This is relevant - "Why solid-state disks are winning the argument".

On 19/11/2014 23:30, Oregonian Haruspex wrote:
On 2014-11-19 15:30:17 +0000, nospam said:
[]
and way more reliable, even if you're hammering it.

This remains to be seen, over the long term. Though it seems logical
because of the lack of moving parts.
[]

Well, no. The reliability depends on the use. Unlike HDDs, SSDs have a
limited number of write cycles, and if you are using them in
applications where there is a high write throughput they /will/ fail.
Look at the manufacturer's lifetime throughput specification when
comparing. In mostly read-only applications they're usually fine.
Problems can include little or no early warning of failure.
--
Cheers,
David
Web: http://www.satsignal.eu

In article , David Taylor
wrote:

and way more reliable, even if you're hammering it.

This remains to be seen, over the long term. Though it seems logical
because of the lack of moving parts.

Well, no. The reliability depends on the use. Unlike HDDs, SSDs have a
limited number of write cycles,

hds have a limited life too. they don't last forever. nothing does.

and if you are using them in
applications where there is a high write throughput they /will/ fail.

so will a hard drive.

the reality is that ssds are more reliable than hard drives and don't
fail anywhere near as often as their detractors claim. see the link in
my other post.

Look at the manufacturer's lifetime throughput specification when
comparing. In mostly read-only applications they're usually fine.
Problems can include little or no early warning of failure.

ssds generally do give a warning of failure.

On 19/11/2014 23:33, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
In article , "Mayayana"
writes:

"Similarly, SSDs are a terrible place to do a bunch of log file writes to;
eleventy squillion crappy little sub-K writes will burn out the SSDs in no
time."

So an SSD might make a good D drive, but probably not
such a good C drive. (Though I don't actually know how
much a "squillion" is. No surprise that the author is not one
of the British regulars at The Register. As much as the
British like to use their own slang overly much, at least
they don't talk like children.

This is definitely an issue if you have lots of writes. I don't know
how many "lots" is; it will depend on the type of disk, and this will
improve with time. However, modern SSDs can burn out in half an hour on
real-world systems with lots of writes. For write-once or write-few, of
course, they are OK.


Do you have any evidence of this 'half hour real world burnout' thesis?

--
Cheers, Rob

| I like to actually know what's going on before I say I know what's going
on.
|

A quick search found this, which seems to be a
relatively unbiased comparison between "fusion"
and caching:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412726,00.asp

It doesn't seem to be "sheer hokum". On the other
hand, do you want to spend hundreds of dollars extra
in order to have your most bloated software load
faster? Speed has been a dubious marketing scheme
ever since the late 90s. I remember when Intel would
announce each new CPU with great fanfare. And 400 MHz
really was a big improvement over 300 MHz. But at some
point speed ceased to be a real issue. Nevertheless,
computer magazines would still describe the new 1,200 MHz
as "blazingly fast" while your "old" 1,000 MHz suddenly
became "good enough for email and web browsing". A
few months later the 1,200 was barely usable and the
1,350 was "screamingly fast".

Another version of the "fusion" approach, which has been
done for many years, is pre-loading. Bloatware such as
Libre Office, MS Office and, I think, Firefox, offer preloading
as a way to make their software seem fast. It's a bloated
mess but it responds instantly because the needed libraries
are already in RAM. Personally I don't find it stressful to wait
a few seconds once in a while. For most things my computer
(XP) responds instantly....and there's nothing faster than that.

In my experience, a reasonably clean system is
fast and responsive by itself. Most things are instant
for me, using a standard hard disk. Much of the reason
for that is that most things don't have to be loaded
from disk in the first place. Most things are in RAM. (Which
is why most software loads faster the second time than
the first.) Some is pre-loaded. System files stay loaded.
So in many cases there isn't much that actually needs to
be loaded from disk. You might benefit a tiny bit from
having your 35 MB wedding photos in fast "fusion" storage,
but "fusion" won't know to do that until you've already
worked on the photos, so that's not going to be a relevant
effect.

A few more recent programs I have are bloated --
Libre Office and PSP16, most notably. But those are
not things that I open and close a lot. Unfortunately,
a lot of current software is simply overproduced in
an attempt to always have new "features" with each
release. I find that PSP5 does 90% of what I want to
do and loads instantly. PSP16 takes about 100 MB RAM
just to sit there, takes several seconds to load, and opens
with a ridiculous and superfluous 3-part UI that includes
a file explorer window and another separate window with
a "quickie adjustment" selection of the normal editor tools.
It's also unstable. Spending $250 for something like "fusion"
might help that to load, but load time is really only part
of the problem.

All of which is to say, speed is nice but one has to look
at it in context. It's not just a quantity where more is better.
The same issue happens with browsers. People want to know
what the fastest browser is. That's easy: It's the one that's
loading from the fastest website server and/or the smallest
webpage.

On 19/11/2014 11:04 μμ, Savageduck wrote:
On 2014-11-19 20:33:28 +0000, James Silverton
said:

On 11/19/2014 1:11 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , Tzortzakakis Dimitris
wrote:

SSDs are faster. They have way lower latency. They consume less
power.
They take up less space.

Yep!But they still are more expensive than conventional hard drives.

you are paying for speed and reliability. if that isn't important,
then
get a hard drive, where capacity is a priority.
I do?I have both, as I am writing after that (both a hard drive and
an SSD)

most people have both.

I have an intel 520 series 120 GB that cost 62 euros, as a system
disk, I
also have autocad on it, and my only 2 games *wolfenstein new
order and
call of duty black ops. It goes without saying that as a data disk I
have a seagate barracuda 1TB for my photos, mp3s, videos and other
programms that there's no room on the SSD for them. I'm very pleased
with my SSD, the PC boots in less than 20 seconds. It is an AMD
FX4130 8
GB gigabyte 990XA-UD3 gigabyte nvidia gtx 650 PC.

20 sec to boot is rather slow, but more importantly, who cares how
long
it takes to boot. booting is rarely done. sleep the computer when not
in use and it wakes instantly, exactly where you left off.

Yep! I usually turn it off when I'm not using it.

what for? sleep it. there is no need to turn off a computer anymore
unless you have to physically unplug it to move it to another room or
open it up for some perverse reason.

I just couldn't afford
even a 128 GB SSD (to the 120 GB I finally got) but it's enough, for
now. The barracuda ?TB cost as much as the 120 GB SSD, also 62
euros-but the speed difference is tremendous
even with an AMD CPU.

how long ago was that? i bought a 256 gig ssd for about $110 or so
about a month ago, which is about $88 euro.

That's a strange way of writing a price; it seems to imply that the
Euro is the European dollar. You can get the Euro symbol (€) by using
ALT-0128 or, if you don't want to do that, use the recognized
trilateral, EUR. I'll just list a few mo
British Pound GBP
US Dollar USD
Canadian dollar CND
Australian dollar AUD
Russian Rouble RUB

If you want others, look on http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/

With a mac it is simple enough to get to; $, £, €, â‚*, Â¥, ₱, ₽, â‚«, etc.


I got everything correctly, duck. For the record yen is actually in
japanese en 円.Wonder if everyone can see the japanese character?BTW,
I'm running mozilla thunderbird on win7 664 bit.

On 20/11/2014 06:10, nospam wrote:
In article , Oregonian Haruspex
wrote:

I see no benefit to those new-fangled "hybrid" drives (really just a HD
with a bigger, smarter cache) because the rust will still be spinning
all the time.

hybrid drives are actually not that great and only slightly better than
a normal hd. it's basically a big cache for recently used files, which
may not be the ones that matter.

Yeah I know. Caching is a gamble anyway but especially when the OS and
the drive aren't talking to each other about it.

they don't need to. the drive cache holds recently accessed blocks with
the assumption they might be needed again.

As far as I understand it, the drive reads ahead and stores blocks in
the same sector, assuming that the OS might need them. Sequential
read-ahead. The OS is what stores the recently accessed blocks.

drives generally cache the entire file when one block is accessed
because there's an extremely high likelihood you'll be accessing the
entire file.

No they don't, because drives do not know the physical structure of the
filesystem nor what blocks in which a certain file is located! This is
the job of the OS. The drive just fetches blocks, and hopes that it
can fetch the right ones.

To my knowledge there are no drives existing that know about the
filesystems they contain.

the os tells the drive what to read and it's cached.

however, that's very different than what fusion does.

The only thing we know about Fusion is from marketing material. Let's
not pretend we know more than we do now ok?

nobody is pretending. quite a bit has been written about it, most of
which is not from apple.

apple's fusion drive is a much better solution

It's the same exact thing as any other hybrid SSD but with more
marketing power behind it.

it's not the same thing at all.

fusion moves files between ssd and hd based on usage patterns. apps and
documents that are used frequently will end up on ssd and what is
rarely used will be on hd, completely automatically.

This is marketing speak.

it is not. fusion is very different than a simple cache.

Where is the technical documentation for Fusion? How do you know how it
works?

because i've read quite a bit about it.

here's apple's tech note:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202574
Presented as a single volume on your Mac, Fusion Drive automatically
and dynamically moves frequently used files to Flash storage for
quicker access, while infrequently used items move to the hard disk.
As a result you'll enjoy shorter startup times, and as the system
learns how you work you'll see faster application launches and
quicker file access. Fusion Drive manages all this automatically in
the background.

the exact algorithms by which it moves stuff is not public, but none of
that matters.

as the user uses the computer, commonly used files are moved to the ssd
and infrequently used files are moved to the hard drive, without the
user needing to do anything other than use the computer normally.

Would you care to explain how Apple's Fusion Drive differs from the SSD
cache technology that Intel introduced with SandyBridge Z86 chipset?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/i...ching-review/2

Now called Intel "Smart Response Technology" - dreadful name...

Fusion Drive was clearly the product of Trekkie inspired marketing men!

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On 2014-11-20 16:19:25 +0000, Tzortzakakis Dimitris said:

On 19/11/2014 11:04 μμ, Savageduck wrote:
On 2014-11-19 20:33:28 +0000, James Silverton
said:

On 11/19/2014 1:11 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , Tzortzakakis Dimitris
wrote:

SSDs are faster. They have way lower latency. They consume less
power.
They take up less space.

Yep!But they still are more expensive than conventional hard drives.

you are paying for speed and reliability. if that isn't important,
then
get a hard drive, where capacity is a priority.
I do?I have both, as I am writing after that (both a hard drive and
an SSD)

most people have both.

I have an intel 520 series 120 GB that cost 62 euros, as a system
disk, I
also have autocad on it, and my only 2 games *wolfenstein new
order and
call of duty black ops. It goes without saying that as a data disk I
have a seagate barracuda 1TB for my photos, mp3s, videos and other
programms that there's no room on the SSD for them. I'm very pleased
with my SSD, the PC boots in less than 20 seconds. It is an AMD
FX4130 8
GB gigabyte 990XA-UD3 gigabyte nvidia gtx 650 PC.

20 sec to boot is rather slow, but more importantly, who cares how
long
it takes to boot. booting is rarely done. sleep the computer when not
in use and it wakes instantly, exactly where you left off.

Yep! I usually turn it off when I'm not using it.

what for? sleep it. there is no need to turn off a computer anymore
unless you have to physically unplug it to move it to another room or
open it up for some perverse reason.

I just couldn't afford
even a 128 GB SSD (to the 120 GB I finally got) but it's enough, for
now. The barracuda ?TB cost as much as the 120 GB SSD, also 62
euros-but the speed difference is tremendous
even with an AMD CPU.

how long ago was that? i bought a 256 gig ssd for about $110 or so
about a month ago, which is about $88 euro.

That's a strange way of writing a price; it seems to imply that the
Euro is the European dollar. You can get the Euro symbol (€) by using
ALT-0128 or, if you don't want to do that, use the recognized
trilateral, EUR. I'll just list a few mo
British Pound GBP
US Dollar USD
Canadian dollar CND
Australian dollar AUD
Russian Rouble RUB

If you want others, look on http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/

With a mac it is simple enough to get to; $, £, €, â‚*, Â¥, ₱, ₽, â‚«, etc.


I got everything correctly, duck. For the record yen is actually in
japanese en 円.Wonder if everyone can see the japanese character?BTW,
I'm running mozilla thunderbird on win7 664 bit.

Yup! I got that just fine, and with a Mac and the Yen, in addition to
the "¥" there are 4 related characters: 円, 圆, 圎, and 圓. Just how those
are used in written Japanese, I have no idea.

--
Regards,

Savageduck

On 11/20/2014 2:45 AM, nospam wrote:
In article , David Taylor
wrote:

and way more reliable, even if you're hammering it.

This remains to be seen, over the long term. Though it seems logical
because of the lack of moving parts.

Well, no. The reliability depends on the use. Unlike HDDs, SSDs have a
limited number of write cycles,

hds have a limited life too. they don't last forever. nothing does.

and if you are using them in
applications where there is a high write throughput they /will/ fail.

so will a hard drive.

the reality is that ssds are more reliable than hard drives and don't
fail anywhere near as often as their detractors claim. see the link in
my other post.

Look at the manufacturer's lifetime throughput specification when
comparing. In mostly read-only applications they're usually fine.
Problems can include little or no early warning of failure.

ssds generally do give a warning of failure.


I went through this with you about a year ago. The distributor advised
me that while they may be fine for an O/S and program location, They
would not be suitable for photographic images, where I am constantly
pulling out images and working on them. I have nearly 3T of active
images. The cost of SSDs to accomodate them is not justifiable for me.
You do so much photography, that for you the cost is obviously justifiable.

--
PeterN

On 11/20/2014 12:05 PM, Savageduck wrote:
On 2014-11-20 16:19:25 +0000, Tzortzakakis Dimitris
said:

...snip...

With a mac it is simple enough to get to; $, £, €, â‚*, Â¥, ₱, ₽, â‚«, etc.


I got everything correctly, duck. For the record yen is actually in
japanese en 円.Wonder if everyone can see the japanese character?BTW,
I'm running mozilla thunderbird on win7 664 bit.

Yup! I got that just fine, and with a Mac and the Yen, in addition to
the "¥" there are 4 related characters: 円, 圆, 圎, and 圓. Just how
those are used in written Japanese, I have no idea.

Running Thunderbird 24.6.0 on XP and all the symbols show up except the
Russian Rouble, which shows up as a box with four tiny numbers inside.

--
==
Later...
Ron C
--

In article , PeterN
wrote:

I went through this with you about a year ago. The distributor advised
me that while they may be fine for an O/S and program location, They
would not be suitable for photographic images, where I am constantly
pulling out images and working on them.

why would a distributor, who wants to sell stuff, understand the
technology of ssd versus hd?

I have nearly 3T of active
images. The cost of SSDs to accomodate them is not justifiable for me.
You do so much photography, that for you the cost is obviously justifiable.

more of your lies and twisting. i never said anything remotely close to
putting 3 terabytes of photos entirely on ssd.