{"id":367,"date":"2009-05-04T21:31:03","date_gmt":"2009-05-05T02:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/?p=367"},"modified":"2015-10-28T11:42:55","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T16:42:55","slug":"the-solid-state-of-hard-disks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/2009\/05\/the-solid-state-of-hard-disks\/","title":{"rendered":"The [Solid] State of Hard Disks"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>A Brief History of [Wasted] Time<\/h1>\n<p>Over the last couple of decades, practical PC bottlenecks have moved.\u00a0 I remember a time when upgrading CPUs could provide a near-linear speed increase with respect to clock speed (does anyone remember the thrill of going from a 33MHz 486 processor to a a 486\/66?).\u00a0 Later, keeping the processor fed became more important.\u00a0 Improved memory bus speeds, lower cache latency, larger cache sizes, and more RAM often provided the best performance increase.\u00a0 And of course, we had network issues \u2013 starting with dial-up performance.\u00a0 Thankfully, most of those resources are no longer the slowest components in modern PCs.\u00a0 In fact, CPUs have increased in performance to the point that clock speed increases give little practical benefits for most users (on the client side, at least).<\/p>\n<h1>Wringing some[Bottle]necks\u2026<\/h1>\n<p>Over the last several years, the primary bottleneck on most of my machines (notebooks, development desktops, and music production machines) has been hard disk performance.\u00a0 If I was waiting for something, it was more than likely that hard drive.\u00a0 The high number and frequency of random I\/Os often resulted in significant delays.\u00a0 Even with large amounts of RAM, launching programs, loading web pages, and performing builds in Visual Studio could take a <em>lot<\/em> of time.\u00a0 High-speed, low-latency hard disks helped a little.\u00a0 And, if you can stomach the risk of data loss, RAID-0 configurations could alleviate some of the pain.\u00a0 But, disk access remained the slow step in many processes.<\/p>\n<p>One of my clients, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arrowvaluerecovery.com\/\">Arrow Value Recovery<\/a> (formerly,\u00a0 TechTurn, Inc.), was kind enough to lend me a Samsung 128GB Solid State Disk (SSD) to test.\u00a0 At first, I imaged my notebook Windows 7 Release Candidate installation and placed it on the SSD.\u00a0 I was expecting an incremental increase in performance (at least for random, small reads).\u00a0 The overall results, however, were amazing!\u00a0 Applications launched in a just a few seconds, and some basic benchmarks provided all the evidence I needed to place the new disk in my primary development machine (a Dell Dimension XPS 420 with two 500GB, 7200RPM drives).\u00a0 Now, after just a couple of weeks, I can\u2019t imagine going back to \u201cold school\u201d physical drives.<\/p>\n<p>SSD\u2019s are new to the marketplace and they\u2019re not without significant potential drawbacks.\u00a0 In the coming weeks, I\u2019ll provide some more details on the experience.\u00a0 For now, here are a couple of basic benchmarks created using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hdtune.com\/\">HDTune<\/a>.\u00a0 The basic comparison is between a Samsung 500GB, 7200 RPM hard disk (16MB cache) and the 128GB Samsung SSD.\u00a0 I did absolutely nothing to optimize the performance of the SSD, so consider this just a baseline.<\/p>\n<h1>Benchmarks<\/h1>\n<h2>HDTune \u2013 Disk Benchmarks<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: inline; border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image-thumb.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"244\" height=\"213\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Figure 1a: HDD Performance (Dell XPS 420)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: inline; border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image-thumb1.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"244\" height=\"213\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Figure 1b:\u00a0 SSD Performance (Dell XPS 420)<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>HDTune \u2013 Random Access Performance<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: inline; border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image-thumb2.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"244\" height=\"213\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Figure 2a: HDD Performance (Dell XPS 420)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image3.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: inline; border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/image-thumb3.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"244\" height=\"213\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Figure 2b: SSD Performance (Dell XPS 420)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I realize that this data is completely anecdotal and unscientific, but it\u2019s a promising start.\u00a0 So far, the general performance improvement from using an SSD has been the single most noticeable upgrade in several years.<\/p>\n<h1>More to come\u2026<\/h1>\n<p>Again, I hope to post some more detailed data (with a focus on benefits for development workstations) in the coming weeks.\u00a0 Now if only my own sequential writing speed could match that of the SSD drive\u2026 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><em>Update: The Engineering Windows 7 blog has a post that covers <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/e7\/archive\/2009\/05\/05\/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx\"><em>Support and Q &amp; A for Solid-State Drives<\/em><\/a><em>.\u00a0 It helps provide some technical background related to the different between random vs. sequential I\/O\u2019s and issues related to random writing.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Brief History of [Wasted] Time Over the last couple of decades, practical PC bottlenecks have moved.\u00a0 I remember a time when upgrading CPUs could provide a near-linear speed increase with respect to clock speed (does anyone remember the thrill of going from a 33MHz 486 processor to a a 486\/66?).\u00a0 Later, keeping the processor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,24,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fun-stuff","category-it-tips","category-general-systems-admin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1047,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions\/1047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anildesai.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}