changing the amount of RAM or the hard disk or network card.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Yeah. Where will you ever come up with that $16?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
16GB is basically video editing only.
...or programming, like a huge chunk of the Slashdot community. A text editor and a few terminal windows don't chew through RAM, granted, but I've never had so much memory that a compiler didn't wish it had more. I'm also running a lot of local daemons (RabbitMQ, Cassandra, Mongo, Redis, etc.) so that I can run a full test suite without Internet access and all of those want their pound of flesh.
My company laptop has 8GB of RAM. The fact that swap is on an SSD is the only thing that makes it a comfortable development environment.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I call MS, and tell them I just got a new HD. Takes a minute.
Of course usually I just clone it and call it good.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Every HD I have purchased in the last decade with comes with a disk for cloning, or you can download it from the manufacturer.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I would prefer to say you were unlucky.
I've changed parts in many, many computers and only had it come up with a mobo change.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is quickly becoming untrue. The no.1 memory hog these days is the browser. People keep 20+ tabs open, many of them filled with tons of fancy graphics and complex structures. The virtual memory WILL become active. And then everything is incredibly slow.
Also, even if you measure that your browser, OS etc. consume say 3 out of 4 GB, do not forget about disk cache. It is *crucial*. Plenty of free RAM means that a lot of files can be cached in memory, which helps immensely.
And, since RAM has become rather cheap these days, I'd try to max out my mainboard RAM capacity for one simple reason: DDR generations come and go. Today you might think "oh that is lots of RAM". Tomorrow you will be glad you got that much back then, because that DDR generation is obsolete now, and remaining chips are expensive. To get an example, just try to find DDR2 RAM to upgrade an old PC...
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
thank you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not entirely true. If your motherboard has dual-channel support then you'll definitely get a performance improvement (though maybe not a noticeable one outside of gaming) when you upgrade from 1 stick to 2 sticks of RAM, even if you can't use the extra capacity. Plenty of systems ship with only 1 stick installed.
You're five years behind. 4GB is not enough for anyone to run a Windows computer at a decent rate. 8GB is the minimum I build with and that's enough for now for most of my customers, be they home or SOHO users. I speak from actually looking at the numbers.
Most computers are fine on 4-8 GB of RAM. The processing slowdowns come from the HD. If you are looking for recommendations, I recommend the EVO 840 Series from Samsung. Great speed, fantastic tools to move and config your drive, and price competitive. Yes, you can do cheaper but I prefer not too. Right now you can grab a Evo 840 Series - 500GB for $270.00. I own three of these beasts (2 500GB, 1 TB). My wife was complaining about 3 year old laptop performance and I agreed. Swapped the drive and BOOM, no more problems. She is happy with her computer again and we didn't have to buy a new laptop. Sure, its possible you can get at low priced 120GB drive and start moving things around to make it work but for a little extra cheddar just keep it all on one drive and save yourself the pain.
Well, I'm glad that someone's out there talking about it, but here on /. it really is preaching to the choir.
That being said, I'd love to see this video get sent out to the masses of people on some major news channels. Getting a couple million more people interested in upgrading and modding their own computer would do wonders for increasing the interest of computer parts manufacturers in catering to the upgrade/modding community.
Z
In 2010, I bought a 120 GB SSD for my aging Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 desktop "gaming machine". 120 GB is well enough for Windows, and even a couple of games (I have a separate RAID5 for everything else and the kitchen sink), and although I can't play recent games in super-duper-high resolutions (I would need a total upgrade for that), the fact is that I've postponed my 4-year-cyle-full-desktop upgrade indefinitely. I don't game as much as I used to, and the computer feels extremely responsive, specially for a 6 year old machine.
I've been evangelizing everyone about the "magical powers" of SSDs ever since, and I firmly believe that it is the single component that will cause the greatest impact on the machine performance, hands down.
So if you still have any doubts about the 120 GB SSD making any difference on a "old" machine, rest assured, it will make a *lot* of difference.
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
pretty much any developer (nowadays) is going to be running one or more development or test environments in a VM. VM's eat ram.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Fancy, but even that speed leaves your spinning disks twiddling their thumbs waiting for data. SSDs will be in virtual Rip Van Winkle mode.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Video editing?
I see you have yet to enter the wonderful world of sample based orchestration.
I could easily max out 128 GB of ram. If I'm feeling excessive I could probably reach 256 GB, but then I'd have to do silly things like loading even articulations I don't use.
And I'm working with relatively low-end sample sets. I don't know the maximum size of, say, the VSL collection, but I bet about two terrabytes are necessary for perfectly fluid playback of the whole thing.
(currently i suffer with only 12 GB of ram and it really strains the capacity. I have to cycle out instruments from ram as I work on my tracks when I run out of ram)
I need to upgrade the shared family desktop from 10GB to 16GB. Every user logs in, then switches users instead of logging out. A Chrome process for every user eats up a lot of RAM. For a few extra bucks, I save everybody in the household tens of minutes per day (my kids are constantly switching users... I should probably get more machines).
People have been doing this for years, and what's with the video? this isn't youtube...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Actually... I found 4 drive slots in a Sager NP8255-S with 2 x 2.5" (spinning or ssd), and 2 x msata (ssd only). :-) ).
:-) ).
(And... if one drops the optical drive for a sata caddy then it should handle 5 drives.)
I looked long and hard for laptops that could handle more than 2 drives; they're kind of rare these days.
I'm finding raid-0 (multiple SSD's) to be pretty peppy (yeah, I back up early and often
Also, being able to go up to 32gb of ram is kind of nice.
I've been pleased with it thus far (going into month #4 now).
Looks like that exact model isn't in production now, but this will get you close: NP8258.
Anyway, most laptops (and essentially *all* ultrabooks) are single drive machines; which works perfectly fine for probably 95% of laptop users. I realize I'm an edge case (in more ways than one
It's kinda amazing how the idea having to call someone to basically beg for access to your operating system is seen as acceptable. People really are able to get used to any amount of bullshit it would seem, even if it's "rare". It's not as if it's necessary in the first place, what with Windows loaders being able to permanently activate anything up to and including Windows 8.1 with a single exe.
the os only boots once a day.. or week or.. so speed improvements there are cosmetic. Nobody is going to notice the time it takes to load a small driver or other OS file during the day whether it is ssd or hdd.
Even some of the piggy programs like firefox or xyzOffice - how often do people close them once they are open?
Outside of special users who regularly load and save very large files throughout the day the SSD "boost" ain't all that its cracked up to be.
Meanwhile, new PCs are dirt cheap and available from about $350 on up to insane Apple prices. Latest CPUs. Latests buses. Latest RAM. Frankly the biggest problem I have is Firefox or similar getting pokey when it starts shuffling around 1GB of in use RAM (even though much more is available).
With the prices of SSD's it is a no brainer.
Unfortunately no brainer describes a lot of managers.
I have 16 GB in my mac mini and i dont see a future of me using it all.
This statement is a bit reminiscent of my fellow nerdy friends when I was growing up who could not fathom filling a 100 megabyte harddrive.
People just running a browser for email and surfing don't need more than 4 right now. I get by with 8 at work and I'm using running 2-4 instances of Visual Studio and several instances of firefox, office, and various other programs.
And none of those solutions are quite ready for prime time, unless you set them up at the same time you setup your machine and you don't need to cache multiple file systems...
(I think they're on the right track, but there are a lot of gotchas and "oh, you can't do that" cases with those solutions.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
4GB for Win7 is borderline minimum. Figure 500MB-1GB for an email program kept open all day, plus 500-800MB or more for the browser (also probably kept open all day) plus 100-300MB for instant messenger or other communication tools, plus the 1.0-1.5GB that Windows wants for itself...
Open up 2 more things and you are bumping into the swap file.
8GB of DDR3 is a good minimum these days. Buying 2x4GB sticks is pretty inexpensive and the 2x8GB sticks are getting there quickly.
Base load for me with a handful of things open is about 3GB, which doesn't leave much headroom on a 4GB system. I have 8GB on this laptop, which is enough to get me through another year or two. My next laptop will definitely need 16GB (which also gives me enough RAM to run some VMs).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
For any professional I would say that below 500GB and there will be trouble. The key is that there is a nice list of software(beyond the obvious) that really benefits from an SSD and one of the worst hogs would be Virtual Machines. These piggies really benefit from an SSD as well as lots of RAM; plus VMs will eat up gobs of HD space as well with those gobs growing in 10+GB spurts.
I keep my desktop as clean as is possible and presently am using around 200GB. I could easily use another 100GB over the next month or so. Then I have an external drive with all the goodies such as downloaded lectures and whatnot for later viewing. So a 256GB SSD would be a disaster whereas a 500GB would leave me with some breathing room.
But with Costco having a 4GB drive available for $120 I can't see external storage as being much of an issue for most people.
It takes at least 3 hardware IDs changing to trigger a reactivation, and that is only on certain parts, not all parts.
The process is well documented. You can act like its horrible and that any little thing sets it off, but then you'd just be making shit up ... oh, never mind, you ARE just making shit up.
Then you just hit 'reactivate' and worse case ... you have to spend 4 minutes on the phone saying a long ass string of numbers and telling it you have 0 installed instances using that key ... boom, activated.
If windows activation is that hard on you, you're doing it wrong. Excessively.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
>authorization from "installing too much" was Apple to activate iTunes.
I've never had to call Apple for that. Just "Deauthorize all computers" to wipe out the non-functional, no longer owned, temporarily installed, whatever iTunes instances, and then reauthorize my current machines.
Much faster than the times (admittedly small handful) I've had to call Microsoft and then deal with their automatic phone system to get activation codes.
I often keep a dozen or more windows open on my web browsers. Doing that, and a couple more things, you can sometimes break 4GB RAM -- and that's using Linux.
For Windows 8 users, you need a couple of Gig just to get the machine off of the ground. more than 4 is needed to do almost anything more than stare at a blank screen.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
It is very rare for any browser to consume over 512MB even if you had 50 tabs open. Try and see yourself.
Figure 500MB-1GB for an email program kept open all day
An e-mail program will easily fit under 100MB.
Foreground, I'll accept. Background is huge whether IE or Chrome on Windows with 32 GB physical and around 67 GB total virtual memory just over 50% utilization.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
So people with laptops, tablets, and phones don't use your website. Thanks for sharing.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What the heck?
You're missing the fundamental issue, which is that folks who've paid for something tend to feel like they shouldn't need "authorisation" when they actually attempt to use it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I actually cannot open more than 4-5 tabs on my old Thinkpad with 2 GB RAM because it will be filled quickly. This is just Chromium and icewm running, on a bare minimum Archlinux installation. More than 4-5 tabs, and disk activity skyrockets, because the disk cache is pretty much zero at this point. And this affects the system twice - first, any other I/O activity will be slower because of almost zero disk cache, and second, Chromium itself suffers, because it too does a lot of I/O operations (more reads than writes).
20+ tabs on that machine is doable, sure, if you are willing to tolerate a slideshow..
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I think most P4 machines do have SATA interfaces.
Funnily I've switched from 1024x768 to 960x720 and I don't suffer from it that much. Slightly inaquate web pages stay slightly inadequate and the completely resolution agnostic ones stay good. At least I don't suffer from the "bug" of webpages displaying kilometer-long lines of text when the width is something from 1600 to 1920, that's the big issue with "old style" pages.
Yes using that res is inane, except I found it's a good thing to use on low end CRT, I created myself a mode at 90Hz. yay!
Sounds more like a CPU than RAM limitation. 2GB of RAM can contain 100 tabs without problems.
I have, Twice and it was for something stupid like an external drive, yes it counted a peripheral as part of the PC like duh. I tend to upgrade bits regularly but this sets the 'reauthorise' off.
What happens after April 8th - no more reauthorise?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It is definitely not a CPU limitation. CPU is almost never a bottleneck these days. The hard disk is the no.1 bottleneck by far.
Also, CPU limitations don't cause massive amounts of hard disk activity and swapping. Note that I did check if swap was in use. It was. A lot.
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"SSDs are NOT a good thing. They are smaller than normal drives for MUCH greater cost/GB, and they fail just as fucking much as normal HDDs anyway."
My experience has been that SSDs fail MUCH more frequently than HDDs. What's worse, when they do fail, they usually fail catastrophically with no practical or affordable way to retrieve your data.
SSDs DO have an enormous performance benefit in random read/write operations, but the risk just isn't worth it IMHO. I do have several machines with SSDs in them for that benefit, but they all do an incremental backup daily to my server, and I don't keep any data on them. Not even pictures of my cat.
How much is the memory consumption of the Chromium process tree when the machine starts swapping heavily?
It consumes almost all of the physical memory. free -m also shows that the RAM is full, even when taking cache into account. Also, it uses about 1GB of swap.
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Ok, it's likely a bug then. Chromium normally consumes only some hundred megabytes even with a big bunch of tabs open.
But even if it consumes less RAM, browsers do a lot of I/O, because they cache all these images etc. so if your disk cache is almost nil, you will notice.
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SSDs are great but some vendors are experiencing a very low MTBF rating in some of their products. If you are going to rely on one for your system then I'd spend a few minutes comparing reported failure rates among your selected choices for an SSD vendor & the specific product you have in mind. Some of these SSDs are failing at a higher rate than even the mechanically based spinning platter drives.
I get the idea about maxing the RAM out - faster speeds and all that. What I don't understand is how moving to an SSD drive saves the cost on a new computer?
What the headline meant, in its English-mangling way, was that adding a SSD to your existing computer will give it a new lease of life, saving you the expense of buying a new computer.
An SSD has faster read/write times I've heard, but doesn't that still leave the bottleneck of the CPU? Is it supposed to act as RAM or a pagefile location or something?
Reviewers and online nerds tend to obsess about how many hundreds of megabytes a second they get in sustained-transfer disk benchmarks - figures that you'll rarely hit in real usage unless you're into editing and copying 4k video, or something similar data-intensive.
What they gloss over, is that virtually any SSD will have order-of-magnitude lower seek times than a conventional hard drive - put crudely that's the time your HDD spends laboriously dragging the read/write head to the right position and waiting for the bit of data you want to spin around to it. That makes a huge difference when your computer has to access lots of bits of information scattered over the disc - particularly when booting, loading applications or if your drive has got fragmented. Running multiple tasks? Tasks no longer have to play tug-o-war with the drive head to get the data they need.
Watch your HD activity light sometime and see how much time your computer spends faffing around with the HD.
And yeah, if you do run out of RAM and your machine starts paging to disc, a SSD will speed that up no end - although in that case upgrading RAM is probably going to be cheaper.
I don't have any vested interest in selling SSDs, but I'll vouch that putting a SSD in my laptop made it feel like a new machine.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I beg to differ. With enough tabs open in the browser, frequently run out of memory with 8GB.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Maybe it depends on the tab contents. 30 tabs of "blank" or some might-as-well-have-been-Gopher page are one thing; 30 tabs of Flash/AJAX/add-ridden web-app are another.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I beg to differ. With enough tabs open in the browser, frequently run out of memory with 8GB.
Yes, but that is because browser writers write sloppy, leaky code. I have 6 tabs open in Firefox right now, and it is using 629 MB. That is completely unnecessary. The entirety of the text displayed in those 6 tabs could be done in probably 16k. Add in memory for the firefox core and some other things, and you probably bump it up to needing 8 MB or so.
I would be schocked, though if firefix could manage to use 8 GB of memory before it collapsed under it's own weight, which it seems to do often enough on mine before ever hitting 1 GB.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Yup... That bit me recently.. Wanted a Dell Precision laptop, new was WAAAY out of my price range, so I found a nice M4400 on the Dell Offlease website for $200, it came with 2GB of DDR2 ram, but supported up to 8GB. Forgot about the DDR2 price gotcha.. Had to pay over $100 for 2 4GB DDR2 sticks.. Then about a month after buying the M4400, I spot an M4500 on the website, for $225.. I wanted to cry.. The M4500 supports up to 16GB and uses DDR3 ram, which a bit of Googling told me I could buy 16GB of DDR3 for about what I paid for the 8GB DDR2.... Oh well... Live and learn...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
There are other uses for 16GB of RAM, if you have to run multiple virtual machines for instance. I myself have 16 gigs on my home pc, mostly because it was cheap, but it also allows me to run two games at the same time, which is useful for some kind of games (turn-based, MMOs).
A small SSD main HD and a platter storage disc? You DO know where the OS is automatically going to select for the swapfile, right? And here's a definition of a lousy day.. using an SSD for the increased performance and having a swapfile on an old style harddisk! I think manual configuration is in order there, wot?
I get the idea about maxing the RAM out - faster speeds and all that. What I don't understand is how moving to an SSD drive saves the cost on a new computer?
Hyuk.. It saves the cost of all thise non moving parts wearing out from being alweays hit with them nasty ol' electrons!
If you've a spare 3.5 slot then consider investing in a Silverstone hddboost plus the largest ssd you can afford. Then make sure you keep the drive optimised with all system files to the start of the drive.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
More RAM?????!!!