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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

> .. There was a brief moment in the early 2000s where the newly introduced SSDs made booting quick ..

Anyone else reading this and getting the feeling someone is reminiscing about a past they didn't live and thus are seeing it through rose-colored glasses because it didn't exist?

In the early 2000s, SSDs had an obscene price tag of ~$1000 per gigabyte, so even an 8GB drive would cost you about $8000. There was nothing for the tech industry to ruin because only 0.01% of people owned a setup with an SSD. And neither Linux, NT or Mach were optimized for them. Hell, to this day Linux' VM system is by default still tuned for swap and slow HDDs (swappiness 60 and all that) because no one has bothered to update the defaults.

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They probably meant 2010s.

I remember this was the time when Google started pushing the Chromebook idea and highlighting how it could boot in "just a few seconds". One of the earliest models I got as a dogfooding device probably needed 20 seconds to boot or so. Nice, compared to the awful boot times of machines with HDDs... but not stellar.

But then, in 2011, my wife bought a MacBook Air with an SSD and I was blown away. That thing booted to a full desktop (and not the joke that ChromeOS was) in... 5, 6 seconds? It was ridiculous.

And we have lost all of those gains. I find it painful to witness how a recent Mac chews through I/O during boot or doing any sort of software update (iStat Menus is great to watch this sort of thing), and how these feel slower to that early experience of 15 years ago :-/

I distinctly remember buying my first SSD laptop in 2012 and being amazed at the boot time. At the time, I didn't realize it was because of the SSD, I just thought, "wow, the devs have made some fantastic optimizations in boot time!"

I wrote a batch script that that opened the entire Creative Suite in parallel and couldn't believe how much faster it was than just launching just Flash would have been on the old drive.

It was also around the time of the early netbooks, when the premise was a lean laptop and you'd do tasks that'd usually be done with relatively demanding local clients by the browser, as google and others were improving their online app offerings. They'd be using things like SATA/IDE to compact flash adapters to keep power down and responsiveness up, they were an ideal candidate for early SSDs as they didn't need a lot of capacity to run a linux + lightweight DE. Then they became just cheap laptops running full windows.

Or they meant 2010s?

Yes. That's closer to the time mortals started to be able to afford SATA SSD's.

Though there were some disk-on-chip things before, but they were sized in megabytes. I think I might still have a PATA one somewhere. (And you could boot various memory sticks and cards for an even slower experience.)

When I swapped my disk in my mac for a SSD for the first time... It was insanely faster. Booted in 5-6 seconds. Apps like photoshop opened up cold in 2 seconds. So no, I think it was a huge leap.

I think no matter what the advance in tech is, it will get enshittified to tolerated "computer is working" slowness within months of said upgrade.

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