For a desktop drive, it shouldn’t matter since you’re probably not going to RAID it, right?
(I guess it might be slower for big transfers, but since you’re probably going to keep frequently-accessed files on an SSD, that shouldn’t be a huge problem either)
Depending on your use case I would argue. If you use it as a pure nas it wouldn't matter. If you want to do fast encoding or something similar and get bottlenecked by your storage it could be annoying. I do post processing on my NAS and use my SSD as swap so I like every mb/sec I can get :)
There are certainly plenty of contexts where SSD's in general provide limited if any performance wins because disk I/O is largely not involved. However, in cases where SSD's are being used for performance reasons, particularly for random reads, I would expect this would make a fair bit of difference.
The benefit of SSD is not the raw sequential transfer. That is easy to max out with spinning platters. You want SSD for random access, it's significantly better at that.
I bought a 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD for a boot drive for my Linux desktop about a year ago. About a month ago, it started giving read/write errors eventually leading to kernel panics. (Didn't lose any data.) I switched back to the hard drive.
I don't see a huge difference in productivity for normal desktop use. An SSD is definitely quieter, and somewhat faster, but caching means most of us are already not hitting the disk that hard. (Obviously if you're doing intensive work with big data that doesn't cache well, that's a different story.)
This has interesting implications when considering SSDs versus traditional hard disks. SSD reads are faster, writes are slower, and space is at a premium.
(And, actually, files that are readily streamed, like videos, aren't necessarily files you'd want to store on the SDD. Those can often – though, yes, not always – be read quite quickly from the HDD. Unless you're dealing with truly huge files, or actively editing a video, you don't need SDD throughput.)
Hmm, I hadn't noticed that they're only doing this on desktops, so I was thinking there in terms of energy efficiency. On a laptop, you definitely want that video to get copied over to the SSD so that the HDD can spin down and stop draining your battery. On a desktop, I guess you wouldn't care as much.
I don't think there's any optimization for hard drives that is going to hurt on SSDs, and unoptimized workloads are always going to work better on SSDs. I'm inclined to agree with GP that SSDs are quite close to random-access storage and so there is little to worry about.
Download size and speed matters. Disk space matters especially if you're working with relatively expensive SSDs. Of course, how much of a problem this is depends on which country you're working in, company's laptop policy etc
> A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying).
For sequential transfers, yes. But that's hardly ever the relevant figure for whether your system feels fast. You should be looking at the random read performance, where your hard drive is good for ~120 IOs per second and your SSD is good for several thousand at a minimum.
I was thinking more in terms of application data, thank you for giving me this perspective.
But still wondering: does the amount of this data really warrant compression? I mean the smallest sensible size of an SSD is around 100GB and it has lots of performance.
(I guess it might be slower for big transfers, but since you’re probably going to keep frequently-accessed files on an SSD, that shouldn’t be a huge problem either)
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