Need "Flow" SSD Benchmarks

[LTG]

I think we need more SSD benchmarks that measure time to execute real life tasks.

When starting and stopping tasks throughout the day, it's too easy to get your "flow" broken by waiting on IO.

These are things people do pretty frequently (at least some dev people) but there are no benchmarks on:

- How long to launch Visual Studio 2010 (sorry compiling is not SSD related)
- How long to refactor a class with Resharper 6
- How long to boot a VMWare image within VMWare Workstation (people run lots of VMs on the desktop!)

How long do these things take? How much time difference is there between a fast SSD and a "slow" SSD?

If there are small differences here it would help to know - not because we would save 5 minutes a day but because flow would be smoother.

 

[Nothinman]

I think we need more SSD benchmarks that measure time to execute real life tasks.

The problem with benchmarks is that it's virtually impossible to directly map them to real-life workloads. Especially when you're talking about desktop stuff because human interaction is so driven by perception instead of real performance.

- How long to launch Visual Studio 2010 (sorry compiling is not SSD related)

Compiling is most definitely SSD-related if you've got a large project with thousands of files that need touched. Hell I get a little bit of disk churn when I click deploy on a single report in SSRS for no reason that I can see. If I deployed all of the reports I have at once I could easily see it churning the disk for a minute or so before actually pushing them to the server.

If there are small differences here it would help to know - not because we would save 5 minutes a day but because flow would be smoother.

In general "flow" will always be smoother with lower latency drives. However, there's a lot of things other than the disk that affect latency. Network is a huge one with so much being in "the cloud" these days, so a DNS server taking too long to respond could make an app hang for a few seconds interrupting your "flow".

And on top of all of that, you've got the OS' disk cache to contend with. The first time you load a page from disk it's slow because of the I/O, but subsequent requests will be almost instantaneous because it's already in memory. AFAIK Windows doesn't have a way to force it to dump it's disk cache like Linux, so in order for your benchmarks to be accurate you would have to always run them after a fresh reboot and hope that SuperFetch doesn't beat you to it.

I'm not saying not to try to come up with a set of tests that closely gauge your daily tasks, but the tests will likely be specific to your tasks and your PC with however all of it's variables are set. That's why most major websites only do the standard throughput and latency tests, because those are universal and everyone knows what they mean to them.

 

[Eug]

Just a note that ALL of those "real-life" tasks listed would be completely irrelevant to me.

 

[DirkGently1]

Real world scenarios will always be greater than synthetic benchmarks, but difficult to reproduce consistently. Breaking out the stopwatch will show considerable gains when comparing HDD to SSD but less useful, and less evident when comparing different SSD to each other.

 

[biostud]

Anandtech uses light work load, heavy work load combo benchmarks to simulate "real life" usage.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4712/the-crucial-m4-ssd-update-faster-with-fw0009/4

 

[razel]

I think we need more SSD benchmarks that measure time to execute real life tasks.

How long do these things take? How much time difference is there between a fast SSD and a "slow" SSD?

If there are small differences here it would help to know - not because we would save 5 minutes a day but because flow would be smoother.

In a real-life work environment on your workstation, if you really wanted to improve flow you wouldn't be closing/re-launching your applications all day. On Vista/7, you won't be taking advantage of it's predictive cache which is so fantastic we don't even bother with SSDs here. We always whine to our bosses about loading up with RAM which is beyond cheap.

With all programmers and IT I work with, our frequently used apps stay open all day and our taskbars are always full. At the end of the day if we plan on Remote Desktop-ing from home we lock, otherwise our system sleeps using standby. The only time it gets rebooted is during the monthly updates which at times is every two months. And the performance of our apps during those times is stellar. My workstation is nothing special either, no SSD, not even Core i5, but it gets what I need done and not having an SSD it isn't killing my productivity or 'flow.'

It's a workstation, for work related apps. If you want to improve your 'flow', use Vista/7, load up on RAM, don't close your apps, and be a master of keyboard shortcuts.

 

[Nothinman]

In a real-life work environment on your workstation, if you really wanted to improve flow you wouldn't be closing/re-launching your applications all day. On Vista/7, you won't be taking advantage of it's predictive cache which is so fantastic we don't even bother with SSDs here. We always whine to our bosses about loading up with RAM which is beyond cheap.

With all programmers and IT I work with, our frequently used apps stay open all day and our taskbars are always full. At the end of the day if we plan on Remote Desktop-ing from home we lock, otherwise our system sleeps using standby. The only time it gets rebooted is during the monthly updates which at times is every two months. And the performance of our apps during those times is stellar. My workstation is nothing special either, no SSD, not even Core i5, but it gets what I need done and not having an SSD it isn't killing my productivity or 'flow.'

It's a workstation, for work related apps. If you want to improve your 'flow', use Vista/7, load up on RAM, don't close your apps, and be a master of keyboard shortcuts.

This.

 

[Belegost]

In a real-life work environment on your workstation, if you really wanted to improve flow you wouldn't be closing/re-launching your applications all day. On Vista/7, you won't be taking advantage of it's predictive cache which is so fantastic we don't even bother with SSDs here. We always whine to our bosses about loading up with RAM which is beyond cheap.

With all programmers and IT I work with, our frequently used apps stay open all day and our taskbars are always full. At the end of the day if we plan on Remote Desktop-ing from home we lock, otherwise our system sleeps using standby. The only time it gets rebooted is during the monthly updates which at times is every two months. And the performance of our apps during those times is stellar. My workstation is nothing special either, no SSD, not even Core i5, but it gets what I need done and not having an SSD it isn't killing my productivity or 'flow.'

It's a workstation, for work related apps. If you want to improve your 'flow', use Vista/7, load up on RAM, don't close your apps, and be a master of keyboard shortcuts.

Truth.