Alexander Hollins wrote:
ssds are generally slower, i thought, in actual use.
Slower?!? Where did you hear that?
If that's true is the worse consumer fraud in a long time. They cost
way more per gigabyte.
I kind of doubt they are slower . . . but as I said, someone else
just told me they are slower than the fastest souped-up hard disks.
Maybe slower to write . . . or read, or to read a whole bunch of serial data.
Actually, for raw speed of serial access, those old tape drives beat
hard disks for a long time, well into the 1980s. The huge ones with
steel-backed tape and vacuum columns were wicked fast. They could do
a search or multiphase sort merge with amazing speed. A programmer
from that era who did not think much of the newfangled hard disks
once described a hard disk as, "a serial device pretending to have
random access capabilities."
- Jed
