Reading and writing photos from hard drives is generally sequential. The fastest SSDs are not twice as fast as the fastest HDDs, so by putting your photos on a HD you lose an incrementally small advantage in speed, and save a lot of money at the same time.
Booting the OS and launching programs, on the other hand, along with the inevitable background accesses incidental to filesystem updates, on-access malware scanning, etc., these types of operations incite much more random accessing of the storage media. Since the best SSDs are several orders of magnitude faster at small random reads and writes than the best HDDs, the payoff of using one of these things as your OS/software drive is huge and immediately noticeable.
I don't really care if I get to rent a movie 2 weeks after it leaves the cinema or I have to wait 6 or 8 weeks
The problem with that attitude--and I know--is that it can be tough to get seeders on the older torrents. Or if you're lucky and an eight-week-old torrent happens to still be well-seeded, you'll download it alright but then getting your ratio back up afterward can be a real exercise in patience. (I know, you said after it leaves the cinema, but the principle is the same.)
My employer really should allow me to set up a wireless link to my house. Dedicated link=no internet traffic=no competition=no congestion. Oh, and 20mbit symmetrical access to the internet from home means that my employer won't be the sole beneficiary of such an arrangement.
According to Anand, the Kingston V Series 40GB drive uses Intel's controller; it's basically just one half of the X-25M 80GB drive. Which is really unfortunate and potentially confusing, considering that Kingston has some "older" 64 and 128GB SSDs with a JMicron controller, as you rightfully pointed out, also wearing the V badge.
Incidentally, I've been following Anand's SSD anthology and I'm aware of the poor reputation of the JMicron controller. My first SSDs were Indilinx and Intel-based for this reason. However, a few months back I decided to experiment with the less expensive JMicron-based Kinston V Series, as some had reported the stuttering issues did not plague these drives. All in all I've been very happy with this drive, and the Atom-based Winxp machine it runs in is delightfully peppy--a clear improvement over any HDD system.
I haven't seen any random read/write test results for these JMicron V Series, and haven't bothered to do any benchmarking myself, but for a budget drive I'm totally satisfied with the way it handles itself and I'll be using them in near-future budget builds until something better displaces them as cost/capacity king (the new 40GB V Series perhaps? although 40GB is a little slim in the days of Vista and 7).
When those privileges include the right to speak to your (still-brainwashed) family.
I suppose that would be worse, but so far we're talking pure unsubstantiated fiction. As far as I'm aware, neither mormons nor Catholics seek to infringe on a persons right (or freedom, for that matter) to speak to their family or anybody else. I don't know where you got that idea.
They shun their own family if they don't buy into their crap. Threatening to make you effectively dead to your whole (brainwashed) family
Citation needed
Catholicism has excommunication, same idea.
Rescinding somebody's privileges of membership is the same as fraud? That's quite a stretch, and your painting every person who ever stood under the banner of religion with the same broad brush is reckless and disingenuous.
Sure, and you would see the generalized benefits of a faster processor and more memory, but then your budget just went up, your power consumption went up, and you lose the benefits every time you reboot, until you run all your programs again for the first time.
On a related topic, some guy on the OCZ forums linked to a detailed post he made elsewhere, describing how he had made a two-member RAID1, the first member being his / partition and the other being a ramdisk. On each boot mdadm would rebuild the array, and his entire root partition would run therefore from RAM.
the cheapest Intel X25-M G2 80 GB is 259, I don't see why you would prefer Kingston's version.
You got me there, I didn't see the cheaper Intels.
Anandtech's article clearly shows that it is severely lacking compared to the other drives, primarily because it is limited to a 5-way internal raid vs 10-way for Intel's own.
You're referring to Kingston's 40GB V Series drive. They also sell 80 and 160GB drives which are identical in performance to the Intel equivalents. The V Series apparently doesn't support TRIM, but perhaps the larger, faster M Series do? If so then it's an entirely comparable product. If not, then yes, the TRIM support lends higher value to the Intel brand.
That's photos, right? I would put those on the HD.
Generally I recommend / or C: on the SSD and/home or/Users on the HD.
At home I actually keep/home on the SSD and mount a media folder on the NAS, which is where I keep most stuff. The advantage of this setup is having all my dot-files on the SSD, which seems to greatly speed up the login process. but effectively all my working data sits on spinning hard drives.
There are plenty of other tweaks out there too for improving performance and/or reducing SSD wear, such as the use of ramdisks for temp and cache directories, and proper partitioning and formatting of SSD to leverage the natural boundaries of the device's page and block. The OCZ forums are a wealth of information and a good place to start. The linux thread on that forum is particularly instructive for Linux and Windows users alike.
Then I guess it's a question of how mobile you are, or how much you actually need to store on the laptop. I personally bought an acer timeline with the 80GB Intel SSD. I repartitioned it something like 20/50/10 for Ubuntu/Vista/unused and keep all my big files on the NAS. That leaves me 15/30GB or so of free space to drop movies for a road trip or updates and drivers for a support visit into dialup country.
Granted, if you are somebody that needs to carry around huge files or games on your laptop, or if it's your only storage for extended periods of time, you may prefer to opt for a bigger drive, or, circumstances permitting, a 2-drive machine with the mixed SSD-HDD setup I mentioned above. For the vast majority of users though, I suspect 80GB is enough, and the performance improvement will have you hooked. I know. Anand's final paragraph in the linked article says it all for me:
I still firmly believe that an SSD is the single best performance improvement you can buy for your system today. Would I recommend waiting until next year to buy? This is one of the rare cases where I'd have to answer no. I made the switch last year and I wouldn't go back, it really does change the way your PC behaves.
The first mistake most people make when talking about SSDs vs HDDs is comparing cost/GB. SSDs are not for storing data. They're for installing your OS and programs, while your data goes to the fileserver or the secondary drive in the workstation. Almost every system builder I've talked to fails to recognize that for your typical home or office user, spending an extra $100-200 on a solid-state system drive, even if it means reducing your CPU budget correspondingly, will show huge gains in system usability and responsiveness. I've built several systems on this philosophy and my customers couldn't be happier.
I ordered my free upgrade from Acer and it cost me nothing.
My complaint is with retailers selling two Vista OEM skus, one with the free upgrade, one without, and charging two very different prices for them. When did "free" start meaning $30?
We use thin clients and RDP for students here at the college. It removes physical access to the Windows machine in a very elegant way, and is tonnes easy to manage.
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Reading and writing photos from hard drives is generally sequential. The fastest SSDs are not twice as fast as the fastest HDDs, so by putting your photos on a HD you lose an incrementally small advantage in speed, and save a lot of money at the same time.
Booting the OS and launching programs, on the other hand, along with the inevitable background accesses incidental to filesystem updates, on-access malware scanning, etc., these types of operations incite much more random accessing of the storage media. Since the best SSDs are several orders of magnitude faster at small random reads and writes than the best HDDs, the payoff of using one of these things as your OS/software drive is huge and immediately noticeable.
1000m, give or take. Plenty of radios out there that will do up to 50km under good conditions. I like Ubiquiti.
I don't really care if I get to rent a movie 2 weeks after it leaves the cinema or I have to wait 6 or 8 weeks
The problem with that attitude--and I know--is that it can be tough to get seeders on the older torrents. Or if you're lucky and an eight-week-old torrent happens to still be well-seeded, you'll download it alright but then getting your ratio back up afterward can be a real exercise in patience. (I know, you said after it leaves the cinema, but the principle is the same.)
My employer really should allow me to set up a wireless link to my house. Dedicated link=no internet traffic=no competition=no congestion. Oh, and 20mbit symmetrical access to the internet from home means that my employer won't be the sole beneficiary of such an arrangement.
According to Anand, the Kingston V Series 40GB drive uses Intel's controller; it's basically just one half of the X-25M 80GB drive. Which is really unfortunate and potentially confusing, considering that Kingston has some "older" 64 and 128GB SSDs with a JMicron controller, as you rightfully pointed out, also wearing the V badge.
Incidentally, I've been following Anand's SSD anthology and I'm aware of the poor reputation of the JMicron controller. My first SSDs were Indilinx and Intel-based for this reason. However, a few months back I decided to experiment with the less expensive JMicron-based Kinston V Series, as some had reported the stuttering issues did not plague these drives. All in all I've been very happy with this drive, and the Atom-based Winxp machine it runs in is delightfully peppy--a clear improvement over any HDD system.
I haven't seen any random read/write test results for these JMicron V Series, and haven't bothered to do any benchmarking myself, but for a budget drive I'm totally satisfied with the way it handles itself and I'll be using them in near-future budget builds until something better displaces them as cost/capacity king (the new 40GB V Series perhaps? although 40GB is a little slim in the days of Vista and 7).
When those privileges include the right to speak to your (still-brainwashed) family.
I suppose that would be worse, but so far we're talking pure unsubstantiated fiction. As far as I'm aware, neither mormons nor Catholics seek to infringe on a persons right (or freedom, for that matter) to speak to their family or anybody else. I don't know where you got that idea.
They shun their own family if they don't buy into their crap. Threatening to make you effectively dead to your whole (brainwashed) family
Citation needed
Catholicism has excommunication, same idea.
Rescinding somebody's privileges of membership is the same as fraud? That's quite a stretch, and your painting every person who ever stood under the banner of religion with the same broad brush is reckless and disingenuous.
"tithe" means 10%. If it's not 10% then it's not really a tithe at all.
Sure, and you would see the generalized benefits of a faster processor and more memory, but then your budget just went up, your power consumption went up, and you lose the benefits every time you reboot, until you run all your programs again for the first time.
On a related topic, some guy on the OCZ forums linked to a detailed post he made elsewhere, describing how he had made a two-member RAID1, the first member being his / partition and the other being a ramdisk. On each boot mdadm would rebuild the array, and his entire root partition would run therefore from RAM.
the cheapest Intel X25-M G2 80 GB is 259, I don't see why you would prefer Kingston's version.
You got me there, I didn't see the cheaper Intels.
Anandtech's article clearly shows that it is severely lacking compared to the other drives, primarily because it is limited to a 5-way internal raid vs 10-way for Intel's own.
You're referring to Kingston's 40GB V Series drive. They also sell 80 and 160GB drives which are identical in performance to the Intel equivalents. The V Series apparently doesn't support TRIM, but perhaps the larger, faster M Series do? If so then it's an entirely comparable product. If not, then yes, the TRIM support lends higher value to the Intel brand.
That's photos, right? I would put those on the HD.
Generally I recommend / or C: on the SSD and /home or /Users on the HD.
At home I actually keep /home on the SSD and mount a media folder on the NAS, which is where I keep most stuff. The advantage of this setup is having all my dot-files on the SSD, which seems to greatly speed up the login process. but effectively all my working data sits on spinning hard drives.
There are plenty of other tweaks out there too for improving performance and/or reducing SSD wear, such as the use of ramdisks for temp and cache directories, and proper partitioning and formatting of SSD to leverage the natural boundaries of the device's page and block. The OCZ forums are a wealth of information and a good place to start. The linux thread on that forum is particularly instructive for Linux and Windows users alike.
Write the image to the USB drive. In *nix you can use unetbootin or dd. For Windows there's physdiskwrite, ddwin, and some others.
Then I guess it's a question of how mobile you are, or how much you actually need to store on the laptop. I personally bought an acer timeline with the 80GB Intel SSD. I repartitioned it something like 20/50/10 for Ubuntu/Vista/unused and keep all my big files on the NAS. That leaves me 15/30GB or so of free space to drop movies for a road trip or updates and drivers for a support visit into dialup country.
Granted, if you are somebody that needs to carry around huge files or games on your laptop, or if it's your only storage for extended periods of time, you may prefer to opt for a bigger drive, or, circumstances permitting, a 2-drive machine with the mixed SSD-HDD setup I mentioned above. For the vast majority of users though, I suspect 80GB is enough, and the performance improvement will have you hooked. I know. Anand's final paragraph in the linked article says it all for me:
I still firmly believe that an SSD is the single best performance improvement you can buy for your system today. Would I recommend waiting until next year to buy? This is one of the rare cases where I'd have to answer no. I made the switch last year and I wouldn't go back, it really does change the way your PC behaves.
Absolutely
The first mistake most people make when talking about SSDs vs HDDs is comparing cost/GB. SSDs are not for storing data. They're for installing your OS and programs, while your data goes to the fileserver or the secondary drive in the workstation. Almost every system builder I've talked to fails to recognize that for your typical home or office user, spending an extra $100-200 on a solid-state system drive, even if it means reducing your CPU budget correspondingly, will show huge gains in system usability and responsiveness. I've built several systems on this philosophy and my customers couldn't be happier.
Never mind, I'll answer my own question: no.
No, but that doesn't stop me from putting a boot partition on a USB stick and / on the Fusion-io.
Now, the fact that I could buy a good used car for the price of the Fusion-io, that stops me.
I prefer the Kingston-branded equivalent at $267. Anybody know if the Kingstons support trim?
None that I'm aware of. I was specifically responding to parent's problems with the WRT54GL.
If I needed 802.11n today I would go with Ubiquiti.
Microsoft would have to restructure a part of their OS
So Vista was just a tweak?
It says in the article that the study found temperature not to be a factor.
Try tomato.
I ordered my free upgrade from Acer and it cost me nothing.
My complaint is with retailers selling two Vista OEM skus, one with the free upgrade, one without, and charging two very different prices for them. When did "free" start meaning $30?
Atom 330 also has hyperthreading and 64-bit support. Not worth the extra wattage, perhaps, but still a consideration.
We use thin clients and RDP for students here at the college. It removes physical access to the Windows machine in a very elegant way, and is tonnes easy to manage.
I'd like to think that most of us are smart enough to not commit such a crime as that.