Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives

Re:Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives by gohnjanotis on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @09:52AM (#881276)

The day I got my 15" MacBook Pro it was obvious the hard drive is what was limiting the performance. I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks since I have it maxed out at 4GB.

For example, intense BitTorrent downloading (and uploading) on a RAM disk frees my hard disk from the constant reads and writes so I can have high speed downloads (and verification of d/led data) and still do disk intensive activities in other applications.

I can't wait for the day where my mass storage can have that kind of speed! (and it looks like it's closer than ever now)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives by blasdel on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @02:07PM (#881803)

Don't use RAM disks -- it's not 1987, you have a grownup operating system with VM and everything.

As long as you have atimes disabled, the only thing RAM disks will speed up is writes -- recent FS operations are cached in memory automatically (and never paged to disk), so reading a 'warm' file doesn't hit the disk at all.

If you really need such a thing, tmpfs is vastly superior -- it operates directly at the VM page level, instead of idiotically mallocing a ton of address space up front (though I don't think anything like it is available for OS X).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives by gruseom on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @11:08AM (#881430)

I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks

Can you go into a bit of detail? How do you do that?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Coding Horror: The State of Solid State Hard Drives by trin_ on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @11:29AM (#881482)

you can mount portions of your ram and use them, but you should be aware that the files need to be put back on a disk before you turn the machine of ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]