24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds

That gives some interesting possibilities for computers in a few years -- one relatively expensive drive for code, another cheap drive for data, for example.<p>Probably 80% of your hard drive is stuff where the access speed is irrelevant -- movies, for example, since your capability to read from the disk far outstrips your eyes' capability to watch the movie. Photos, Office docs, email, ditto ditto ditto.<p>Then there are programs -- or even a subset of programs, really -- that actually have appreciable startup times. Office, Eclipse, etc, I'm looking at you.<p>You could put those programs on the "fast" disk (along with most of the OS, presumably) then make it as big as you pleased with cheap spinning platters. With a little bit of software trickery, you could present the two disks as one physical drive to the operating system (or to the end user) and shift data between them using some sort of caching policy (LRU, whatever).<p>It sounds like a sexy idea for servers too -- can't afford to keep the entire working set in RAM? No problem -- back up the RAM with solid state and only write to spinning magnetic media when you need long-term non-volatile storage.

Wow. Simply -- wow.<p>I was amazed at really seeing the HD bottleneck minimized this way. I always knew about it, but -- wow.

It's actually quite clever marketing on behalf of Samsung, and impressive to seek them using 'geek marketing' in this way.<p>However, given that a 64GB Samsung SSD drive goes for about $500, 24 of them (plus RAID card for that many) is still looking quit steep!

Reddit thread: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit_samsung_gave_me_24_new_ssd_drives_to/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit...</a><p>The IT guy from the video is a poster there, so there is some useful information if anyone is interested.

And then software will expand to make everything slow again.

It's funny how they never say how much RAM this computer has.<p>Vista has a feature called 'superfetch' which pre-caches applications in memory so they're never actually loaded from disk. Also, it's hard to tell, but if this computer has sufficient RAM, you could conceivable load everything directly from memory.<p>Also, the fragmentation test was a little dubious. A computer that new would have very little file fragmentation, so of course defragging would be fast.<p>That said, it was an entertaining video!

Although I understand the awesomeness of this video I don't get that a marketing company comes up with this video. The nerd community is already familiar with the potential of SSD's and their speed increase. I think that the consumer market should be steamed ready for the 'next-gen' in hard disks via a video that's not focused on RAID configs, 6 TBs, a benchmark of 2GB/s and stuff. Focus on things like homevideo editing or working office, photo apps, mediaplayer and stuff all at once.<p>More exposure, more familiarity with the hardware and advantages, more potential buyers.

Desktop performance with solid-state drives is less interesting to me than server performance -- specifically databases and other services where seek time is more important than throughput.<p>Has anyone done performance tests with MySQL on low-latency storage devices? As another commenter suggested for the desktop, strategies of using solid-state for latency bound activities and traditional disks for throughput intensive stuff might be an interesting hybrid to explore.

So, given that demo, does a single SSD perform substantially better enough on a normal laptop to warrant the expenditure yet? (Last I heard, standard advice was to wait until the price drops.)

This should work with USB thumbdrives too.<p>The ones I've tested are faster than a HDD (and faster than the SSD in a eee PC). They're also cheap.<p>Bottleneck would shift to USB bandwidth (60 MByte/s) and the PC itself.

<i>The complete system defrags in about 3 seconds. </i><p>This part impressed me most.