Has anyone ever noticed that you’ll ask a question online, and people just parrot back things they’ve heard? I found a decent deal on an SSD disk, and was trying to poke around and see if I’d actually see a big boost. Here’s a summary of what I’ve found so far:

• SSDs have no seek time so they’re good for random reads. I knew that. But I don’t do an abnormal number of random reads. I load big files and write to swap.
• SSDs have a limited lifespan. This drives me crazy because it’s extremely misleading. It’s technically true, but seems to imply that hard drives last forever. Of the people who have actually done testing, it seems that most solid-state disks last longer.
• SSDs are wicked fast if you stripe data across eight of them. The problem here is that (a) it’s totally unhelpful in figuring out if an SSD will give my laptop increased throughput or not, and (b) ANYTHING is wicked fast if you stripe data across eight of them. (Okay, so maybe not floppies.)

What drives me crazy is that you’ll ask a question about the gross throughput on SSDs, and people come in yapping about how you shouldn’t use an SSD because of the limited number of write cycles, or someone recommends them because their friend’s neighbor has an 8-disk SSD stripe set and he said it’s fast. Asking about actual throughput from the SSDs has gotten me a lot of silence back, actually.

In other news, you cannot use a 2.5″ SAS drive in your laptop. Both are “serial,” but it’s still ATA and SCSI. (Some SAS backplanes, however, will also support SATA drives.) We have a server with some goofy 2.5″ SAS drives, and I was hoping I could upgrade my laptop to use a 73GB, 15K RPM disk. Not possible.

Related posts:

1. Tweaking SQL
2. Deal!
3. A New Take on RAM and Swap?
4. SSD, Affordable
5. Disk Throughput