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Re: Advice on system purchase



Am Dienstag, 30. Oktober 2012 schrieb lee:
> Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> writes:
> > most of the time, and a faster CPU doesn't make Thunderbird or
> > Firefox, IE or Outlook express, go any faster.  Nor any of the
> > standard desktop apps.
> 
> Sure it does.
> 
> > 90% of users would benefit more from a low wattage dual or even
> > single core CPU, with an SSD instead of a rust drive.
> 
> SSDs are a waste of money unless you do have the workload to benefit
> from them.  And if you have that, where do you store your data?

I disagree.

Putting an SSD in this laptop has been the single most effective way to 
improve all my desktop workloads like it was when I switched from floppy 
disk to harddisk. Its just insane. This machine is to frigging fast…

If the CPU isn´t too slow for it and most current CPUs aren´t, a SSD will 
be highly beneficial for just about any workload that is using random I/O. 
And most workloads are.

Thus I would go rather with some dual core i5 + SSD than with a quadcore 
i7 + harddisk. Save a few bucks on the CPU if you can afford a good SSD 
then.

And where to store that data? On the SSD.

That said if you just have a media center playing back music or video 
files the benefits of a SSD would likely only be faster hibernation/resume 
times.

So granted, for workloads, that access big files sequentially an SSD does 
not make much sense. But in the desktop area thats mainly multimedia stuff 
IMHO.

Anyway, in desktops and partly in laptops as well you can combine them. 
Put random I/O data like OS, applications, mails and other small files on 
SSD and have a harddisk for photos, music, videos and so on. Thus you get 
the best of both worlds.

Hopefully soon BTRFS will be able to use SSD as cache with the new VFS hot 
data tracking feature and then you would not have to distribute data 
manually between SSD and harddisk anymore.

-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7


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