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We get accustomed to things. Everyone knows that while using a computer, there are going to be times when you just sit and wait for the machine to become responsive. The main reason is due to one component of the system, the fundamentals of which haven’t changed much since the early 1950’s.

The computer industry serves us up multi-core CPU’s running at multiples of GigaHertz, fast RAM, fast I/O, blah, blah, blah – the idiot child in the group, however, is the hard disk drive. With apologies to all the thousands of developers working hard at optimizing the performance of HDD’s (I spent 19 years of my life at this, too), really, it’s lipstick on a pig compared to the Solid State Drive, a disruptive technology that has finally become real and within reach of most of us.

I can’t put it much better than Anand Lal Shimpi in this article:

A Personal Anecdote on SSDs

I’m writing this page of the article on the 15-inch MacBook Pro I reviewed a couple of months ago. I’ve kept the machine stock but I’ve used it quite a bit since that review thanks to its awesome battery life. Of course, by “stock” I mean that I have yet to install an SSD.

Using the notebook is honestly disappointing. I always think something is wrong with the machine when I go to fire up Adium, Safari, Mail and Pages all at the same time to get to work. The applications take what feels like an eternity to start. While they are all launching the individual apps are generally unresponsive, even if they’ve loaded completely and I’m waiting on others. It’s just an overall miserable experience by comparison.

It’s shocking to think that until last year, this is how all of my computer usage transpired. Everything took ages to launch and become useful, particularly the first time you boot up your PC. It was that more than anything else that drove me to put my PCs to sleep rather than shut them down. It was also the pain of starting applications from scratch and OS X’s ability to get in/out of sleep quickly that made me happier using OS X than XP and later Vista.

It’s particularly interesting when you think of the ramifications of this. It’s the poor random read/write performance of the hard disk that makes some aspects of PC usage so painful. It’s the multi-minute boot times that make users more frustrated with their PCs. While the hard disk helped the PC succeed, it’s the very device that’s killing the PC in today’s instant-on, consumer electronics driven world. I challenge OEMs to stop viewing SSDs as a luxury item and to bite the bullet. Absorb the cost, work with Intel and Indilinx vendors to lower prices, offer bundles, do whatever it takes but get these drives into your systems.

I don’t know how else to say this: it’s an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive. It’s the difference between a hang glider and the space shuttle; both will fly, it’s just that one takes you to space. And I don’t care that you can buy a super fast or high flying hang glider either.

This problem came to a head for me this year after acquiring a 12MP camera – JPEG aside, the files can be big. And now the friends I hang out and do stuff with are getting good, high-MP cameras, too. Throw in my “shoot hundreds, show tens” policy (“Really, Rick, show tens?”, “Yes, really, Smarty Pants, I show far fewer than I take“), and – well, there’s just a lot of big data files floating around.

I’m getting better at using tagging to organize pictures (I use Picasa; it’s free and it just works). Tagging makes the files searchable and therefore easy to find. The problem tagging creates is that in order to add a tag to a picture file, the file has to be opened in RAM,  the metadata found, the metadata modified, and the file closed. If the file is already in RAM, great – but if one is tagging a couple hundred pictures, they’re not going to be in RAM, they’re going to be (somewhat) randomly distributed on the HDD. So now, each file has to be found on the HDD, read into RAM, modified and rewritten to the HDD.

Choke.

The resource monitor on my laptop clearly shows where the problem is – the system is  waiting for disk I/O. On my particular laptop, with the stock HDD, I’ve observed maximum I/O rates of around 20MB/s. This is an HDD connected to a SATA II interface capable of 300MB/s. Yikes.

Enter the Solid State Drive. No moving parts, and the current maximum I/O rates are approaching 200 MB/s. Some fundamental problems with new vs used performance have been worked out (not on ALL SSD’s, buy carefully, look for TRIM support…) and the prices have become reasonable.

I follow MaximumPC’s Best of the Best and thus picked a Patriot Torqx for my laptop. I’m glad I did; just this week Intel issued a firmware upgrade to fix their SSD’s and bricked a bunch of them.

Long story shortened, the Torqx is now installed in my laptop with a fresh copy of Windows 7 Home Premium (apples to (maybe shinier)  apples, I was running Win 7 RC on the  HDD), and here are some numbers:

• Cold boot (power on) to Windows Logon Screen – 20 seconds. Unbelievable.
• Observed disk I/O rates while tagging with Picasa – 120 MB/s. That’s a 6x improvement!

Impressions – program installs are far faster, program launches are far faster, no disk drive whine, the laptop runs cooler, the whole experience is much better. I’m not ready to claim “hang glider vs space shuttle” like Anand, but it is a huge change for the better.

Highly recommended. YMMV.

~Rick