Then I looked at the numbers, hehe.

Past 16MB the HDD has the lead in write speeds, is that because of a larger cache? Does it matter? Rendered irrelevant through the huge difference in latency? 

SSDs traditionally lose in raw sequential write throughput, but dominate in read speed and minimal latency (we're talking a difference of 7-8ms to 0.1ms). There are SSDs that have excellent writes as well, for example the Intel X-25E and a few others that push above 190mb/s writes, but these are enterprise grade drives where a 80gb disk will cost you over 650-800 euro. 

The numbers you were looking at are not MBs, they are KBs. The test reads and writes 256mb files in blocks of 0.5, 0.1, 2, 4, 16, etc. 

If you put your OS and favorite games on the SSD, then you would mostly be reading that data, not writing it. 

No matter how smart and cunning you are when implementing your bulletproof storage solution, you are a complete retard if you expect "reasonable" performance from a disk controller card attached to a 66 Mhz PCI 32bit bus.

Individual disks on the controller: 75mb/s reads and writes
2 disks on the same controller in a mirror: 48mb/s reads and 28mb/s writes. 

http://jago.pp.fi/images/linux-menu.png

This is how you make a nonshit Linux GUI. 

this is if you want to start digging: http://jago.pp.fi/images/terminal.png 

100 euro gets you this: http://jago.pp.fi/temp/intel40gbssd.png
Intel 40gb 2nd gen SSD, perfect for a budget performance system, great read speed, awesome 0.1ms seek time, but pretty low write speed.

200 euro gets you this: http://jago.pp.fi/temp/SSD-LOL.jpg
Intel 80gb 2nd gen SSD, the true overall best consumer SSD, double the cost not only gets you double the space, but also noticably higher read and write speeds 

how could you consider that mainstream? 40gb is just barely enough for your os, and maybe a few content creation applications and a single game. 

Super Self Destruct 

That's what it's ment for, not for storing 1080p movies. 

You can get 6 times more storage capacity for quarter of the price compared to the Intel drive. Hardly mainstream yet. I could see them as supplemental drives, though, at the moment.

Even budget laptops these days come with 320GB. 

The general thought among the engine team here is that SSD will be common place in ~2 years. By then they'll have the kinks worked out, they'll be a decent size and the price won't require a bank loan to get a good one. 

You are missing the point and are comparing apples and oranges.

Traditional SATA mechanical disks, which do ~110-115mb/s reads with 8-10ms seek time are not exactly in the same category as SSDs with 0.1ms seeks and 200+ mb/s reads. Neither are laptop drives that are even slower. 

...if you are using an SSD as your only drive, and filling it up with rips of The Wire, you are a giant failure of a man.

These are crazy awesome value now, I bought a Raptor about 6 years ago for the same reasons, and it was ace. 

The cost of RAM per density is and has been dropping on a curve similar to Moore's Law. For the near future I'd see a co-existence of both systems, cheap terabytes are nice. 

This is the weirdest thing. Pandora and Windows Vista can make sounds just fine, but iTunes, MediaMonkey and Quake are silent. This is on my Macbook Pro.

Any ideas? I've never seen anything like this before... 

Is Quake running under Windows or Mac OS X? 

Windows Vista. I also don't have sound in games like Peggle Nights. It's absolutely bizarre. 

Actually, never mind. I uninstalled the audio driver I had in here and put in the default Boot Camp driver. All is fine again. I love Windows! 

 

Yeah, fooling around on PC for awhile. I wanted to do some WPF coding/learning, so while I'm here ... :) 

yeah, you probably know this by now, but always always use boot camp drivers. :) 

I normally wouldn't deviate but I was really trying to get UnrealEngine3 running here so I could work at home and I installed some other drivers. I have been properly flogged and will stick to the script from now on. 

Let's preface this with a bit of history. I've been an NVIDIA user since Geforce 256 and a pretty happy one at that. I've never ever had any signifiant driver issues with NVIDIA products, so I sticked to it, especially considering I've been hearing of and reading about multitudes of compatibility, stability and general driver issues on the ATI front over the years. The one time I had decided to make an exception was (I think) about 4-5 years ago where I had recommended a specific ATI card to a friend after having seen it receive a few good reviews. Except that we could never get it to work: the system would power up, give video, boot, etc, but not a single ATI driver package would recognise the card so we were stuck with the generiv video driver. After several days of battling with installations and reinstallations, we said fuck it, took the ATI card back to the store, brought an NVIDIA card with us and it "just worked". Needless to say, that had only reinforced my idea that I should just stick with NVIDIA.

Fast forward to today and NVIDIA Fermi GTX470 and GTX480 cards launched and they're a huge load of poo poo in regards to it's power draw and temperatures and full load operating noise levels. I've been holding up upgrading my videocard for a long time now: I am still using a 8800GTS, all the rest is modern (i5 750, X25-M os drive, 650W PSU, etc) as I have been holding out to see what Fermi ends up being like. Now I am at a crossroads. I had been considering going from 8800GTS to the GTX470, but when you compare it to the ATI 5850, it becomes a really really hard sell: the slight improvement in performance is directly offset by the slightly higher price, the power draw at load is 120W (!!!) higher, the load temperatures are 15C higher and the accompanying increased noise levels are obvious. The second major issue are the reports that Fermi cards do not really truly idle if you have 2 monitors attached to the card (which I always do), see this: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/15/ resulting in absurdly high power draw and temperatures even at the desktop. All in all, this all sounds like some serious package of black humor.

So I am very tempted to bite the bullet and just get an ATI card, the 5850 sounds like very good value, BUT... browsing around dozens of forums I am still seeing that on average, ATI users seem to have a lot more compatibility, stability and driver issues than NVIDIA and I am still having shudders remembering that time I had to troubleshoot that ATI card I had recommended to my friend years ago. There are supposedly some flicker issues with some ATI cards, some issues with Bad Company 2 rendering glitches, etc etc all really stupid sounding things that should've been ironed out in a quick fashion a long time ago, but yet people still seem to have to deal with these things.

What's a man to do? Should I just suck it up and go for the 5850 and potentially deal with annoying retarded driver issues on a common basis, but sleep soundly knowing I got myself good performance for low cost with reasonable power draw and temperatures or do I value my sanity and driver stability and reliability more and just go with the GTX470, despite it's very obvious shortcomings?