I know SSD:s are fast but...

[deadman1]

when I saw this I went  ??? and then  :o

[Partner Spotlight] Samsung SSD Awesomeness

I want that computer  >:D

[mandru]

Now if they can clear up that problem where 2+2=3.9999999999999.

;D

[JRD]

I'm forwarding this to the IT department and my manager... let's see what they can do!  ;D ;D ;D

[Art Blade]

Re: I know SSD:s are fast but...

??? ...but FREAKIN' EXPENSIVE! 

8-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

I thought you weren't supposed to defrag SSD drives?

Still, really nice to have that speed, I wouldn't mind getting one in my next system.

[Art Blade]

that's what I read, too. An SSD defrag kind of wears the drive out faster than simply saving and overriding files. It's so pretty darn fast anyway you won't need a defrag. :)

[PZ]

I didn't know that software action on a solid state drive would wear it out faster - interesting.  As to speed, when the IBM PC first came out, I purchased two for $2,250 each.  They had 256k RAM, a single 5.25-inch floppy, and no hard drive.  I quickly purchased enough RAM to boost it to 640k, and promptly assigned 360K of it to a RAM disc.  Into this RAM-based disc, I loaded my word processor, and database - the performance difference was remarkable even for primitive technology like I was using.  The RAM disc basically worked like a SSD (in that there are no moving parts) - well worth the effort it took to get it all into memory. 

I can't wait until the price of the solid state drives comes down to a reasonable level, but an SSD being roughly 5 times faster than my current VelicoRaptor makes a 120gb SSD for hosting my OS a tempting item.  :-X

[Art Blade]

I don't remember how exactly it works, but somewhat along the line of: Filling a cell on a SSD is one thing, reading it out something else, both don't do any harm. It gets "interesting" when you delete (clear) a cell. Doing that a couple of times may render it unreadable, the disk hides it so you cannot access it any more. Over time you mysteriously lose storage capacity. So, if you defrag your SSD it means that you clear and rewrite cells all over, perhaps a couple of times (like, move data from A to a temp location C, clear A, read out C, store it in B, clear C, and do that again as often as necessary to sort your file structure until every fragmented part is glued together, hence called de-fragmentation). On a regular HD deleting data creates a gap between two other chunks of data. The next time you save something, the disk will use the gap and fill it up, realise that the new data is bigger than the gap, so store the rest at the end of all currently existing data. The more often you delete and save (install and deinstall) the more fragmented your files will be. The reason you'd do a defragmentation on a regular HD is to get files that are often used onto the fastest part of the spinning disk (like a record on a record player) and at the time glue all parts (fragments) together so the HD doesn't have to read all across and back and forth until it gets all fragments but read it in one single go. A SSD doesn't have a moving part ("record") so it doesn't make sense, and the speed is there because it can almost instantly access every cell (like a table on a data sheet). In other words, it's useless and destructive to defrag a SSD. If I remembered all that correctly, that is. :)

[PZ]

Then it makes sense to have an SSD for the OS and for programs, but not for data that is volatile (e.g., documents), in which case an fdisk is the only solution to restore the disk to it's full capacity.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, that's the way I understood the defrag situation on SSDs, it causes more harm than good. Cosidering their capacity, and the fact that multiple overwrites dragrades the unit, it's not worth putting anything that changes a lot on one. OS and applications, and most used games of course :-) but since they are a bit on the small side, I would think twice before putting something like FC2 on it, considering how much space it takes up. That, and the fact that windows really wants to put everything on the C:\ drive like the my documents folder, could fill one up pretty quick.

[PZ]

... windows really wants to put everything on the C:\ drive like the my documents folder, could fill one up pretty quick.

I know - annoying.  One of the first things I do is to move my documents folder as well as most of the large items in the Documents and settings folder to another drive, and after GPFontaine's comments some time ago, I'd throw in another drive specifically for the swap file.