Blog Agog

inky:

marco:

It’s hard to overstate the performance gains that SSDs offer. It’s not the sort of incremental, you’ll-notice-it-5%-of-the-time gains that new CPUs usually offer.

If your computer feels slow, it’s almost definitely the hard drive’s fault.

If you’re waiting a little longer than usual for a popular website to render its Dashboard or show you an encyclopedia page or tell you which of your old high-school friends have gotten fat, you’re probably waiting for some hard drives in a server somewhere…

Here’s the problem I have with SSDs: they are still inherently unstable. I discovered this through my own travails: too many writes, and the drive will die in the most appalling fashion. Were this problem overcome (and I sincerely hope it is eventually, or at least worked around), then I would be the SSD’s most fervent supporter. An effective seek time of ~0ns is absolutely beautiful. Making them cheaper means that I, and many tech-savvy people, would be willing to buy one (backing it up regularly), and accepting the risk that the drive would shoot itself in the foot after a few years.