Topic: Say "Good Bye" to HDD. - page 3. (Read 5904 times)

Not true sir...

http://www.gizmag.com/sony-185-tb-magnetic-tape-storage/31910/

Good Bye HDD.

No way dude people are never going to be fully comfortable having their critical and/or personal data be on the cloud.

Well for me it is not enough. Unless you plan to install every program on the second drive (HDD). Which I don't like doing as some things sometimes don't work correctly.

One of the unpleasant things about Windows... maybe someone will correct me here (please, please, please!), but I've never found a way to have stuff which'd automatically save to C:/ automatically go to, say, O:/ - you know, stuff which heads to appdata or "My Documents" and other such stuff in "Users." -On the Windows side, that is. Obviously, I tell Core (that always makes me think I'm at some fitness forum...) to use O:/ - but I'm not going to look up every single program to see if there's possibly (unlikely) a way to have saved data moved over to O:/

That's why I have to constantly open WinDirStat for my SSD (if I haven't made it clear by now -- it's a really slick program).  There's just so much junk on my copy of Windows, now... but I can't just wipe it anymore without all sorts of issues. All my software's on the O:/ HDD, but all the "vital components" are on the C:/ - which I can't store the blockchain or anything other than the enormous mass of DLLs and Doze files on... so if I wipe it, I lose all those referenced DLLs and similar subcomponent files. You know - and these subcomponents... maybe a piece of software references 10MB worth of data on C:/, so it's ridiculous to have that so "importance-biased."

It's an unpleasant situation. Even if I upgrade my hard drive, I have AT LEAST 200 unique pieces of software throughout my Medusa-like hard drive compound (ha - I don't even think they'd all fit in most PC cases), so I'd be looking at literally days or maybe even weeks to bring them all back to being usable. It's for a similar reason I'm not particularly fond of Steam.... it's difficult to manipulate files -- yeah, I can just redownload the file from them, but on my 3G Sprint connection, it took me a week just to download Empire:Total War a couple weeks ago. I see, you know, some of the Core devs saying stuff like "oh, well the blockchain is only as big as Diablo 3" - but I obviously rely on my primary means of income and expenditure a Hell of a lot more than Diablo 3, so it's kind of important that it's not as cumbersome.

... There are so many things I hate about Windows.... .... maybe time to switch and become one of those assholes who tells everyone else they're the devil if they don't, too.

128GB is plenty if you are using it "only" for the (a) OS.  If you install multiple OS on the SSD then you could potentially fill it up.   I have a 240gb installed.  Although I intended to use it only for the OS is has slowly acquired other files/programs.  I have a sloppy tendency to always download files to the desktop and sometimes when installing new programs I mistakenly install them to the SSD. 

Well for some people 128 GB is not enough even for the drive with the OS. This is what kept me from not buying a SSD yet.

Well tape is finally (20 years after the first predictions) dying.  LTO gave it an extra couple years but it is in sold multiyear decline now

D&T is correct, no need to defrag an SSD.  It only adds wear for basically no gain.

I am working on the next gen HDD.  HDD are looking more and more like SSD due to the fact that we can no longer randomly write to the surface of the drive - because the tracks are overlapped.  So now we have to write your data somewhere else and then write it to the shingled region when we get a chance.  In a lot of ways just like a flash page must be totally erased before it can be resued a shingled region on an HDD must be totally rewritten in order to put your data "where it is suposed to be"

This is how it will play out.  SSD will take over where HDD used to be (<10 TB ish), HDD will move into where tape used to be (100 TB ish) and tape will be used for offline storage or maybe finally go away but don't count on that.

Then eventually new technology (GBs of non volatile DRAM read and write speed memory, without wear issues, right in the SOC with the CPU) will push "up" the SSD pushing "up" the HDD maybe finally killing tape (but don't count on it).

HDDs are not going away for a long time (see tape and the predictions of its death over and over again).

The best way to go about it. If you do it like this, cheap 128 GB SSD is all you need.

BTW, getting my crucial m4 SSD was the best improvement in computer performance I felt since I replaced my celeron 1.8 with athlon 64 3200+.

I always prefer to go double. The SSD for OS and programs as well as commonly played games. The HDD for the documents.

But it will take a few more years before SSDs reach the needed prices. I have a smaller SSD, but for backup I plan to buy a 1TB HDD which costs much less than a 1TB SSD.

Thanks for the tips

This.  SSDs and blockchain(s) are a good match.

Everything will move into the cloud over time. Everything will be online.

Yeah I am pretty sure that is all technological voodoo.  The controller is already performing various optimizations which are outside the scope of the OS.  The OS believes it has control of the "disk" and it is writing or reading from a specific logical sector that maps to a set location on the disk however that isn't the case with SSDs.  It is just an illusion is maintained to provide backwards compatibility.  The controller is just using those logical sectors provided by the OS as lookup values and then writing data based on internal requirements to maximize performance and endurance.  A single write from the OS will be written across multiple flash chips.  The physical location may be changed by the controller and it simply updates the internal lookup table.  So the OS just sees write to a sector, read from the sector, erase the sector but the controller is performing a lot of internal state recording to maintain that illusion that these sectors even exist.  

All this is done to maintain backwards compatibility with ATA standard but it does mean that where the OS believes the data is stored has been reduced to little more than a lookup value.  If SSD has similar properties to HDD then it probably wouldn't matter however SSD are radically different than the HDD they "pretend" to be.  NAND flash can't be overwritten, NAND flash must be erased and has a limited number of erase cycles, NAND flash can't be accessed at the cell level, instead an entire page needs to be read and written in one operation.  This means that behind the scenes what is happening on disk is very different than what is being indicated to the OS



I doubt limited use of mydefrag will hurt but it is dubious that it can provide any real world benefit.  The claim isn't exactly false but it is misleading.  Yes is the data is fragmented across multiple OS sectors and it might mean a few more IO requests at the sector level and possibly an additional CRC check or two but we are talking about a negligible performance overhead.  All the lower level "details" are simply lies from the SSD anyways and the software has no way to control the actual contents of the flash pages.

On edit: here is an article with similar conclusions (although they didn't test this particular software):
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047513/fragging-wonderful-the-truth-about-defragging-your-ssd.html

But their is an optimization you may use once in a great while.

This is an option under MyDefrag called flash memory disk.

http://www.mydefrag.com/Manual-UsingMyDefrag.html

I use it once in a great while in safemode.

Defrag is completely pointless for an SSD and may actually degrade performance.

So does that mean defrag is a bad idea for this type of drive ?


*edit* I suppose it was about minimising head movement so maybe its totaly irrelavent?*/edit*