A number of metrics are used to quantify storage performance. If you're a regular Joe, you have to be wondering how such dry terminology can apply to office work. Rather than telling you, we're going to dissect several routine computing tasks.
Microsoft Word: Typing
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Overall Statistics
Microsoft Word: Typing
Elapsed Time
18:53
Read Operations
5857
Write Operations
2726
Data Read
173.24 MB
Data Written
43.30 MB
Disk Busy Time
2.63 s
Average Data Rate
82.47 MB/s
It should come as no surprise that there's very little I/O involved in simple tasks like typing. Most of the activity represented in this trace occurs when we open Microsoft Word and save our document. Actually, the latter is far more storage-intensive than you might think. We spent about 18 minutes to transcribe three pages worth of text from a CNN article. The end result was a Word document only 16 KB in size. However, the act of saving actually involves reading more than 100 MB and writing 20 MB.
I/O Trends:
85% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
60% of all data transferred is random
77% of all operations are random
40% of all operations are 32 KB in transfer size
24% of all operations are 4 KB in transfer size
11% of all operations are 16 KB in transfer size
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Nice escape, Tom's... I was wondering "hmm, what kind of torrent will they download, 95% of them are copyright infringement"... nice :D And a good article, too - maybe now I can convince some of our "office-only-don't-need-fancy-hardware" clients to switch to SSDs, esp. considering the HDD price increases.
I want an SSD so bad I can taste it. The biggest problem for me is Price and Size. For my system drive I would need at least 500-600 GB and these sized SSDs are way to much money. My Steam folder is like 280 GBs alone. I know alot of you are going to say just put Windows and the most critical apps on the SSD and the rest on my 1TB drive but that defeats the purpose in my book. I want all my apps to benefit from the SSD especially if I am going to invest so much money into it. Here's to hoping the prices come down and fast!
SSD's are meant for holding only your operating system and a few key applications you can't live without. All your data/media should be stored on a regular, large hard disk.
Unless you are working with huge files like pictures and videos, there isn't much a need for a huge SSD. A pair or HDD in RAID combine with a SSD can give you even better capacity and speed. I think most consumers are better with a 90-120GB SSD and a nice large HDD. I got an alright 120GB SSD for $120 w/ rebate. A good 120GB SSD cost about $180-$220. Laptops can hold two drive if your replace your dvd drive which most people rarely use. Once you get a SSD, it is hard to go back.
Your office is apparently far different that the ones I service :p At least you got a virus scan and MS Word typing in there.
I suppose I can see some inexpensive reliable SSDs in office machines in the near future, mostly to reduce the failures connected with mechanical drives and speed up boot times and installation times.
I've got a C300 in my work pc, and I have to say I'm disappointed. Not by the performance itself, but the overall result. Productivity went DOWN after the upgrade, as the size of the thing simply isn't adequate. You spend more time cleaning up and moving data than you do actually working. And I even had to move all my virtual machines to usb. That didn't exactly speed up anything either. Replacing a 750gb drive with a 120gb ssd simply isn't viable.
I find it ironic that the only place your tiny ssd drives are good enough are in computers where speed isn't important in the first place. Until 320GB ssd's can compete with regular magnetic drives, it isn't an option to upgrade.
Imagine the added cost of upgrading the 2442 registered clients to ssd drives! About half could make do with a 120GB drive, and the rest would need at least 160GB and possibly bigger.
That's an expense you can't possibly gain in productivity.
Replacing sas drives with ssd's might make sense for your database or vmware/hyper-v systems, but it isn't going to make much sense on the majority of workstations.