Yes. Speed is about the same and they are cheaper. They are MLC... NO... AND if so, how about reliability? Fast and cheap and having to backup your SSD every day are fine if your into that... not me... ;-)

I have read too many negative stories on MLC drives and the premium on the Intel X-25E is definitely VERY high but I am extremely happy with it. IIRC you can write something ridiculous like 100GB per day for 5 years and the Intel X-25E should hold up. In any event the new trend is towards eMLC which is so new that I'm not sure I want to step right into that without waiting a little while. Hence the choice of an SLC drive.

IN any event... just check out the SSD you are getting and don't just go with fast and cheap ONLY is my advice... reliability is huge for SSD... and whatever works for your pocket book and tolerance is great... I'm NOT going to get into this SSD is better vs. another as they all have PRO's and CON's.

ASIDE: We are considering launching w/ servers with these SSDs (w/ SoftLayer) so there's slightly more to why it was selected.

Cheers,

--Nikolaos



Richard Hauswald wrote:
Sandforce Controller based SSD's are a fast and cheap alternative to
expensive models using SLC:
50-240GB Max Performance
Max Read: up to 285MB/s
Max Write: up to 275MB/s
Sustained Write: up to 250MB/s
Random Write 4KB (Aligned): 50,000 IOPS

You get 120GB for $220 and 240GB for $450.

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Nikolaos Giannopoulos
<nikol...@brightminds.org> wrote:
I run a MacBook Pro 17" early 2008... Core2 Duo CPU with a 7200RPM Seagate
HDD but the primary and secondary SATA controllers are held back to 1.5 and
1.0 Gb/s respectively from 3.0 Gb/s on later models.  The stock system is OK
but not great for development so I supercharged it :-)

About a month ago I found out that I could theoretically get 6GB of RAM in
this thing (Apple still only supports 4GB) and I picked up a stick of 4GB
(adding it to my 2GB) of RAM from Other World Computing and it REALLY makes
a difference.  Running w/ Eclipse, GlassFish, MySQL (not so hungry), Firefox
and it really helps not to have to swap anymore.  I wouldn't run a dev box
with anything less than 6GB today.

The 2nd major performance improvement is getting a SSD.  True - compilation
is CPU intensive not disk intensive - but starting up Apps almost
instantaneously (in comparison to an HDD) is something to behold.  Firefox
pops open.  Eclipse launches in around 5 seconds.  The system launches so
fast.   But you do need to get a TOP end SSD in my opinion - preferably SLC
over MLC though the new rave is eMLC - and although prices are coming down I
wanted to get one of the best SLC SSD's I could find so I picked up an Intel
X-25E 64GB (I know you said cheap and at $800 you could pick up another
laptop but reliability is huge for me).  I then swapped out my HDD for the
SSD and then picked up an Optibay replacement for my DVD drive and put my
HDD in the DVD drive bay; i.e. SSD is primary drive;  HDD is secondary; and
DVD drive ends up in a DVD enclosure (came with the kit).  One needs a DVD
less and less these days so getting an SSD and an HDD in a system is ideal
IMHO.

The system CPU and SATA controllers are now my bottle neck but when I
upgrade to a newer Mac the SSD is going into the next system and CPU will be
better :-)  Personally I like to get at least 2 if not 3 years out of any
given laptop.

Bottom line:
----------------
- 6GB+ memory
- Great SSD
- Decent CPU
and you'll be rocking

--Nikolaos




gshegosh wrote:

W dniu 07.01.2011 18:11, Richard Hauswald pisze:


Backup on a daily basis(!). I promise you: If you ever developed
webapps on a SSD you will never develop using a HDD again. If you have
to switch back... ...it will be hard!


Yep, I'm using RAID 0 for my system partition and I'm not complaining,
too. Substantially cheaper than getting top of the line SSD (tried some
cheaper ones and they were worse than HDDs) and performance is on par.



Any Dual Core CPU should suite your needs, I never ever ran out CPU
power when developing software. Memory is something you can't get
enough of. 4GB is ok but I'd like to have 6GB, cause Firefox, Eclipse,
Tomcat, Windows 7, Windowx XP Mode and a Linux VM running in parallel
is not so uncommon for a developer. But nearly to much for 4GB RAM.


Damn, perhaps I should be asking about _software_ stack, not hardware
one. Eclipse and Tomcat seem to be better for a PC than Netbeans and
Glassfish are.

As I'm writing these words, Netbeans and Glassfish running for some 3 or
4 hours take 2,5GB of my memory and it grows with each redeploy, max
I've seen was almost 8GB. "killall -9 java" became a kind of routine for
me since NB+GF will become unstable well before the take up those 12GBs
I have.

I guess memory is not a problem these days, since it's cheap and easy to
get 8GB or more even in a laptop.

Perhaps one can't run "out" of CPU, but when I compare compilation time
of the same project on my machine which is 4-5s to my friend's Mac where
it's about 20-30s, I believe my productivity _can_ hurt because of a
slow CPU. Especially on my old laptop which compiles the same project in
3 minutes. And compilation is not all, frequent redeployments, switching
between IDE and browser and Photoshop and Virtualbox, using Firebug, all
this is much more acceptable on a fast, multi-core CPU.

That's why I'm asking about i5 and i7 laptops -- I can read benchmarks
all day, but I'd love to hear what development on these machines feels
like, especially from folks who use Netbeans and Glassfish combo.

The only other option is to find a shop that will let me play with a
laptop for an hour before I buy it :-D

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--
Nikolaos Giannopoulos
Director of Information Technology
BrightMinds Software Inc.
e. nikol...@brightminds.org
w. www.brightminds.org
t. 1.613.822.1700
c. 1.613.797.0036
f. 1.613.822.1915

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that requires sensitive data to be transmitted over the Web.   Learn how to
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--
Nikolaos Giannopoulos
Director of Information Technology
BrightMinds Software Inc.
e. nikol...@brightminds.org
w. www.brightminds.org
t. 1.613.822.1700
c. 1.613.797.0036
f. 1.613.822.1915

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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that requires sensitive data to be transmitted over the Web.   Learn how to 
best implement a security strategy that keeps consumers' information secure 
and instills the confidence they need to proceed with transactions.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl 
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