On 08/18/2011 04:30 PM, 0 wrote: > Also, SSDs are so overrated. It definitely makes the laptop lighter and > reduces the power consumption but its not worth the price. I can't wait > to see them replaced by PRAM/PCM based storage. >
I strongly disagree. Having used ssd's on server hardware for a few years now, I finally got an ssd drive for my laptop about a week back. This is an HP EliteBook 2540p with 8GB ram and ( it had ) a 250gb 7200rpm sata disk ( its an i5 machine ). Pretty much everything is faster on an SSD - and thats a massive productivity boost. Bootup time is down to 16 seconds from 40 seconds, not a big deal since most people just do suspend / resume anyway. Battery life has gone up marginally too : 2hrs'ish to 2 hrs 45 min'ish ( this is a year old laptop now, and the battery has been through a fair few power cycles, this machine is my main workhorse at home and work ). the main killer feature of the ssd is that actual work is faster, searches are faster, stuff loads quicker - even things like thunderbird and firefox and chome respond nearly instantly. Using an editor is more productive ( eclipse and jedit are both super responsive ). And this is a machine with 8GB of ram, so if I am not running VMs quite a lot of stuff is in cache, but with an ssd - it gets into cache faster. I guess its hard to explain, but the few seconds of time you save even with small operations makes a massive difference. eg. being able to do a find across a 20k line project in near realtime is fantastic, you can actually follow your thought process; big deal to me. Being able to deploy a new VM in less than a minute with puppet manifests being tested in under 25 seconds; big deal again. Being able to import a 12 GB mysql backup db into the local laptop, run tests against it and do migrations in near realtime with index builds in a few seconds - massive win. So yes, if you are a generic user, with a need for a device to look at webpages and mostly consume media - a 7200rpm disk or the seagate hybrid disks are fine. If you are actually looking at development grade work, an SSD is definitely the way to go. Leave the large scale storage on remote machines ( I have a 1U machine with 4 x 2TiB disks in a DC, thats about all the real remote storage anyone needs normally ). btw, I've also heard people argue that ssds are lighter than 2.5" sata disks - the difference isnt really noticeable. And to really get the massive battery life extention, you need to scape the cpu governors right back to run as slow as they can, for as long as they can. With an SSD churning out data at the 300 - 350MB/sec mark, pretty much everything becomes cpu bound - and the regular ondemand governors are going to keep the cpu at high clock rates quite a bit. and my second btw, if you are going to use a large'ish screen with a reasonable response rate: get something better than an intel HD graphics interface if you can. Just my 2bits - KB _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
