back to article It's time to end the Windows Wait

Flash memory is going to turn back time - in a good way. Once upon a time in a galaxy far away, PCs started up instantly: lean operating systems leapt from chips in machines that were not saddled with obese software and weighed down with bloatware. We've all got so used to drumming our fingers on desks, waiting for the …

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  1. Andrew Baines Silver badge
    Facepalm

    ZZZZZZzzzzzzz

    Yes, I think we've all gathered that SSD is faster by now. As soon as I can get a 1TB drive for my main PC for £40, I'll jump on board.

    Until then, I'll wait the 15 seconds it takes my PC to resume from sleep.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Boffin

      RE: ZZZZZZzzzzzzz

      I have one "media server" PC still running a five-year-old Gigabyte i-RAM, loaded with junk PC133 modules that would have been on eBay otherwise. It has served as the boot disk for those six years without a fault (apart from the time wifey disconnected the mains plug so should could plug in the vaccum cleaner, and the built-in backup battery drained over the weekend, clearing the i-RAM's boot image!). True, the capacity is not 1TB, it's actually only running 4GB, but that's more than enough for a boot image. I've seen clearance stock of i-RAMs on places like eBay going for $50..... If the battery dies on the current i-RAM I'll probably go look for an i-RAM Box (instead of a PCI slot it uses standard 5.25in disk slots) and use up some of the junk DDR400 modules I have spare. They seem a lot more reliable than the current crop of cheaper SSDs.

    3. johnnytruant

      £40?

      You'll be lucky right now. eBuyer currently has 1TB spinning magnetic media at £100 and up.

      But still, yes.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Facepalm

        Yeah, surprisingly prices went up when 50% of the world's hard drive production capacity was destroyed in a flood.

        Trolling or ignorant?

    4. AdamWill
      FAIL

      yup

      Yeah, that article was a gigantic waste of space. I particularly like how it finishes with "Flash is fast and disk is slow, and that's all you need to know." - but the author made sure to write the other few hundred words anyway. I guess you don't get paid for one line of forehead-slappingly-obvious information but you *do* get paid for five paragraphs of it?

  2. Dirk Vandenheuvel
    Holmes

    I got an SSD last year as a boot disk and I will NEVER go back. The best thing that happened to my PC in years. W7 boots up in just 7 seconds. PCs should come standard now with SSD boot disks IMHO, it just makes the whole "computer" experience so much better for all users.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Yes, pity the poor user who has to wait several seconds for gratification.

      Clearly less latency is the key to improving my computer experience. Not, say, software that's far less bloated with idiotic, annoying features, and riddled with bugs. Not improving half-assed hardware designs and poorly-written drivers. Not getting UIs designed by actual user-experience experts who do actual research.

      Yes, it'll be the same sorry crap, but it'll be FASTER. Hurrah!

  3. Paw Bokenfohr
    Stop

    That's the problem

    "get a solid-state drive for your system instead - a good one, mind, not just any bunch of crap chips from a fresh-out-of-the-box SSD that runs out of oomph as soon as every cell is written"

    ...see, that's the problem, for me at least.

    There are so many failures and probelms with chipsets and the underlying flash memory itself (though it seems more to do with chipsets right now) that I have absolutely no idea which type to buy for the best. If they were hard disk prices, I'd be happy to take a flier and just buy with my gut, but they're not, and so what I am waiting for is for someone respected (do you hear me, Reg, I mean you - yes you are respected by many of us!) to do a round up on the current state of the art and tell us the truth about what chipsets and vendors to buy and which to avoid.

  4. n317
    FAIL

    You can of course get a Dell PC with flash storage that would be just a quick as your Mac Book... I've been solid state on a PC for quite some time...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      SSDs not necessarily the answer.

      I am running the Windows 8 Dev. Preview on a VERY old Dell Inspiorn 600m, that I purchased in January 2005, and it boots up & is ready to go in under 15 seconds.

      In this case...it's all about the OS.

  5. Pete the not so great

    Hybrids

    Are these a good price compromise?

    1. Matt_payne666

      Yes! the day to day running of my hybrid is excellent, the machine resumes from sleep in 5-6 seconds, resumes from hibernate in about 10 seconds, the OS is very responsive nad I have acres of space for storage....

      I have trialed an OCZ SSD in this machine and it was faster, no question, but its a trade off between things happening faster than instant for the SSD and instantly for the way I use the hybrid... the hybrid won due to my wasteful use of storage - leaving VHD's and old zip files, gigs in the recycle bin, that sort of thing! the SSD was then just demoted to netbook duties...

    2. Andrew Baines Silver badge
      FAIL

      Not really

      Reviews all say they're a great compromise, then you look at the stats - not a great deal faster than regular drive.

      I had high hopes for one manufacture (can't remember whic), who released a card that allowed regular and SSD to appear as one drive. Turns out to not be that clever at all.

      For the time being, how much is it worth to shave 8 seconds off boot time and 2 seconds off an application starting?

      1. AdamWill

        a hell of a lot

        the article is stunningly obvious and a bit pointless, but it really *is* amazing to use an SSD, and I gladly forked out for one in my desktop after getting one in a laptop. Eight seconds off boot, two seconds off application startup, 30 minutes off a kernel compile, twice the speed on system updates and live image composes, adds up pretty damn fast, let me tell you.

  6. SJ
    Thumb Up

    But where are the SSD based Windows desktops for corporate use

    Nice article, but from my checks there don't appear to be *corporate* windows 7 desktop PCs that are based on SSD, unless someone else can put some names in the hat.

    1. Natalie Gritpants
      Boffin

      I'll tell you where they are.

      My previous contract was at Intel and the whole place is run on SSD laptops (with Linux server farms for the real work). There did not appear to be any desktop machines. Unsurprisingly the SSDs are all Intel.

    2. Richard Gadsden

      Dell OptiPlex 790 or 990

      Dell will happily sell you a top-end 790 or 990 with a 128GB SSD in. They'll charge you through the nose for the privilege, of course.

      1. Al Jones

        Cos corporate machines really need 128GB drives

        NOT!!!

        I'd be happy to buy desktops with 30GB SSDs, if I could get them. They shouldn't cost much more than the 250GB or 320GB HDs that are more or less standard now, and that contain a standard OS image and no user data (it's all on the network).

  7. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Yawn! We've had fast-starting O/Ss for years.

    > PCs started up instantly

    My PDA (Dell x50v) is like that. Just press the button and the screen pops on instantly - ready for work. It's hardly noteworthy and it's definitely not new or novel.

    In fact, if memory serves, the old CP/M systems I was working with in the early 80's would boot up about as fast as a modern day windows box. Though I did have to go to the trouble of swapping floppies during the startup.

    1. Andrew Baines Silver badge
      Happy

      BBC Model B

      Beep-Barp and off you went. None of this boot nonsense.

      You could get solid state storage too, and applications in EPROM launched instantly too.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Swapping floppies?

      That doesn't match my experience. The system needed to boot took some 10kB (out of 400kB on the DSDD disk) on our kaypro. Booting up was lots faster than a modern day windows system. Though writing the current work took longer; spinning up floppy disks takes a while. And swapping floppies auto-set the r/o flag. I've lost work to that quirk, yes. But turn off the (already quiet) keyboard beep and enjoy utterly silent code writing in the middle of the night. Good times.

      But the point stands: There's really no reason why we wait for machines booting up. Sub-second linux booting has been demonstrated. My irex bookreader takes well over a minute to boot their linux, though; probably one reason why they failed. Not to forget the old RISCOS, small enough to sit on flash-rom, lightning quick to boot. Flash for a boot drive is pretty nice, but it's still needlessly sloppy and slow software. Me, I use a free unix and while it certainly could boot faster (booting off usb, meaning in 1.0 mode, is a bit of a bottleneck), I tend to not turn it off, for it doesn't need rebooting.

      1. Disco-Legend-Zeke
        Pint

        I Have Lighting Fixtures That...

        ...take longer to start up.

  8. MchJ

    rubbish article

    Look, here's a £100K car, it goes much faster than that £20K car. Let's write an article about how everyone MUST buy a £100K car.

    Is that it. Yawn.

    1. LaeMing
      Unhappy

      and the style of prose was rather purple of hue.

      And I can bet that MS et.al. wlll manage to cram enough bloat into the next few versions to bring even a ram-disk back down to tape-drive speeds, once flash-boot-drives are common (MacOS and Linux are certainly an improvement, but I wouldn't quite let them off the tubby-list either).

    2. Marvin the Martian

      The 100K car is still hobbled by the 20mph speed limit. And loses some of its trimmings trying to get over a speed bump / sleeping policeman. The article's point about speed is anyway trite.

      What I fell over was "Flash storage in notebooks and desktops basically pretends to be disk. It isn't. It's non-volatile for a start." That's certainly the first time I've heard a HD called volatile -- normally that's RAM and other stuff that loses its contents after powering down. Or I completely miss the point.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Well, he's right. Not his problem thatnot everyone can afford one.

      Small flaw in your analogy: there are no speed limits on hard disks, so you'd be able to max the expensive car..

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        You can max out the expensive car.

        However, you can only carry yourself and 1 item of hand-luggage.

        Your family etc. and your possessions must travel in a large van behind.

        Also, your expensive car stops working if you use the vehicle controls 100,000 times.

    4. Patrick R
      Thumb Down

      Where's the "Rate this atticle" button

      when we need one ?

  9. nematoad
    Linux

    Oh, right.

    I haven't used Windows in years so I'll have to take your word for it that PCs loaded with Microsoft's finest are slow and full of bloat.

    As Andrew Baines has said once the price of SSD comes down to within touching distance of a HDD then I'll think about jumping ship, until then I'll just have to put up with my Linux boxes booting in about 30 seconds or so.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft grrrrrrrr

    Actually it's a software problem, not hardware at all. I have an 8-core PC with 6GB of RAM, an SSD for my C partition and two Velociraptors for my data and other stuff. Yet it still sometimes responds like a slug swimming through a sea of frozen treacle. And other times it just goes out to lunch for up to 10-20 seconds.

    To be honest, the response time I get is no faster than I got from my (vastly less powerful) VAXstation in 1990. And the funny thing is that, whereas VMS was designed as a general purpose operating system, Windows is supposed to be heavily user-oriented.

    Here's an interesting question. Given 8 cores, and far more RAM than it will ever need, how come Windows seems incapable of prioritising my needs first? Surely it could dedicate one or two cores to making sure that keyboard and mouse interrupts are serviced and the resulting routines executed immediately, while everything else cruises on in the background? (Indeed, that could be done even with a single core). Yet it sometimes seems that Windows puts the user last - way behind, for instance, the important system routines that are analyzing the performance logs to find out if performance is inadequate and, if so, why.

    1. godefroi
      Thumb Down

      You're not seeing a Windows problem, you're seeing a driver problem. Some driver's got stuff tied up, and there's nothing Windows can do about it. Update your drivers, hopefully that'll fix it.

      As to the article's claim that working on flash-based systems eliminates the need to constantly save your work, that's complete and utter rubbish. There's still a difference between volatile RAM and nonvolatile FLASH, and if your software (yes, software, not OS) wrote your work to nonvolatile storage every time you typed a character, you'd use up your available write cycles startlingly fast. Ironically, spinning disk would be just fine with this.

    2. Chemist

      "the important system routines that are analyzing..........."

      That had a certain 'Hitchhikers" feel to it.

  11. Ian Ferguson

    Sure, I'll run out and buy a load now!

    Lets see, I need around 10TB for the server array and 500GB x 150 for the desktops.

    ...

    Oh.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SSD

    I've just changed to an SSD for my boot disk (60 gig SATA3) Its a full SATA 3 motherboard too and the difference in application load times is quite startling. Firefox for example took maybe 10 seconds to load before and is now instant. Same for all the other apps so it is a worthwhile upgrade apart from the one big drawback and that is price. Just compare £80 for 60 gig as opposed to <£40 for a 1 Terabyte WD Green disk. (Before the Thai floods of course).

  13. HP Cynic

    Yeah my new PC (1 year old now) came with a 60GB SSD and on that of course I just store the OS and various programs while the 1 TB drive holds all the games and such.

    My PC boots from off to usable in 20 seconds or so and that includes lots of programs which launch on Startup.

    A SSD OS is one of the most obvious and measurable upgrades you can make to a PC.

    Sleep to active again: 5 seconds including the password screen.

  14. Tim Parker

    "Flash storage in notebooks and desktops basically pretends to be disk. It isn't. It's non-volatile for a start."

    So is disk - that's rather the point.

    "There is no need to constantly save Word documents or spreadsheets to disk because they're not being written to a platter revolving 250 times a second; "

    No indeed they're not - they're being saved constantly from volatile DRAM to NVRAM in the solid state disk (at least if you want any protection).

    "they're stored in non-volatile silicon and clever operating system software can save every change you make."

    Exactly - it's not magic. To protect your incremental changes something _has_ to be placed in non-volatile storage. All you've done is swap comparatively slow platter-based magnetic storage for faster solid state storage.

    The details of how the various operating systems buffer, cache or otherwise manipulate the changes is another (quite interesting, if you like that sort of thing) matter - but hardly germane to the inference that you've suddenly done away with having to transfer data from volatile to non-volatile storage.

    1. David Gosnell

      Glad I wasn't the only one to spot this bizarre assertion. I assumed I was going mad and had missed some fundamental point, but evidently not.

  15. JDX Gold badge

    Bleh

    Did they let the work experience kid write something or is El Reg publishing reader letters now?

    And when was this true: "Once upon a time in a galaxy far away, PCs started up instantly: lean operating systems leapt from chips in machines that were not saddled with obese software and weighed down with bloatware."

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Bleh

      "And when was this true: "Once upon a time in a galaxy far away, PCs started up instantly: lean operating systems leapt from chips in machines that were not saddled with obese software and weighed down with bloatware.""

      Before you were born, maybe? I suppose you have to classify 1980s microcomputers as "PCs" which doesn't exactly sit well with the introduction of the term - meaning something very tightly connected to IBM - but they were still personal computers.

  16. Mr. Fatuous
    Flame

    Saving

    The save button isn't just there purely because of untrustworthy hard-drives, it's there because of untrustworthy operators too. Who hasn't worked on something and then decided further down the line that it's junk and easier to restart from the last save than push on.

    1. LaeMing
      Meh

      The author of the article apparently!

  17. Tim Wolfe-Barry
    Go

    @SJ - Corporate Win7...

    My latest work laptop came with a 256GB SSD - now that my job doesn't involve having to run 8 different VMs on one PC that's LOADS of space - and it boots and resumes like magic (well, at least as fast as the DR DOS 5 based 386 SX-25 I had in 1994!)

    Dell 6420, i7, 8GB RAM. no idea what it cost mind...

  18. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Indeed.

    I must go out and replace my hard disc immediately.

    Oh, wait. I don't save my documents every ten minutes because the disc drive is slow or unreliable. I save them because it *is* reliable and I've reached a point in my work I'd like to save, and I reckon I can take a breath for the space of typing a few characters. A disc susbsytem moving data in excess of 20MB a second isn't going to produce a noticeable delay on anything other than large audio or video files - hundreds of megs. I'd hazard a guess that most of the delay on save is the serialisation from the user program.

    And as Andrew said - a TB for forty quid sounds a good deal. I'll have one. But not until then.

    p.s. what's this 'windows boot' of which you speak?

  19. Matt_payne666

    flash is great, yes we know that, but it is just a succeptable to damage as spinning media, often with worse results... i just had one of my SSD machines loose power, the end result - toasted SSD - no boot, nothing showing in the bios, totally corrupted... much the same a pulling a USB flash drive mid write...

    And I am a flash fanboi - having used SSD's since the slow, low capacity drives in my UX1-NX

    oh and as for apple fanaticisim, the 6 seconds it takes my bloaty Win7 Dell laptop to recover from sleep is a price im willing to pay for having 500gb of hybrid storage..........

  20. Graham Bartlett

    Chris Mellor, meet reality

    "There is no need to constantly save Word documents or spreadsheets to disk because they're not being written to a platter revolving 250 times a second; they're stored in non-volatile silicon and clever operating system software can save every change you make."

    There's a need to constantly save documents because PROGRAMS CRASH!

    And then there's "can save every change you make". Well yes, in theory every keystroke could be instantly saved to the SSD. An SSD has a finite number of write operations on each cell. Any guesses on what writing a new copy of the file every character, or even every word, is going to do to the SSD? If it lasts a year I'd be pretty damn surprised.

    1. GreenOgre
      Windows

      Well, maybe on Windows ....

      Have a look at Apple's OSX Lion. YOU don't need to save to disk, that's done automatically. You can save "versions" of a document that you can revert to after thoroughly screwing everything up yourself.

      1. Sean Baggaley 1
        Stop

        True...

        ... but it's fundamentally an extension of their earlier "Time Machine" backup technology under the hood. Think of it as having a built-in, OS-level, Git-style versioning system sitting on top of the filesystem. It's nice, but it can take some getting used to.

        I agree with other commenters here that the original article is a rambling, incoherent mess. Yes, SSDs are fast—I just replaced my laptop's crappy old 5400 rpm hard disk with a Crucial 512GB model and the speed difference is in the "Holy f*cking SH*T!" category. But these drives have been stuck at the same price:GB ratio for some time now, with little sign of imminent improvement. (Incidentally, it's a little cheaper to buy these from the US if you're an EU citizen.)

        However, the article's author clearly doesn't understand why computers save to non-volatile backing storage: it's because volatile DDR-type RAM is still quite a bit faster than the tastest flash RAM, but also highly volatile, so computers use the former as a temporary workbench before storing the results on a non-volatile backing store.

        As for fast startup times: yes, those early IBM PCs, ZX Spectrums, BBC Micros, Atari STs, Commodore Amigas and Acorn Archimedes started up very quickly, but a lot of that is because they had almost f*ck all in the way of RAM. On my old ZX Spectrum 128K, even the slowest of third party floppy drives loaded files near-instantaneously compared to the more common backing storage known as "cassette tape"! In the US, floppy drives became cheaper and more widespread much more quickly than overseas, so most Brits had to suffer with cassettes instead, where loading a 32KB game file could easily take 3-5 _minutes_.

        Once you got computers like the Atari STFM and Commodore A500, hard drives began to make more sense (although the latter reserved so much damned RAM for its filesystem, it effectively required a memory upgrade to use one). Even so, I could load a game off a floppy in about 30 seconds. Not instant, but, compared to those earlier 8-bit computers and their cassette-based storage, still pretty damned fast. And boot-up on my Atari STFM never went above 10 seconds, when booting off a floppy. (It was actually slower if you had to boot solely from ROM as it kept trying to find disks to boot from first, before eventually giving up after about 30 seconds.)

        On the IBM PCs of the '80s and early '90s, boot times off hard disks were pretty quick. Even Windows 95 loaded up pretty fast. The reason? PCs of the day still had RAM measured in a handful of megabytes—until around 1995, 4MB was perfectly normal for an IBM PC running Windows 3.11 or Windows 95. And that takes seconds to fill even using the hard drives of the day. It's only now that we have RAM measured in gigabytes that the hard drive has reached its limits: the fastest HDDs today will only transfer data at about 60MB/sec or so—and are usually noticeably slower at writing than reading.

        But, when the market demands computers that can be used for producing music, editing and grading videos, rendering 3D animations, and playing games with what would have been cinema-grade CGI in the 1990s, that increasing RAM is unavoidable. It's just that hard drives have never been able to keep up.

        Whether flash storage will remain a discrete medium like mechanical hard disks, or become more tightly integrated with the computer's working RAM is open to debate. We're already seeing an integrated design approach in smartphones and tablets, with users no longer having to even think about concepts of "saving" documents—Apple's iOS lacks the concept of "saving" entirely. (OS X Lion's similar interface changes are clearly part of a longer transition; OS X 10.8 should be interesting.)

        One argument in this thread I do disagree with is using mechanical drives in a compromised setup with a small SSD "boot" drive, which feels like a false economy to me. Once you've worked with an all-SSD system, you'll never want to use applications like Aperture or Final Cut Pro with media stored on a mechanical drive ever again. It's those media files that really benefit the most from the speed, not the application's source code.

        SSDs _are_ the future, and I doubt anyone seriously disagrees with that. It's certainly likely they'll get a lot cheaper over time, but they're still an expensive option for most. The rise of cloud storage could help increase the adoption rate as smaller drives make sense in that context. (This is the design rationale for Apple's MacBook Air range, for example.)

        But many power users will need drives in the 515GB - 2TB range, and there really isn't anything suitable, or affordable. Yet.

  21. EddieD

    This article is so pointless, even by tabloid standards.

    The OS is irrelevant. Our magnetic media iMacs and Macbooks are no better than our similarly equipped PCs, and our SSD PCs are no worse than our SSD equipped Macs.

    Are you perchance regretting the money you spent on your toy?

  22. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Train Crash

    So what happens when your computer inexplicably dies and you can't get to all your data on the deeply embedded flash chips?

    Eggs & baskets anyone?

  23. Bonce

    I'm curious to know

    How paper tape and punch cards made it into the "magnetic media afterlife"

    /pedant

  24. slack

    Optional

    If you are still using the OS that requires a reboot virtually every time the mouse is moved then this might be an issue.

    For the rest of us it isn't.

  25. James Hughes 1

    Perhaps

    If people didn't write crappy slow software, hard disks would still be perfectly adequate....

    Then imagine how fast it would be when you do go to SSD

  26. Aitor 1

    I almost agree

    Only that it is a bad design no to have to save the documents... any autosave will either not work as expected (fail) or consume lots of resources.

    As for constantly writing SSD disks.. bad idea.

    Another thing is to change the way a computer works, and have RAM, non volatile RAM and SSD (either NAND or Memristors). THAT way you could have the document cached y non volatile ram, and from time to time save it to SSD. In case of a crash, the system would copy the last coherent copy to SSD on boot.

    As for SSDs replacing rotating disks, I totally agree with you, it is absurd to have disks today,., but many companies insist TODAY on using them for databases!!

  27. Mondo the Magnificent
    Facepalm

    Flash in the pan..

    Flash is still expensive and the £/Gigabyte cost makes it unrealistic for most home and corporate desktop and portable users

    Also, the capacities just aren't there yet and most home desktop systems hoard tons of data on the disk/s in the form of movies, music, photos and apps.

    What was overlooked is those transitional products like the Seagate Momentus which is in essence a rotating hard disk with 4GB of Flash to speed things up

    Not as slow as a plattered disk, not as fast as a flash disk but it does make a very noticeable difference on boot up performance

    Until flash disks are as cheap as chips and offer massive capacity, this article is a mere flash in the pan..

  28. Eddie Edwards
    WTF?

    Non-volatile?

    "Flash storage in notebooks and desktops basically pretends to be disk. It isn't. It's non-volatile for a start."

    As opposed to disks, which lose their data when the power is disconnected?

    Seriously, does the author know what "non-volatile" means, or did he just grab the nearest buzzword from apple.com?

    1. SYNTAX__ERROR
      Happy

      Yes, that's what I thought too.

      Also, the author seems to suggest that saving is no longer necessary. Saving will always be appropriate for two reasons:

      1. Running programs and data are stored in RAM, which IS volatile.

      2. Unless you want to make one hell of a mess and have to deal with lots of versions of everything, the user needs to decide when to save. It is not desirable nor effective to save every single change, especially not accidental deletion of content or the cat walking across the keyboard.

      1. Dick Emery

        That's what undo is for.

    2. LaeMing
      Go

      Flash Memory will loose their data after aboue 10 years without power. Magnetic disks (if stored appropriately) are a lot less volatile than that!

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    SSD's are not engough by a long shot

    Actually the article is pretty off-base. Its true that SSD's are a lot faster than mechanical drives but its not true that mechanical drives are the main bottleneck in day-to-day use.

    SSD's sure as hell don't cure that damnable spinning hourglass, for anyone.

    I'm something of a speed freak, used to have 10rpm UW SCSI disks as my boot drive before SATA came along, then I switched to raptors, Raptor-X and finally Velociraptor drives.

    By that time mechanical disks were fast enough that they were no longer the main bottleneck except for start-up of OS/applications.

    When I upgraded to a Vertex 2 and recently an Intel 510, I noted speed increases but they were not nearly so impressive.

    Sure the OS starts much faster, so what? I reboot once day at most, once a week if I can. Windows 7 x64 is very stable and has great uptime. Sleep/standby works great.

    But I still spend an unnaceptable amount of time looking a the spinning hourglass whenever Windows decides this is a complex task and needs to think about it.

    This is infuriating on a Quad Core 3GHz machine with 4GB fast RAM and a cutting edge SSD as well as a couple of other marginally slower systems/laptops. I'm not talking about CPU intensive tasks either - I never see the CPU go above 15%.

    As far as I can tell, this is a combination of crappy software code combined with poor chipset design creating the bottlenecks.

    The trouble is that IT software/hardware companies (other than Apple) don't do any real life testing of their products with an eye to the user experience. Let's fix that and we worry about exotic components later.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yep

    "We've all got so used to drumming our fingers on desks, waiting for the computer to start, that we no longer dismiss Windows as bloatware, even though it is."

  31. Len Goddard
    Thumb Down

    No real advantage

    I start my desktop PC when I get up in the morning, if it hasn't been running all night. Occasionally I have to reboot during the day. Flash based storage isn't going to do a lot for me until I can afford to replace the 3Tb of data drives as well as the boot disk.

    The situation may be different on a notebook PC but I don't use one.

    1. Figgus

      Or you could just drop in a SSD for your OS and keep the spinny drives to hold your 3TB of data. It works very well for me.

  32. CM
    WTF?

    SSD destroyer?

    Our Sales chum(p)s all have fancy smancy SSDs but the co. inflicts a disk encryption on laptops. Result is a write-everywhere layer of bad software which dramatically reduces the lifespan of SSDs.

  33. Paul 135

    SSDs are the only game in town, and this COULD have been a good article...

    ... only to be ruined by all the unnecessary and cringeworthy crAppl€ love. Next he'll be telling us that crAppl€ invented SSDs :-/

    This idea of not saving documents is only going to cause problems - the novelty just seems not to have worn off for our iDrone here, who hasn't used it long enough for the widely criticised nuances to come and slap him in the face yet.

  34. schafdog
    FAIL

    Inconsistency in your argument

    "We feel we have to constantly save to disk, to preserve our hard work, because magnetic media and its associated software can't be trusted, which is another way of saying it's crap and fundamentally broken."

    This argument is totally broken. why would constantly save to a "untrusted" media? We did this because it worked, but OS'es and applications wasnt stable. Being away from Windows for a long time, (Linux, OS X), I do not constantly save.

    However I can totally agree on SSD rocks. Got my first yesterday. Starting a heavy loaded developer machine (OS X) took 30-60 seconds, lots of application not responding at first. it's less than 10 now.

  35. Peter Kay

    Less drugs for the article author

    Starts off about NAND memory which, yes, may transform operating systems when it arrives.

    Sadly then the halluciogenics kick in and Mellor turns into an imbecile. Clue : spinning disks are non volatile too. Applications save to them because the rest of the hardware is deemed to be less reliable than the storage. From what I can see after wading through the marketing guff, the Macbook Air does *not* have NAND memory. Programs don't run from it, and it attaches to the SATA port - it's storage, not memory.

    Then there's the guff about resume. It's no surprise that laptops resume faster than desktops as they have a UPS build into them.. This is a deliberate design decision.

    SSDs will be lovely at some point, but you can't buy 2TB of SSD for 80 quid.

    Frankly disks aren't that slow in any case. I'm not so desperate that I can't wait 5-10s for Windows 7 to resume from suspend.. (it takes longer for my CRT monitor to warm up than the hardware to respond, and no - I don't want to buy a particularly expensive TFT when my existing monitors are working fine)

  36. voice of unreason
    Go

    Price is relevant? Really?

    Mmm - price is relevant for your needs? Really, really - think about this instead of parroting "disk is cheaper than SSD". Tape is cheaper than disk, but for most people, so what?

    Yes it is, but for most people, not for what they want to do:

    Even 128 GB SSD is ~£100, and makes more difference than any other processor or memory enhancement you can make. If you are price-constrained, buy the cheapest CPU & mobo you can, and have SSD.

    "But my pictures / video take loads more than 128GB". Yes, but not on every mouse-click. Have an external 2 TB drive for very little money. Connect it wireless if you feel like & stash it on a shelf. That way, you save 30 seconds on every boot, 2 seconds on every mouse-click. And lose maybe 10 seconds once every hour when you want to watch a movie on the big drive, or the photo collection.

    Sure, store 2 TB of data. But don't suffer a speed penalty that hobbles every other system, for a photo collection you look at twice a day!

  37. melts
    Flame

    what drivel was that about non-volatile

    'ssd's pretending to be a disk, they arent, they are non-volatile for a start' ???

    err harddrives are non volatile too...

    last i checked its ram thats volatile, and its ram that stores your precious waffle before you hit the save button, just swapping in a ssd doesn't mean you can pull the plug on your pc and get your typing back. changing autosave to every single second would do about that. whether that works with an ssd, idk, surely seems like a way to burn through your precious cell writes.

    In fact i'd of been more interested in hearing about why the stats on these ssd's seem to have ever shrinking process size for their chips and that seems to have ever shrinking writes before failure count. maybe i'm reading it wrong, but I saw this in a recent spec browsing adventure. ie this from Kingstons site on their new HyperX;

    'Intel® 25nm Compute-Quality MLC NAND (5k P/E Cycles)'

    thats 5,000 program/erase cycles, and thats bad, surely.

    I'm sure when the drives first came out they had 100,000 writes per cell, and I thought that'd be dandy for my system disk.

    it seems to be based on the move from SLC to MLC, I don't know a lot about it but I see it as a problem, talking about that and what to do about it would of been far more interesting than this.

    I'm pretty sure 4 ssd's in raid0 would make a single ssd look a bit silly, but just as moving hdd to ssd, its all about money. helping people learn about what is a good investment would of been meaningful, compared to the drivel that boils down to computers with more expensive components are better. (you may as well of said everyone should have 128gb of ram so you can load your entire environment to ram, and i guess your logic will be use ssds so you don't need to save anything either, just pull the plug, right?)

  38. Rob Beard
    FAIL

    As much as I'd love an SSD, I tend to prefer storage capacity over speed. I very rarely shutdown or reboot my laptop, most of the time I bung it on standby mode when I'm not using it so it resumes in a couple of seconds.

    On my Nettop which I use for media playback on the TV, I just turn it on and wander off and do something else for a minute, and eventually that too will be left on all the time (it's running a secondary MythTV backend and frontend so when I finally get some time to sit and play I'll probably leave it running all the time since it's pretty much silent).

    When SSD capacities rise and prices come down (or a combination of the two) I'll pick one up. I know I can get a 64GB SSD for around the £70 mark at the moment but my laptop is a 12.1" machine with only space for one hard drive. I guess if I had a 17" beast with two drive bays then an SSD for booting and a HDD for little used data storage would be an option.

    Rob

  39. Richard 22
    WTF?

    What the hell?

    >> This is just the beginning. Flash storage in notebooks and desktops basically pretends to be disk. It isn't. It's non-volatile for a start. There is no need to constantly save Word documents or spreadsheets to disk because they're not being written to a platter revolving 250 times a second; they're stored in non-volatile silicon and clever operating system software can save every change you make.

    Erm - what? You still need to save from the RAM (which is volatile) being used by the Application to the non-volatile storage (which is either flash or HDD). Both flash and HDD are non-volatile, and even flash reads/writes are much slower than RAM access speeds, so we're not going to replace that with flash any time soon. So yes, you do still need to save your documents. The fact that Lion hides this from the user seems to be entirely irrelevant here (it could do it whether you've got a spinning media or flash-based drive)

  40. b166er

    15 seconds! You mean hibernate, surely?

  41. Matthew 17

    Hybrids, almost awesome.

    with hybrid drives the firmware uses the 8GB or so of SSD as a cache, so it learns what is the most popular files and moves those to the SSD part of the storage. It's not that successful.

    Better would be to lose the software and to be able to partition the drive so I could have 8GB of SSD to install my OS and other bits n bobs then use the rest of the regular storage to put everything else. This way I could have a laptop that boots up quickly but still gives me 750GB of space without having to remove the dvd drive so that I can install a 2nd hard drive.

  42. phoenix
    Stop

    Windows Shindoze

    I can boot my dual-core, SATA 150, DDR machines in 20 secs now, tomorrow and in 6 month's time. How? GNU/Linux. No registry, no lousy file system, few crap drivers. Want speed without the shelling out go GNU/Linux you will not look back.

  43. Zaphod.Beeblebrox
    Facepalm

    Words almost fail me

    "It's unnerving at first; closing a document or edited file without explicitly saving it, ... but that's how it should be. We feel we have to constantly save to disk, to preserve our hard work, because magnetic media and its associated software can't be trusted..."

    Except the same thing can (and is) done with software running on spining media - the two are not mutually exclusive, and the problems aren't either. An SSD based system can suffer the same issues as a spinning media based system - power it off before data is written (whether the data is being written automatically or manually) and the data is gone. And if the disk fails, it hardly matters whether your data was written minutes or microseconds before, the hardware still failed making it difficult to retrieve your data.

    Finally, does the fact that the software is constantly saving to disk instead of you doing it manually actually change whether or not the hardware or software can be trusted? I think not...

  44. James 100
    FAIL

    "We feel we have to constantly save to disk, to preserve our hard work, because magnetic media and its associated software can't be trusted,"

    When you save to disk, you *ARE* trusting magnetic media and the associated software! It's the in-memory storage which is prone to crashing (hence frequent auto-saves).

    SSD may be fast - at least for read access - but it certainly isn't comparable to RAM yet - and the explicit serialisation step involved in "saving" a file, at least in programming terms, can act as an effective barrier to bugs and in-memory corruption. Yes, Word can and will crash, but when it does you can roll back to the last pre-crash autosave and carry on without losing much.

    In terms of the user interface, though, I agree the new Lion approach seems much better. Behind the scenes, the files are actually still getting saved to disk - but that detail is all taken care of for you, as it generally should be. Just a shame about the bizarre reversal in this article, that you save your data to magnetic disk because it can't be trusted!

  45. agentgonzo

    Rant and grumble. My iPhone still takes longer to boot up than my Windows PC. It's just that portable devices and macbooks use suspend/sleep a lot more than desktop PCs.

  46. AndrueC Silver badge
    Mushroom

    My laptop runs Windows 7 and uses Hybrid Sleep. The first time I use it it takes about ten seconds to come ready. From then on as long as I use it again within three hours it takes about 5 seconds.

    You don't need SSD to speed up boot times - you just need to understand what the functions and features available to you and use them properly.

    Windows has deeper issues causing the hourglass. My office machine (XP) some times takes nearly half a dozen seconds to open a text file (my TODO list) stored on its local hard disk - WTF is that about? Then there's the Explorer context menu. Why does Windows have to wait until every last time has been chosen before displaying it? Some things are fixed and it ought to show those first then populate the rest over time. But I think mostly it's the network stack and/or the way Windows uses it.

    Whatever the cause it /is/ bloody annoying and I wish MS could sort it out. To hell with speeding up boot times - that's something most people only do once or twice a day. What MS need to sort out is why nearly every god-damn thing I do with a computer these days seems to trigger the hourglass.

    Windows has provided me with a career for nigh-on a quarter of a century but bloody hell it's become irritating of late.

  47. Mage Silver badge

    Flash

    Depends on price. My nearly 10 year old Laptop running XP (120G HDD replaced original 30G about 3 years ago) boots about the same time as many cheaper Flash based Linux running Netbooks.

    You need big money for fast Flash. My CP/M system is faster as it doesn't have to load much.

    ROM booted non-PCs back in mid 80s were impressive boot time. But not so useful as CP/M or MS/DOS.

  48. Thomas 18
    Trollface

    "the magnetic media afterlife"

    There is no silicone heaven

  49. J.G.Harston Silver badge
    FAIL

    "We feel we have to constantly save to disk, to preserve our hard work, because magnetic media and its associated software can't be trusted,"

    No, it's because the magnetic media /can/ be trusted, it's the program/data memory that /can't/ be trusted, which is why you regularly save your data /from/ memory /to/ disk.

  50. pjcard
    Stop

    Do not buy *a* drive

    "get a solid-state drive for your system instead"

    For the love of god buy two and raid mirror them, because they will fail at some point (or more specifically, before a hard drive generally would). They're essentially consumables.

  51. Savvy System Lord
    FAIL

    Silver bullet - for now...

    Just give it some time and the bloatware will make flash as slow as spinning rust.

    The cause of sloppy programming isn't solved.

    What would solve it, would be something along the lines of how the Formula 1 teams have a weight and engine capacity limit.

    If all software (especially OS's) were developed on a standardised machine with the following limited specs - say: a P2 300MHz, with 256Mb of RAM and 5GB of Storage.

    It would be good for consumers, but bad for the business models.

  52. John Tappin
    Facepalm

    But this isn't new....

    i remember by trusty Acorn Archimedes flashing into life with the RiscOS in an EPROM (ok, not quite the same as CMOS or flash) and this loaded instantly from power on. The HDD was still spinning up and I could already acces the machine.

    At the time I could never understand why people wanted to load an OS from a floppy disk which took ages with its little tunk tunk tunk noise as it stepped through the tracks.

    As OS loads moved from floppy to HDD installs they bloated massively clearly attempting to fill all the space available with features and apps that would more than likely never get executed in the entire life of the device. Even with Internet access we still fill our local storage with unused bloat.

    I still regret ever getting rid of my Acorn - Still one of the best machines I have ever used and programmed.

  53. JC_
    FAIL

    The 2 year old SSD kicks off my Dell desktop instantly, but reading this article you'd think that only Apple-users have access to such futuristic technology... And since when did HDDs become volatile? The data's still there after a power-cycle. Baaaad article.

  54. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Flash is fast, yeah, but no but, yeah, but whatever

    "Flash is fast and disk is slow, and that's all you need to know"

    calls for a paraphrase:

    "Disk is cheap, flash is not, and that's all you need to know".

  55. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can you replace the "get more from this author" with a "never show anything from this author ever again" link please? I don't know where to begin, aside from to ascribe this article to a fiendish trolling attempt, and not rise to the bait...

  56. Sil
    FAIL

    Wakeup

    This would perhaps have been an insightful piece of journalism three years ago.

  57. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You, sir, are NAND idiot...

    ... for the whole "hard drives are volatile but flash is not" nonsense.

    >"Flash is fast and disk is slow, and that's all you need to know."

    Oh yes? I do not think this policy of ignorance has served you well today.

  58. BinaryFu
    Thumb Down

    Are we there yet?

    Well, no - not yet anyhow. Although a 32gb or 64gb SSD is in the affordable range, a reasonably sized one (read as, for Windows OS) isn't. A Windows 7 disc will take up a fair amount of room just for the OS, not to mention any games/programs installed. It's not unreasonable to see 50gb+ on an average user's Windows 7.

    Add to that the fact that you cannot get Windows (anything) to install on drive C but install other things (like for example, games and such) on a separate drive, without the game going "No no, we won't work unless we put a few things over here on C...like a gig or two of data..."

    So, until someone comes out with a MINIMUM of 128gb SSD at a reasonable (Under $100US) we're not going to see them anywhere except in high end (read as expensive) laptops, where longevity and speed are critical.

    1. LaeMing
      Linux

      Hmmm

      And here is me grumbling away to myself about how my desktop Linux OS/apps partition has to be 8G (8G!!) these days. Any bigger and I won't be able to back it up to a single DVD-R! :-)

  59. stim

    here's an idea...

    just leave the laptop on sleep when u go to work (plug it into the wall if you have too) and then wake from sleep when you get home! takes all of...ooo 1 second!

    why are people still shutting down and booting up every day!!!!???

    my laptop (new toshiba satelite r830-143 will happily last nearly all week in sleep mode and is always on the coffee table when i come home to use it.... and guess what it's a 5400 spinning disk... (640gb to add, like to see ur SSD do that!!)

  60. Neoc

    So let me get this straight...

    The author's answer to badly written and over-bloated code is to.... buy faster hardware.

    Riiiight...

  61. Infernoz Bronze badge
    WTF?

    The author seems to be in a reality distortion field

    Yes, flash can be faster for _offline_ storage. No, you still have to save your RAM data to Flash drive/chips, it isn't magically on Flash. Tablets are much faster to load because an App has and uses so little RAM, so saves to Flash seem much faster, however it has to keep more data on Flash, so can be slow during use! Windows and other full OSs like OS-X and Linux generally keep a much more data in RAM, so loads and saves often take longer than for a tablet, however program execution is usually less bogged down by disk access during use.

    Price example:

    * Flash disk 120GB for cheapest offer price for slowest model over £100

    * Rotary magnetic disk 2TB (16 times the size) for pre-flood offer price £57, so over. 27 times cheaper

    * Rotary magnetic disk 1TB (8 times the size!) for post-flood offer price £70, so over 11 times cheaper

    Anyhow there have also been well published issues over fatal data loss of a whole Flash disk, far worse than for rotary magnetic disks, so is no way in hell that I'll buy and have a Flash disk as a boot disk until they are solid reliable and more competitive in price!

  62. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    "disk based" OS?

    I love my MacBook Air and the speed the SSD provides - but all OSs are "disk based".

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