Tag: VRPM

Have We Seen The Last Hard Drive In A Computer?

wd-ssdThe computer you’re using probably has a hard drive. That’s been the go-to mass storage solution for over 20 years.

Now there’s better.

A hard drive is elctromechanical. Its got moving parts. It heats up. It makes noise. It’s relatively slow and prone to fail.

Enter the SSD or solid state drive. No moving parts. It’s 100% digital. Speed and reliability have improved. Noisefree!

My newish computer boots from an SSD in around 15 seconds. There’s also a large ‘old school’ hard drive for data. I wouldn’t buy that today. There would be a second SSD instead.

SSDs cost more than hard drives. That difference continues to shrink. For most people, even with SSD’s smaller capacities, there’s plenty of storage space.

Mechanical hard drives will be relegated to offline backup. Never throw anything out! Storage is cheap.

Computers will become smaller, quieter, faster and with longer battery life! It’s right around the bend.

My Fast Drive Gets Slower Then Faster

benchmark

I’m in love with my new computer. It’s really fast. That was the plan.

I spec’ed out all the components. That doesn’t mean I have a through understanding of all of them.

For instance, my boot and program drive is an SSD (solid-state drive). With no moving parts it’s light years faster than a conventional hard drive. That’s why the system boots in under 20 seconds!

The SSD comes with a companion program, Samsung Magician. I looked at it when the system was first installed, not since. It didn’t seem important. There was no indication the drive would change with age.

I fired it up today and was surprised to see my SSD had slowed in all categories! Random writes went from 70,159 I/O operations per second to 53,047 IOPS.

There are optimization routines listed within Magician. I tried those and installed a waiting firmware update to my drive.

Oh my!

Random write speeds are up over 100%! Other speeds are up too, though not as much.

Will I notice the difference? I’m not sure. Disk i/o is one factor of many, but it’s among the most important.