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Comment by Matt_Cutts | Hacker News Reader

I would absolutely recommend SSDs. It's one of the few times you can swap out a component in your computer and notice a performance boost. They are getting better very quickly though, so one big decision is when to pull the trigger. Every few months a new generation of SSDs with better firmware seems to come out. I've switched my laptop and home computer to SSDs.

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They're just another product on the Moore's Law trajectory. Treat them the same as you do computers and phones -- plan to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and plan on only having the latest and greatest for about 12 minutes after you get it.

Wrong. HD speed improvements have been pretty flat, and has been far outpaced by HD capacity which is closer to Moore's Law. SSD offers a nice boost in speed. Don't just throw around Moore's Law as if you know something.

I think you might have misread kbob’s comment. I think he was talking about upgrading from one SSD to another newer SSD — not from HDD to SSD.

It would be stunning for SSDs to take off with exponential speed improvements. Sure, I expect them to get faster and faster, but I have no doubt that there's no Moore's Law at work in this case. I stand by my original comment.

It has nothing to do with speed, it has to do with transistor counts, which should increase disk size or lower cost.

I totally agree. Moore's Law is completely inapplicable when it comes to disk performance.

Which is a strawman of your own invention that you are being an arse about, kbob didn't mention SSD performance.

kbob was replying to a post about a "performance boost" and then claimed without qualification that HDs were "on the Moore's Law trajectory"... I didn't invent anything here.

Moore's law is about transistor counts, not speed, and is directly applicable to SSDs.

It really depends. Taking a hard black&white stance on other side is just silly.

Say you have an SSD that consists of 8x16GB chips. Internally it's implemented in something like a RAID0 array, which is why they're so fast. If the capacity doubles / size shrinks by a factor of 2 and someone decides to stick 16x16GB chips in the next gen SSD then you will see a speed increase. On the other hand if they go for 8x32GB you won't.

Moore's Law, as originally stated, is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. Flash memory is definitely on that trajectory, and SSD controllers look like they can make good use of increased transistor counts for a few generations.

My comment was directed to Matt_Cutts' complaint that he didn't know when to buy an SSD. I don't think it matters exactly when you buy one. (Though I personally am waiting to see how Intel's 25nm SSDs compare to those based on the SandForce SF-2000 controller around Jan/Feb 2011. Maybe I should practice what I preach.)

I switched over to a SSD (from a 5400 rpm drive) in my new laptop and didn't notice much difference at all. Everything was instant before, and it's still instant now.

This may be because I have a lot of ram, because I mostly work with small files, or because I'm using Linux which seems to be more resistant to bad disk IO speeds.

However I do like the gain in battery life.

you never load a large program like gimp? The speed difference is huge when loading up gimp on a rpm drive vs ssd. It's also pretty big when doing something like a "select count(*)" over a huge un-indexed table.

Which SSDs can you recommend for your laptop and home computer?

Anandtech has the best reviews on SSDs I've seen. This is the latest article to benchmark current drives. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3812/the-ssd-diaries-crucials-...

My MBP has had a 160 GB Intel X25-M for almost a year and couldn't be happier.

Me either. This is the single best improvement I've made in the last 4 to 5 years. My MBP is awesome with this X25-M. I have adapted myself to use this little 160gb space very confortably using some external storage at home. This is great! I sure do recommend this to anyone!

I have an 80 gb intel x-25m in my 13 inch MBP but I also took out the superdrive and installed a 500gb live in an enclosure in the optical bay.

Yep, it is off when it isn't and use. It does affect battery a little bit but I have found it be negligible.

How does that affect heat and battery life? Does the second disk switch off when not in use?

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