The end of slow desktop/laptop computers

VenusianSky · Sep 16, 2012

Now that it looks like Solid State Drives are becoming more affordable, are we finally seeing the end of slow computing experience due to hard disk drives? I recall years ago when I looked towards the day when platter disks would be replaced by memory. Solid state drives and memory drives have been around for many, many years, but they were very expensive solutions for the amount of storage. And does anyone remember DOS RAMdisk? I now see you can find deals for brand new SSDs for as little as $350 for 512GB (Amazon had a deal of the day last week for such a drive). At this rate, maybe by next year, we could see terabyte drives around several hundred dollars.

For as long as I've been building computers, the upgrade of the disk has been the only thing that I really noticed an enormous speed difference. For example, I remember going from a 5400rpm disk to 7200, and I couldn't believe how much a difference it made. I even said then that it was the biggest speed difference I noticed in a computer upgrade. I also got a 10k drive once, and again, the improvement was quite noticeable. Sold state disks are far faster than any of those technologies and I think the era of slow computers due to hard disks is finally nearing an end. It's about time.

flopticalcube · Sep 16, 2012

Your internet connection will now become the limiting factor in more and more situations.

VenusianSky · Sep 16, 2012

flopticalcube said:
Your internet connection will now become the limiting factor in more and more situations.

Your are absolutely correct about that. It may be a while until large internet infrastructures in the US, such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, are going to be upgraded to handle extremely fast speeds with a large customer base. I am talking about getting all customers up to 100Gb speeds.

G51989 · Sep 16, 2012

Yes, solid state drives are great,

Tho for power users, they won't be the norm for storage, so what lots of people will do is have an SSD Boot Drive and a Hard Drive for mass storage.

KnightWRX · Sep 16, 2012

flopticalcube said:
Your internet connection has always been the limiting factor

Fixed that there for you.

There always will be a bottleneck. The farther away the data is from the processor, the more of a bottleneck it has to go through.

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G51989 said:
Yes, solid state drives are great,

Tho for power users, they won't be the norm for storage, so what lots of people will do is have an SSD Boot Drive and a Hard Drive for mass storage.

What do knowledgeable folks have to do with mass storage ? Depends on the power user really. Not all power users require vast amounts of storage... or wait... are you one of those people that confuses the meaning of "power" in "power user" ?

G51989 · Sep 16, 2012

KnightWRX said:
Fixed that there for you.

There always will be a bottleneck. The farther away the data is from the processor, the more of a bottleneck it has to go through.

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What do knowledgeable folks have to do with mass storage ? Depends on the power user really. Not all power users require vast amounts of storage... or wait... are you one of those people that confuses the meaning of "power" in "power user" ?

I'm not sure, I consider myself a " power user " just because I have very high hardware requirements, at work at home.

My current home network is at 31.4TB. Need more.

flopticalcube · Sep 16, 2012

KnightWRX said:
Fixed that there for you.

There always will be a bottleneck. The farther away the data is from the processor, the more of a bottleneck it has to go through.

Not always, as applications didn't always need a connection or a fast one. But going forward, it will be (unless you live in South Korea).

KnightWRX · Sep 16, 2012

flopticalcube said:
Not always, as applications didn't always need a connection or a fast one. But going forward, it will be (unless you live in South Korea).

Well of course if your application does not require the Internet, then the Internet isn't the bottleneck... But it still remains the slowest link in your computer, always has been and pretty much always will be.

Even in South Korea. My point stands : the farther away (physically) the data is from the processor, the bigger the bottleneck it'll have to go through. That's just them darn physics.

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G51989 said:
I'm not sure, I consider myself a " power user " just because I have very high hardware requirements, at work at home.

High hardware requirements are not the traits of a power user. They're the traits of someone with high hardware requirements.

Power users always has stood for users that have great knowledge of the system than the average user. Hardware requirements mean squat as far as defining power users.

Of course, like all our jargon in computer science/it, the general public has perverted it to mean something it never meant, through sheer lack of understanding and ignorance. That's how we lost hacker and that's how we're losing virus and now power user (though that perversion of the term to mean "one with big hardware requirements" is something I've mostly only seen on Mac sites... funny, the sites with the least power users around).

G51989 said:
My current home network is at 31.4TB. Need more.

Grats, mine sits well below 1.5 TB. Yet I'm pretty sure I'm a power user, having been in the "biz" for close to 15 years, and having been brought up tinkering with PCs since I was a kid.

flopticalcube · Sep 16, 2012

KnightWRX said:
Well of course if your application does not require the Internet, then the Internet isn't the bottleneck... But it still remains the slowest link in your computer, always has been and pretty much always will be.

Even in South Korea. My point stands : the farther away (physically) the data is from the processor, the bigger the bottleneck it'll have to go through. That's just them darn physics.

The medium would also play a role as well as a few other requirements (Wireless, low power, narrow spectrum, etc) but generally, yes. Although, without knowing the algorithm involved, its impossible to say if any particular aspect is a bottleneck or not regardless of its relative speed.

VenusianSky · Sep 16, 2012

I do audio production and photography as a hobby. Audio, and video for that matter, benefit a bit from fast disk speeds since large audio/video files can take long to load/save from memory to a HDD. Photographs typically aren't as large as audio/video, so the difference in load/save times isn't as great. Two things that greatly benefit from SSD speeds are OS boot times and video game load times. The biggest thing to benefit from SSDs IMO are databases. A huge x00GB database on an SSD is a sysadmin's wet dream.

Come to think of it, video and 3Drendering would definitely benefit a great deal by SSD.

MacsRgr8 · Sep 17, 2012

Still, it's good to observe that CPU power / speed isn't a major case anymore.
Finally the MHz-Myth stands!

Until recently the CPU speed of your laptop or desktop was the major reason for upgrading, as it was (usually) the limiting factor.
Now with multiple-core iX's the speed issue (i.e. bottleneck) has been transferred to the ageing HDD.

TBO, the emergence of the Tablet is probably the best example of this.
Who cares which CPU / RAM / grfx is in there?

I love it when you can simply buy the device you want knowing "it's fast enough".

OTOH.... playing X-Plane 10.... no piece of hardware is fast enough for it. Even worse.. as it isn't 64 bits yet.. the software itself is its limiting factor.
So..... nah... we're not done yet.

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