[LAU] OT: SSD disk prices have dropped?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:02:08 +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
>Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> writes:
>
>> On Wed, 14 Nov 2018 16:17:43 -1000, David W. Jones wrote:  
>>>The speed difference between that $50 spinning disk and an SSD is
>>>phenomenal.  
>>
>> It is and nobody should worry about "greatly reduced access speeds",
>> if the SSD has got no cache. With the SSDs I mentioned, I can turn on
>> the computer and use the display manager's greeter to log in after
>> around 2 seconds.  
>
>And your SSD does not have an internal cache?  Are you sure about that?

Hi,

via a link provided by https://ssd.toshiba-memory.com/en-amer/ssd/tr200:

" The SSD does not use a DRAM cache, instead it uses a chunk of its
NAND cells and invokes an SLC written cache to speed up the majority of
writes." -
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/toshiba-tr200-ssd-960gb-review,5.html

>> This is "reduced access speed" nearly nobody could notice, at least
>> not if you migrate from a HDD to such a SSD and neither for averaged
>> desktop work, nor for real-time audio work.  
>
>Real-time audio work does not mind disks braking transfer speeds to
>Flash speeds, including the pauses for wear management, internal
>allocation, block erasure?

HDDs do have internal management routines, too. Apart from a damaged
HDD, I never experienced a HDD, let alone a SSD, as a bottleneck when
doing real-time audio work. For everything I'm using HDDs and SSDs, I
either don't notice a different performance, since HDDs are already fast
enough, e.g. for real-time audio usage or SSDs are noticeable faster
than HDDs, e.g. when launching bloatware.

>I've been caught out flat a lot fantasizing about how I'd wanted to
>imagine computing to be.  I would recommend some restraint distributing
>advice on that base.

On what SSD experiences do you base your recommendation?

I dropped all HDDs for Linux real-time audio, since the SSDs are silent
and I'm using an iPAD for real-time audio. Those are my experiences
with SSDs. I'm not aware that any issue I experienced with a recent
Linux install or my iPad was caused by a SSD and would have not happened
when using a HDD. For backups I'm using external HDDs, since they are
less expensive and because I don't know how safe a SSD is, when used as
a backup drive.

I don't know if the OP does expect a scientific investigation. I
mentioned my experiences, named the used SSDs and provided information
such as "host writes".

Regards,
Ralf