I am not sure if there is a consumer market for SSDs this big. If you have a high-performance online transaction processing app, then this could be great. But if you just have a terabyte of porn, you are wasting your money. Disks (and even tape) handle this workload just fine.
For a boot drive, 30G ought to be enough. I only use 7G on my desktop and about 4G on my laptop:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ssd-root 28G 6.9G 19G 27% /
/dev/mapper/md0_crypt 917G 331G 587G 37% /home
No reason to pay $3000 for a 1T SSD when a 30G SSD + 1T hard drive will give you the exact same performance for 1/10th the cost. (I have 3 drives in md0_crypt, and so it ends up being as fast as an SSD too. The bottleneck on both disks is the crypto; apparently i7s don't have hardware-accelerated AES, but the i5s do. Grumble.)
It's awkward to fit Windows 7 Ultimate in 30G, never mind applications. Swap file and hibernation file, which will both be present by default, added up to over half that in my case immediately post-install (12G memory).
I'm using an Intel 80G SSD in my desktop as the boot drive, on Windows 7. Rather annoying is the fact that directories like Program Files, ProgramData and some others cannot be moved to another drive and replaced with junctions (the moral equivalent of a mount point), because some MS application installation features rely on hard links for some kind of checkpointing, and these cross-device links fail silently.
Rather annoying is the fact that directories like Program Files, ProgramData and some others cannot be moved to another drive and replaced with junctions (the moral equivalent of a mount point), because some MS application installation features rely on hard links for some kind of checkpointing, and these cross-device links fail silently.
This is what the Microsoft Tax really is. I have a full Linux desktop install in 7G, but a basic Windows 7 install is awkward in 30G -- with no easy way to fix the problem except by purchasing a larger disk.
At least all those Windows users bring down the cost of beefy hardware for me ;)
My C is devoid of Program Files and all my temporary files and such are also on my second drive. What seriously irks me is that some applications (especially games) install files to 'My Documents', I've admittedly not looked for a resolution to this as I have more than enough room to accommodate this.
Thanks, I never really looked into it, if it's really that easy it's worth the time to stop the colossal growth I get there with iTunes and crap. I already have 5 gig in My Documents inside a few months of a fresh install.
Can't you move the swap and hibernation files on the other bigger and slower disk? Since you are not going to use them too much, I don't see any point on keeping them on the fast disk.
Oh, I've already done that for the page file, and I just disabled hibernation. I actually meant completing an installation, not post-optimization - you can cut down on the total use by moving directories to another drive and linking to them with junctions, and I have done that to cut it down - but the Windows directory alone takes up 14G, and I wouldn't rush to mess with its internals:
~$ time du -cs /c/Windows
14G /c/Windows
14G total
real 0m32.853s
user 0m6.255s
sys 0m22.682s
This is Cygwin du running cold (as cold as the Windows directory gets) and it was CPU limited on a Core i7 920 @ 3.6GHz. There are just shy of 90,000 files in my Windows dir. A second (=> warm) run completed in 28 seconds; the Intel SSD is very fast for random reads, and I highly recommend it. Most of the other brand SSDs have higher contiguous throughput, but the Intel usually beats them easily on random access.
Can you share your experience about having an SSD boot drive for your desktop? I've wanted to get one for a few months now for performance reasons. I run an Ubuntu desktop and have a 10G partition for /.
I would like to speed up some common tasks that are quite slow now such as logging into Gnome and opening Firefox for the first time and things like that. Most reviews i saw were running the whole thing from an SSD drive.
I'm told that older datacenters are maxed out on power consumption, not physical space. It seems that companies with storage-intensive needs could get great deals for colo if they used SSDs along with low wattage processors. Of course, for $4K/TB, it doesn't makes sense. However, when prices drop or someone makes slow-but-cheap solid state storage (for long tail stuff, not OLTP), things will get very interesting.
Not sure of the price/density coefficient multiplier for flash versus hard drives, but if it's near unity then these should be set to disrupt the magnetic drive market in 4-5 years.
My parents, representative, I believe, of the average computer users, have an 80 Gb hard drive that is at less than 15 % used capacity. The point at which, say, twice that level of storage drops to less than $100 in SSD format makes a strong economic case for widespread consumer adoption. We see the beginning of this in netbooks.
I only use about 40GB on my laptop. I'd buy a 60GB disk for $100, but not a 120GB for $300. They should concentrate on getting the price down rather than the capacity up. They're too expensive.
That's easily within reach. I remember there being issues with read/writes. You could only write so many times or read so many times. Is this still true? How long will an SSD last?
Flash has a wear mechanism for writing, limiting the number of erase (and thus write) cycles. The firmware in the device does "wear leveling" which spreads the wear around as evenly as possible rather than concentrating it. The net result is that the SSD will probably outlast the computer it is in.
Depending on how the "garbage collecting" (moving active sectors out of erase blocks and erasing the blocks, number of erased blocks held in reserved, etc.) is implemented, SSDs can be fast for initial writing, but slow down significantly after they are used a while. Some manufacturers use better algorithms, but the algorithms are based on heuristics and trade-offs, so what works well for your neighbor may not work as well for you.
Theoretical reliability and lifespan is much higher than that of mechanical drives. There have been bad "batches" of SSD drives from one or two companies, but there are from mechanical drive companies too.
People should have backups anyway, so I guess if the companies are standing behind these drives and all the users so far are pleased it's not really an issue, though it doesn't beat the mech drives really (although in mobile applications shock resistance is higher) but there seems to be no cons. It's just price, size and speed to decide on them now.
Still, given the prices, for home applications I imagine people just want a boot drive and storage on a larger mech. On the server side there are probably quite a few databases that could benefit from 1TB with good random access and throughput.
Personally, outside of data capture or similar applications with sustained turnover of large amounts of data, I think it's a non-issue in practice; and for those applications, the SLC drives are available at a higher price.
We specced these in feb to replace the disks in one of our clusters; not quite economical yet but getting there. When we deploy the next storage cluster in June I expect it will be with SSDs.
Diskspace is basically close to free nowawadays. I've made it known on a number of projects that "I never want to hear we're out of space, ever, eliminating copier paper is more worthwhile to get an extra TB of space for a project."
Diskspeed however is worth its weight in gold for some applications.
For a boot drive, 30G ought to be enough. I only use 7G on my desktop and about 4G on my laptop:
No reason to pay $3000 for a 1T SSD when a 30G SSD + 1T hard drive will give you the exact same performance for 1/10th the cost. (I have 3 drives in md0_crypt, and so it ends up being as fast as an SSD too. The bottleneck on both disks is the crypto; apparently i7s don't have hardware-accelerated AES, but the i5s do. Grumble.)