Hi there,
I just read a small article on slashdot.org about Intel being on the verge to release 80 and 120Gb Flash drives (solid state drives). Beside this being a quite astonishing news, because we use to think Intel is making only processors and chipsets, one gas got me thinkinh of the current state of computing within the PC area.
I got now a rig with 4Gb Ram, and a SATA2 WD400Gb hardrive and still I don’t feel like my computer is flying or running extremly fast, although there are improvements. But this has a very solid reason – the harddrive. This is the slowest component in a system. The ram supports nowadays around 6400Mb/sec when using 800Mhz memory or 4267Mb/sec when using 533Mhz memory and the internal bus of a modern chipset can handle that easily; and dual core / quad core processor can process most available data on the bus. But all this hit a wall when communicating with the harddrive. Although the SATA2 interface can handle a theoretical 3000Mb/sec, and the best deliver around 2000Mb/sec, because of the physical constraints and how the drives are build, a typical read/write operation is around 1000Mb/sec and that is in ideal conditions.
So what can be done to improve this state of matters. You really have few options and all of them are expensive.
- Buy a 10.000 rpm drive. This is a simple sollution, but an expensive one as a 32Gb drive has the same price tag as a 500Gb 7.200Rpm drive.
- Get 2 smaller drives, let’s say 2x120Gb 7200rpm drives and put them in Raid 1 if your motherboard supports that. This can theoretically deliver around twice the bandwidth of a single drive both in writing and reading. This I think is the cheapest sollution at the moment because they can deliver more than a 10.000rpm drive in terms of bandwidth at a price twice as low.
- Get a SCSI harddrive. Well I am no expert in this but I know you get more performance when using it right but yes, it’s expensive. You have to have SCSI harddrives and also a SCSI controller which are not over the top in pricing but it will set you back quite some.
- Use solid state drives. Ugh, this is still a dream for the average user. SSD can deliver 0.1ms seek time and top models can sustain continuous 1000Mb/sec read operations while a normal mechanical drive has fluctuations of this value. Reading small files scattered around the disk is also faster that mechanical drives. Also there is small power consumption, better resistance to physical shocks, etc. Still there are downsides at the moment:
- write operations are below the rate of a mechanical drive
- price tag is simply prohibitive; a good SSD with 64Gb will set you back with 800-1000USD.
- technology is still in it’s infancy. Many things can change and if manufacturers keep their promise, in two months you may realize your top of the line product is now rated middle segment.
- In very specific scenario the HDD replacement may be an overkill because there are better suited sollutions. In my case, a web developer, I saw cases where I could increase productivity a lot even if I could manage to move 1Gb of data from HDD to a more faster storage device. For example in RAM. Yes, why not? A good development machine has 4Gb of Ram. Windows, even Vista stays below the 1.5Gb mark so you have 2.5Gb of Ram that can be put to good use. So you can emulate a partition in Ram. There are tools for that and Microsoft even delivers a free one. Just move your projects there and set the database tempdb to be stored on that partition and voila, you have them on a 300 times faster drive.
So, there is a problem and there are sollutions. The choice depends really on the person, scenario and budget. At this point I would recoment 2 drives in Raid1 if you need extra performance but that’s just my pick, you have to find yours.
If you have better ideas, let us know …
Update
I just found a news on TomsHardware (here) about OCZ anouncing a SSD with SATA2 capable of sustained 120Mbps reads and 100Mbps writes which is almost twice as fast as the old SSD generation and it’s available already in the UK with prices starting around 700USD for the 32Gb model and 1300USD for the 64Gb model.
Entries (RSS)