History Repeats
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out
Yeah, you’ll look at the subject and go “duh” but I have a valid reason for picking that title. I was thumbing through my latest issue of Maximum PC, and came across a “budget” PC (pretty scary when “budget” PCs are $1500+) and noticed a striking similarity in the choice of components compared to a very similar shift a few years ago.
When folks were introduced to the DVD ROM spec, PCs hardly ever shipped without both a CDROM or CD RW drive and a DVD ROM drive. I was one of the folks who built one such PC from scratch, including both a CDRW and a DVD-ROM. Then the shift was with DVDRW drives, and once again I had both a DVDRW and a DVDROM (yeah, both drives can read DVDs, but I wanted one to write with “just in case” I needed to write while reading, and no, I didn’t do it to copy movies.) Then it happened again with BluRay drives, both readers and writers, though, to a lesser extent.
The reason I bring it up is that these PC vendors are embracing the “SSD Era” by copying the old habits of system makers and ye olde rotational optical media. This time, it’s SSDs and hard drives.
Opting to make the boot and primary OS drive an SSD, whilst adding a platter based hard drive for more mundane storage tasks, we’re going to see this shift into top gear, if it hasn’t already. Yeah, totally clairvoyant of me, I know. 
If you read one of my prior posts, you’ll know that I upgraded my laptop to an SSD, and I use the same one in my workstation at work. I never really truly appreciated the SSD’s benefits until last night however. Much like a former Maximum PC editor once wrote (thanks Josh!) he never really understood the hype surrounding multicore processors at the time of their introduction. He never really took advantage of them until he realized that he was still computing in “single core land.” I was still computing in “rotational media land.” For me, it was a last minute LAN party at a friend’s house. Normally I host them at my house, but I wanted to have one without having to ask everyone to come over at the last second, but there’s always a couple who are up for last minute ideas, and so we scheduled the LAN. Instead of lugging my heavy ass desktop power house and accompanying hardware, I instead opted for my laptop so that I could go setup and leave at the end with little fuss.
I always knew that SSDs would one day rule my life, I just never expected to be shown in such a powerful way. My laptop is a little long in the tooth now, having purchased it about 3 years ago now. It’s a pretty modest little laptop, sporting a Core 2 Duo T9300 processor running at a swift 2.5 GHz, 4GB of RAM, and sporting the very gray haired GeForce 8600 GT-M. I installed my own Corsair 120GB SSD to replace the 7200 RPM WD that was in it prior. The Corsair is nothing special, just the standard Sandforce (first gen) powered 120GB SSD that has earned a place of respect in many other system builders’ systems.
In that same room were people with an i7 920, and an AMD Phenom II. Both of them had standard 7200 RPM hard drives, and much faster video cards. Even the folks we played LoL with over the internet couldn’t have known what I was rocking. We started the game, and during the loading screen, I watched, in complete awe, as my little 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo raced to the finish of the loading screen several seconds before even the local i7 or Phenom II. I was blown away. I had already been used to the Corsair’s prowess in Windows general environment tasking, such as with office apps and other things such as vSphere at work, or the IM software and mIRC I used at home. Little did I realize how fast that little SSD would be in that situation. My desktop PC uses a six-core Phenom II and two 150GB Raptor-X’s in RAID 0, and even they were ousted in my later testing.
One thing is for certain, I welcome our new SandForce based overlords, and will be seeing about replacing my dual Raptors come this Christmas. For me Ben? You shouldn’t have! Why, yes… yes… you should have! My Geeky heart thanks you!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments