Ultrasonic SSD?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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xen
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Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Mon Jul 25, 2016 2:49 pm

Can anyone comment on whether there could potentially ever be any issues with ultrasound coming from SSDs?

Has anyone ever measured ultrasound (particularly perhaps in the range of 20.000 Hz +, or even 30K+.?.

The sort of sound that would perhaps not travel further than a meter or 2 before dying out.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Smanci » Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:31 am

Can anyone comment on whether there could potentially ever be any issues with ultrasound coming from SSDs?
As likely as with any PC component.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:19 am

Well the question was more whether that would be systemic as that has always been my impression that that would be the case and ..... actually it has been one of the reasons I have stayed away from the 2.5" and 1.8" SSDs (I have less issues with smaller sizes).

A fellow weird person once told me that such a thing would be very likely, he said, because of the fast switching inside the electronics. I just never heard of anyone actually seriously considering that and putting it to the test, causing my suspicions to remain vague assumtions ;-).

In fact the only reference I have ever found was that of using ultrasound to improve the storage density of SSDs ;-).

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:26 am

What's with the rage against SSDs xen? ;)

I thought mine made a sound, but it turned out it was the motherboard, while reading/writhing to the SSD. No ultrasound though as far as I know, just "normal" noise that electronics make. A sound we all can enjoy now when or systems can be made solid state. :)

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:36 am

It's just one of these many things that I think in general makes things worse instead of better ;-).

I have never met a single person who did not become extremely defensive when I mentioned anything bad about SSDs.

They all start attacking you. That should clarify how downtrodden stupid the attitudes are, if no one can even take a single bad thing about it without becoming upset with you ;-).

You are the first person who manages a smile ;-D.

I mean they all go into convince mode where they feel it is of the utmost vital importance to convince me otherwise (of my opinion and statement) and become extremely obnoxious in doing so.

That is to me proof that the attitudes and reasons for it are incorrect and wrong.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:09 am

I think they are great. I was an early adopter and got a very expensive 16GB Mobi SSD early on. I never regretted that purchase. Before that I was very much hunting for the optimal OS HDD. Short stroking, the 10K RPM Raptor, trying to shave down the microseconds in seek time that made such a huge difference regarding how responsive my desktop system feels on a day to day basis. Then came the SSD. A revolution, or a blissful ceasing of revolutions. :) They were small, low power and lightning fast.
I find it ironic that we now are shrinking them down to a point where heat becomes an issue again. That's a bit sad.

The optimal solution for me is solid state storage on every device, lots of HDDs in the server.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:17 am

Also it gives rise to the general obnoxiousness people have in the tech internet:
  • Why don't you just use an SSD?
  • Why don't you just use an SSHD instead of getting a separate SSD?
If anyone starts doing that they feel bad about their choice and now want you to do the same so they won't feel bad about it anymore because another is verifying their choice. But that also means that anyone not making the same choice constantly has to be attacked. (Think Christian crusades ;-)).

So personally I just see freedom being taken away from me. Meanwhile they are all in denial about the many issues SSDs have had (or still have) and consider it perfectly okay if some people reported having to send back 8 out of a batch of 10 as failing within a month. They all go "Oh, that was back then, the issues are sorted now" and whenever something new is revealed, that same is repeated ad infinitum. That spells DENIAL like no other thing.
  • Why don't you just use an SSD as your main drive and be done with it?
That's another one when you say you are researching SSD as caching drives and having issues with it.

Meanwhile just like BTRFS on Linux (if it ever was successful) it erodes the support for older technologies and unless I am mistaken I have seen the price of HDDs in recent years (since 2011) gone UP.

Could be mistaken though. So when a flawed model of OS use that hinders people and hinders flexibility in arriving at the proper solutions (just like Windows 8 and 10 are really stuff that doesn't much help you, all of the friendly "help" you get from Microsoft is usually completely unwanted and sits in the way of what you actually want to do (drawing your attention with nonsensical moving tiles and all that) I feel the push to use SSDs as main storage devices not only makes computing less accessible it also closes off doors for those unwilling to push them open to stuff that was previously possible, but today isn't.

Basically, I see my livelihood being threatened here (as a system's designer ;-)).

Every time people choose a bad solution I cringe because the goals I have in mind (in the end, perhaps) are threatened by people investing in mediocre solutions that they then cannot step out of anymore. The same happens a lot in Linux where most developments are completely detrimental to the freedom of the user (think the SystemD debacle) and they cause newer high-level technologies to be deployed all across the board that are deeply flawed from a design perspective but once those technologies are in place and everything gets changed to make use of them, you end up with a terrible terrible system in terms of both the ability to get away from it again, and the overall power and usability and potential for user-friendliness (for instance) are basically, the sanity of the platform.

For instance in Linux everything now uses or is being migrated to use "DBus". DBus (dbus) is a messaging system between applications. It is very hard to use as a user and is rather unfriendly. It is only meant for applications and you *can* inspect it but it is not like it is obvious. Now these days many systems run NetworkManager (which is flawed by itself) and DNSmasq (dnsmasq) as a way to collect name server sources (DNS servers) from wherever you are getting them (such as DHCP, VPN). However DNSmasq has been retrofitted to use DBus. Consequently server information is only stored in the memory of the process and needs to be queried with DBus (I think).

The end result is that /etc/resolv.conf, which always used to hold the currently available DNS servers, now simply points to the dnsmasq process (localhost) and there is no information in there whatsoever. So which are the current DNS servers? We can't know. But if we add something to /etc/resolv.conf, it gets overwritten. So the configuration is now stored in something that is not user accessible. And in fact, we have to perform "nmcli dev show | grep DNS" in order to obtain it. Through NetworkManager. That wants to be the all and everything for itself.

(I was writing this before you responded).

That Linux thing is just an example of bad systems incurring other bad systems and in the end everyone is using bad systems that are just to its core not very user friendly and can never be because of how they were designed. The issue with technology is that it doens't hinder you much when it is still minimal and low-level. The higher level it becomes and the more it gears towards a skewed design principle, the more it is going to determine the entire overall system. Unix had a design principle of small components. These days that idea is completely lost from Linux. It is no longer small components, it is behemots driven by Red Hat.

If you let go of sanity you will end up with an insane system that will in the end destroy you.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:20 am

Vicotnik wrote:I think they are great. I was an early adopter and got a very expensive 16GB Mobi SSD early on. I never regretted that purchase. Before that I was very much hunting for the optimal OS HDD. Short stroking, the 10K RPM Raptor, trying to shave down the microseconds in seek time that made such a huge difference regarding how responsive my desktop system feels on a day to day basis. Then came the SSD. A revolution, or a blissful ceasing of revolutions. :) They were small, low power and lightning fast.
I find it ironic that we now are shrinking them down to a point where heat becomes an issue again. That's a bit sad.

The optimal solution for me is solid state storage on every device, lots of HDDs in the server.
Well you know that is very odd because I thought my systems were always very responsive and I never had anything faster than a Samsung SpinPoint F1 at 7200.

But in recent years that feeling has gone down.

I mean, I guess you did was in the deep minority doing that thing? System slowness is still absolutely not an issue for me for the most part. And you cannot do video editing on a server. You would preferably also not do software development on a server. I mean compiling tasks and all that. Forcing SDDs to be the main OS drive forces them to be bigger as well.

How big are your SSDs these days?

(Oh right, 240GB and 120GB for main computers :P). 240GB is not that big for a hard drive in itself. But games (some of them) easily require 40GB each. If I installed WoW, D3 and GW2 I would probably already be at 80GB, not sure, or more.

So now you have to take account of the fact that you have very limited storage space. Previously, you didn't need to, but now it is basically an element of design. Space constraints are now designed into it.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Smanci » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:31 am

xen wrote:Well the question was more whether that would be systemic as that has always been my impression that that would be the case and ..... actually it has been one of the reasons I have stayed away from the 2.5" and 1.8" SSDs (I have less issues with smaller sizes).

A fellow weird person once told me that such a thing would be very likely, he said, because of the fast switching inside the electronics. I just never heard of anyone actually seriously considering that and putting it to the test, causing my suspicions to remain vague assumtions ;-).

In fact the only reference I have ever found was that of using ultrasound to improve the storage density of SSDs ;-).
Almost every piece of electonics is prone to that. Switching frequencies in digital motherboard VRMs is several hundreds of kHz. Some power supplies and converters, couple of tens of kHz.
Basically you shouldn't be using any electronic devices if that's an issue :)

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Tzeb » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:34 am

xen wrote:How big are your SSDs these days?
A few days ago i bought a brand new 850 evo - 500GB for 100 euros.

Made two partitions: 80GB for win, the rest for games.

It's good that these toys are bigger every year and the price/GB is going down all the time.

Fighting ssds is a waste of time. No sane person should use an "old style" hdd for the os today, as the slowness is cringe worthy. You have no excuse, as you can get ~120GB ssds for 30-40$.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:39 am

xen wrote:Well you know that is very odd because I thought my systems were always very responsive and I never had anything faster than a Samsung SpinPoint F1 at 7200.

But in recent years that feeling has gone down.

I mean, I guess you did was in the deep minority doing that thing? System slowness is still absolutely not an issue for me for the most part. And you cannot do video editing on a server. You would preferably also not do software development on a server. I mean compiling tasks and all that. Forcing SDDs to be the main OS drive forces them to be bigger as well.

How big are your SSDs these days?

(Oh right, 240GB and 120GB for main computers :P). 240GB is not that big for a hard drive in itself. But games (some of them) easily require 40GB each. If I installed WoW, D3 and GW2 I would probably already be at 80GB, not sure, or more.

So now you have to take account of the fact that you have very limited storage space. Previously, you didn't need to, but now it is basically an element of design. Space constraints are now designed into it.
I was actually dual booting two OS on that 16GB SSD, so I can keep it small. :) I'm also a huge fan of RAM disks. They are even faster than SSDs don't you know.

With responsiveness I mean for example the time it takes for applications to start (but I consider boot time almost irrelevant). The way I use my systems, and again this is day to day I'm talking about not specific tasks, the reduced latency in the I/O really helps.

I can stick a 3.5" HDD in a system if I need to. I keep a Scythe Quiet Drive just in case. But by the time I get around to video editing I'm guessing the 1TB+ SSDs will be reasonable priced. :p

But I do get your frustration. My job is not in tech. I would react as you do I think if I was.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:22 am

Smanci wrote:Almost every piece of electonics is prone to that. Switching frequencies in digital motherboard VRMs is several hundreds of kHz. Some power supplies and converters, couple of tens of kHz.
Basically you shouldn't be using any electronic devices if that's an issue :)
That just treats everything as equivalent. That's like saying spending 10 minutes in the sun is equivalent to 3 hours, because whatever you do, outside there will be sun.

So that's no argument at all, it just tries to undo arguments by saying everything is equivalent, when the inquiry was about whether this is actually so (you can only make that statement when the inquiry has been answered, in absence of any answer, you cannot know these things).

Basically, you cannot use the argument of not knowing it, to say that people should not inquire into knowing it, as if you did know it, which wasn't so, or you would have provided a straight answer ;-).

Thanks for responding though :) ;-).

So the inquiry still stands and hasn't been answered yet apart from a very generic answer about basically all electronics. But the question pertained to the specificness of this one. Including, of course, its amplitude, frequency, patterns, and all of that, if that ever became important in that sense while trying to figure out if there was anything interesting going on there.
Tzeb wrote:Fighting ssds is a waste of time. No sane person should use an "old style" hdd for the os today, as the slowness is cringe worthy. You have no excuse, as you can get ~120GB ssds for 30-40$.
There is actually no excuse for using them, at least the way they were used before (and still). The slowness is only a result (really, I am pretty sure it is going to be a direct result) of systems designing for SSD, so they are trying to solve a problem that didn't exist before they were introduced, catch my drift? If everyone uses SSDs and then designers become lazy or let your system do stupid shit it doesn't need to (I have no clue what Windows 8 and 10 are constantly doing all the time for useless activity) THEN not using SSD is going to be cringe-worthy DUH.

But that's like putting the wagon in front of the horses. It is a bit the same as a run on the bank. People say the bank is going to crash, hence everyone does a run for the money, and as a consequence the bank crashes. Same thing.

Same with Audio CDs. People were all hyping that Audio CDs were going to go extinct, so they started selling their CDs and stopped buying them even though maybe they still wanted to. As a consequence, Audio CDs went extinct and they realized their self-fullfilling promise.

Their self-fullfilling prophecy.

So you are really being quite stupid by ensuring that SDDs have become an absolute necessity when before they weren't, but as a result typically your cost of computing has gone up and the advance in system responsiveness is really irrelevant (at least to me) compared to what it used to be before.

TODAY it is not longer irrelevant but that is the self-fullfilling prophecy I was talking about. You ensured that you could no longer live without the SSD by allowing software designers to not care anymore about their performance.

A modern system with 8GB of RAM may have 4GB in disk buffers at any one time. That means that unless you are doing writing (and you cannot tune the thing) there will be 4GB of disk in your memory. That means that anything that was recently acccessed is going to be in there.

Even this should be unnecessary for a good performing system.

Linus once said "If you require 1.6GB of buffers because you are compiling and then deleting the entire kernel source tree and you want this to be blazing fast because you don't want to commit any of that to disk, you have issues". He said that 100MB would be sufficient (talking about dirty buffers, e.g. write cache). For any 16GB system.

That also means that if you hard-limited the dirty cache to 100MB, you would have those 3.9GB so to speak available as read buffers.

So basically you say "resistence is futile" but that is only ever uttered about something that is getting recognised as detrimental.

And I am not intending to fight them, in fact of course I want to use them as caching drives in a better setup than what I have today. I just don't want the big ones in my system for health reasons ostensibly. I have a very small one but it sucks (Transcend may not be the best brand).

But also because I do not take the "easy route" as I am a system's designer myself and want to work towards the good solution and not stick and be content with a mediocre one. You can only serve one master. If you invest in the bad systems, you will no longer have the impetus and desire to invest in the good ones.

(You saw the amount of research I do in RAID systems in the other thread, I really believe in a certain concept. There is a design concept I believe in and I feel it could have life). So I am not just doing this as a reactionary thing. This is as much a creative thing for me: SSDs as main OS disk do not fit with my creation.

They just don't agree with the concept I have. They do not agree with the design. They render the operation of the machine impossible, in the sense of the larger system I would be devising and all the tools around it.

I just ordered a WD Scorpio Black 750GB I must say. I need this 1TB disk for a RAID 10 system :P. So I will take the opportunity to upgrade this "motherboard" to Windows 10 at the same time (only 3 days left). I still wonder what RAID card to buy, if any.

On this 5400 system, Chromium (Chrome-based webbrowser) takes about 5 seconds to start up completely.

That is more than I want but then I do not have the solution I want either (a cache disk) because Linux started being a complete idiot about it. The kernel just couldn't handle it. I don't know why. I have to ask them.

So I am not saying everyone should stay with slow HDDs and maybe the introduction of SSDs as system oses is just the logical evolution (you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis).

But if the goal is synthesis then the goal is cached drives, the goal is not to stay stuck in the antithesis.

The design imperative is the combine the technology, not to throw one out for the other and then only combine them at the network level or something like that.

But as a solution designer myself (kuch kuch) I have a bit of a longer breath in dealing with these issues than most, perhaps. For me using a computer is not "hope it works, fine, done with it, can play games now".

I spent countless hours getting this to work (in Linux, currently) and testing and debating the LVM cache system, for instance.

My work then also leads to other interests such as designing hidden partitions for Linux (that doesn't exist in it) which uses the same technology (the device mapper). "There is no excuse" is like saying "Please stop doing all that development work, we don't need it, no one needs it". Even though e.g. commercial NAS providers use those kinds of systems.

Which I also want to work or develop for, in a sense.

So "there is no excuse" clearly doesn't grasp "who you're dealing with" in that sense ;-). Maybe my goals just extend much farther, I have a lot of patience with this, and I have much bigger issues currently than slow startup times.

Starting Chromium a second time also takes 5 seconds even though it is supposed to come from the in-memory cache.

This basically means that for this system, (there is no hard disk activity at all) the disk is not even an issue here.

Starting Firefox (coming from disk now) takes about 7 seconds. Starting it a second time takes about 3 seconds. 3-4 really. So my first time start latency only gets doubled compared to the second time. 3 seconds for a first browser start is completely acceptable for me considering the slowness of the overall system.

Relatively speaking, a 100% overhead in having to read it from disk is not bad.

That would e.g. be the equivalent of 2s -> 4s on a faster system.

Microsoft did an excellent job in redesigning the startup sequence of its most important Windows 10 apps. They now start in stages and give you the experience that it loads very fast because constantly and at a constant pace you get to see new elements load. It is a rather pleasant experience I must say. Even when it still takes 5-6 seconds, it feels very very fast. (Firefox takes longer to start on Linux than on Windows because Mozzila cannot use certain optimizations that they can use on Windows). (In general Linux is slower anyway).

So maybe, I don't know, maybe it is just illusionary, but the cringeworthiness of some piece of software also depends on how stupid the designers are in how their application loads. If there are going to be user interface inconsistences you are going to be annoyed. If you don't know what's happening, you are going to be annoyed. If nothing visible responds (all the while it is doing something) you are going to be annoyed.

You want to know what is going on; as long as you do, having to wait is not all that bad (because it can be pleasurable).

Having to wait while nothing visible happens is really the worst thing.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:28 am

Just saying.

If you ever now suggest in Linux that application load times are slow, all of them are just going to say "Just use a fucking SSD".

Meaning, all objections and criticisms of any application loading slow are now void.

Some software reads the disk 20 times for no reason while clearing the read cache? VOID because your SSD should be able to handle it (well, slightly exaggerating here, there should never be a reason to dump the read cache, just an example).

Inefficiency in software design is going to be considered void as a reason to complain, object, or even want to improve (unless you don't bug anyone with it and do the work in silence as their obedient slave) when it comes to harddisk access because the SSD should be able to handle it.

Which clearly demonstrates why in that climate, HDDs are suddenly no longer going to be viable anymore. Not becaues of their inherent design or speed. But because of bigots who feel they know the solution everyone should use and who are going to spend the rest of their time on the planet attacking people who don't agree with it.

In other words "Our way or the highway". Not technological limitation. Just obnoxiousness and arrogance.

Just laziness really. "Why don't you do it well?" "It's not needed, your SSD will handle it".

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:47 am

If we forget about SSDs and HDDs for a moment and instead look at the tech behind them. Surely you can agree that solid state has some appeal over the mechanical movements of parts? No matter how much you develop the latter it could never beat the responsiveness of the former.

Starting firefox takes about a second on my system (Linux Mint XFCE), but it's kind of heavy. I normally don't get that sense of delay. Most of the applications I use seem to start instantly. Not all of course, Calibre takes four seconds, but then the book collection is on the server. Don't want to waste that precious SSD space.

I don't feel any difference between Windows and Linux in this regard btw, I think it has more to do on how one uses the computer. Windows uses crap like Superfetch to make the HDD less sluggish. It works almost constantly in exchange for perhaps better responsiveness. I always disable that one.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:52 am

[responding to the last guy still, not you].

So this is why I feel there is no excuse for using SSDs because you are ruining the ecosystem for an irrelevant speed boost that soon (as it already happened) will no longer be irrelevent due to your own choices as you have made your bank run and now the bank (HDDs) has falling flat on its face.

Spending so much money on something so unimportant (certainly in the beginning) is clearly hype and greed and like most hypes it creates what it set out to abolish.

It set out to abolish long load times. And it has created longer load times for software (it's just that you don't notice it anymore, but the software has become less efficient and more bloaty).

So your goal was efficiency and effectiveness, and practically speaking from a software design perspective, you have achieved the reverse.

Because you focussed on the wrong component in that sense. And you now give OS creators a license to do all kinds of nasty shit in the background too because it won't impact performance anyway; or people won't notice. When using system resources becomes irrelevant, something is wrong.

And as a designer this is just terrible. Seeing a lack of caring all around. (People still aggressively try to optimize but seeing how terrible SystemD is and that most systems with SSD today boot in 5 seconds to the desktop, (I guess) I assume you will not garner a lot of sympathy in the end for being a HDD user -- people are even attacking you for using SSDs as cache, according to them there is only "one way to kill a cat".

(A cache allows you to automatically improve startup time across a much larger volume of disk, allowing for many different ways of combining volumes and spreading them out and concatenating them or striping them or whatever). I can have a 1TB volume and a 100GB cache and set my cache policy such that promotion is slow such that performance boost across the volume becomes very long-lived and resilient to change. Then the same cache will adapt to changing usage patterns over time and I will have a meaningful performance boost across a 1TB volume for a total price of not more than €100 or less (depending on what you do).

And it would scale equally well to a 2TB or 6TB volume.

I don't know where you can get a 850 EVO for € 100 but typically prices are around € 160 for 500 GB so that is a bit misconstrued here. The relative difference between a 500GB disk for € 160 and a regular 3.5" WD Blue coming in at €50 for 1TB is still a factor 6.

You point to 128GB disks. But you yourself buy 500GB. How on earth can you assume that what is not suitable for you is going to be suitable for another? If you are not content with 128, why would anyone else? So that is really rather disingenuous. You would need to name the 500GB one as the real price of the thing.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Tzeb » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:54 am

xen wrote: Just laziness really. "Why don't you do it well?" "It's not needed, your SSD will handle it".
I can live with that. The time someone would "waste" on optimizations for hdds could be spent on other features etc. Just because a ssd costs peanuts today.

I remember late 2012, when i got a 60GB vertex3 for ~100 euros. The same $ got me a 500GB samsung today. So a 4TB ssd should be 100$ by ~2020.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:00 am

Vicotnik wrote:I was actually dual booting two OS on that 16GB SSD, so I can keep it small. :) I'm also a huge fan of RAM disks. They are even faster than SSDs don't you know.
Sure you can. I was saying now you have to. It is a sacrifice you make for getting something else. I would not much like that (I have done it myself on a 50GB VPS, that "saving space thing" but it is not the most convenient or fun thing in the world. It is a sacrifice).

You are sacrificing one thing for something else and lessening your overall experience because of it. I don't like to sacrifice anything really.

You may feel this sacrifice is acceptable for the gains you get from it, but it is still not a nice feeling. I don't like it. I'm sure you don't either (but you are just too happy with the gains to notice ;-)).
With responsiveness I mean for example the time it takes for applications to start (but I consider boot time almost irrelevant). The way I use my systems, and again this is day to day I'm talking about not specific tasks, the reduced latency in the I/O really helps.
Sure, what can I argue with that. It would help me too. But other things would help a lot more and they wouldn't be 160 euro for a new harddisk that wouldn't be big enough.

I am just saying that apparently you have money to waste. I don't really, at least not anymore, and never have.

I am also not one of those people buying nVidia 970s, just saying. Or even worse, 980s, etc.

I don't have that money to spend on stuff that is nonsensical to me. This is a 1st world problem really, like 4K television and 3D cinema. I have experienced 3D cinema. I do not understand the hype, it did not change my experience of the movie whatsoever.

It gave pains to my eyes until I was used to it and then after I did not have a different experience than what I have had before watching the same kinds of movies.

First world problems really. Shaving 1 second off of a load time of an application.
But I do get your frustration. My job is not in tech. I would react as you do I think if I was.
Well, thanks. Not all tech people do though. But then I consider much of the open source world to be desperately ill.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Tzeb » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:03 am

xen wrote: I don't know where you can get a 850 EVO for € 100 but typically prices are around € 160 for 500 GB so that is a bit misconstrued here. The relative difference between a 500GB disk for € 160 and a regular 3.5" WD Blue coming in at €50 for 1TB is still a factor 6.

You point to 128GB disks. But you yourself buy 500GB. How on earth can you assume that what is not suitable for you is going to be suitable for another? If you are not content with 128, why would anyone else? So that is really rather disingenuous. You would need to name the 500GB one as the real price of the thing.
I got my 850 evo form someone on our "local ebay" (.ro). Yes, they are over 100 euros in stores, but if you look around you always find stuff a bit cheaper.

I was using for a few years one 128GB 840 pro just for the os. I saw this 850 evo at 100 euros and i got it not becuase i was not content with 128, but mostly because of the price. And i thought i could move a few games to the non-os partition.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:11 am

Tzeb wrote:
xen wrote: Just laziness really. "Why don't you do it well?" "It's not needed, your SSD will handle it".
I can live with that. The time someone would "waste" on optimizations for hdds could be spent on other features etc. Just because a ssd costs peanuts today.

I remember late 2012, when i got a 60GB vertex3 for ~100 euros. The same $ got me a 500GB samsung today. So a 4TB ssd should be 100$ by ~2020.
Not me. Software efficiency is a function of architecture. Those optimizations are usually not optimizations "run after the fact" but they are often core design principles, or design features. If you start backing down on your requirement to design an elegent system, you are going to suffer in everything else as well. And your "uncaring" in one area is going to affect another area and you become overall less attentive to detail or less insistent on good principles.

As some spirituality states "You cannot get there unless everyone gets there". So this "wasted time" you mention is not really time wasted on "optimizations" after the fact. It is time not being spent on designing the architecture. It reduces the time people are going to spent in advance (before implementing the system) because they think "Oh what the heck, it doesn't matter anyway". But in general every dollar spent in design pays itself off in 20 dollars spent implementing, in that sense. Someone who is a really good programmer will first completely design the software and then write it in a matter of days, so to speak.

Then, if you fail to do so, you are going to be confronted with all kinds of problems later down the road that you thought would be unrelated to the disk access strategy, but which were not. Just generally stating this. Linux in particular is an experience of software developers constantly running into bottlenecks and design limitations because they didn't think in advance where they wanted to get to.

Linux sees constant systems being revamped because well, they just didn't look ahead.

They only design something when it is needed right now. That is no design at all. That is having no design phase and just start coding right away with no idea of what you are doing other than the stuff you could think up and imagine within 2 hours.

As a result most architectures in Linux are just abysmal, but that is just my P.O.V.

(One example is Linux by default using many many many many small files smaller than 4K. Then suddenly the new 4K disk format gets to be a problem because "we want our 512 byte sectors" and "those 4K sectors waste all that disk space!". Jesus christ really.

For god. Sake. Design something sane for a change and you won't run into freaking 4096 byte troubles. Seriously. A Linux system grinding to a halt so to speak because the sector size was increased to 4096. *Slaps head and orders a beer, this is too much*.

Design can save you so much time later down the road and I don't think you should encourage cutting down on that, but welll, that's that.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Smanci » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:17 am

xen wrote:
That just treats everything as equivalent. That's like saying spending 10 minutes in the sun is equivalent to 3 hours, because whatever you do, outside there will be sun.

So that's no argument at all, it just tries to undo arguments by saying everything is equivalent, when the inquiry was about whether this is actually so (you can only make that statement when the inquiry has been answered, in absence of any answer, you cannot know these things).
Those answers mean: they might, they might not or they might even make infrasonic sounds. Depends on the components used. No guarantees.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:26 am

xen wrote:Sure you can. I was saying now you have to. It is a sacrifice you make for getting something else. I would not much like that (I have done it myself on a 50GB VPS, that "saving space thing" but it is not the most convenient or fun thing in the world. It is a sacrifice).

You are sacrificing one thing for something else and lessening your overall experience because of it. I don't like to sacrifice anything really.

You may feel this sacrifice is acceptable for the gains you get from it, but it is still not a nice feeling. I don't like it. I'm sure you don't either (but you are just too happy with the gains to notice ;-)).
But it's the same thing with HDD space. We used to have small efficient things but with almost unlimited storage came a lot of bloat. That sacrifice you mention is universal, hard to escape it.
xen wrote:But other things would help a lot more and they wouldn't be 160 euro for a new harddisk that wouldn't be big enough.

I am just saying that apparently you have money to waste. I don't really, at least not anymore, and never have.

I am also not one of those people buying nVidia 970s, just saying. Or even worse, 980s, etc.

I don't have that money to spend on stuff that is nonsensical to me. This is a 1st world problem really, like 4K television and 3D cinema. I have experienced 3D cinema. I do not understand the hype, it did not change my experience of the movie whatsoever.

It gave pains to my eyes until I was used to it and then after I did not have a different experience than what I have had before watching the same kinds of movies.

First world problems really. Shaving 1 second off of a load time of an application.
In the first world, all problems are first world problems. The 256GB SSD I got at a great price, 128GB is usually enough for me but that nice Intel 730 at close to 50% off was to good to pass on. The latest SSD I bought was a cheaper 128GB model, it was 399 SEK (about 42 euro). They are getting cheaper.
xen wrote:Well, thanks. Not all tech people do though. But then I consider much of the open source world to be desperately ill.
With free software you can distance yourself from the world a bit if you want. My Linux is mine to do with what I want. I don't interact much with the community. Me going from Windows to Linux was a reaction to the way Microsoft is going with it. There's little hope of escape there; Windows is not mine to to with as I wish. Bloated crap if you ask me. ;)

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:37 am

Tzeb wrote:I was using for a few years one 128GB 840 pro just for the os. I saw this 850 evo at 100 euros and i got it not becuase i was not content with 128, but mostly because of the price. And i thought i could move a few games to the non-os partition.
Right. Well that's reasonable (and acceptable as an argument ;-)).

The smallest disk I have used as an OS drive that was still acceptable to me in the past was 160GB.

I know Linux is perfectly content with 20GB or 30GB as long as you are capable of storing games elsewhere. However as you indicate you want games to be on the SSD right. That's the whole idea of it. Load time in games is the worst thing, much worse than anything in your OS.

(There was a bug in WoW long time ago where slow computers would not get around to loading the new screen before the ship would return to the previous location, causing an endless cycle of not-completing loads until the thing would bug out and your ship would end up somewhere in a desert or on top of a mountain or something).

And my older friend who used SCSI back in the day (of Quake 1, nota bene) mentioned the bliss of having faster load times, I mean, no issues here.

Perfectly in agreement here with fast game load times.

But I wouldn't want a Windows system without swap, that means I want at least 30GB for the OS + some spare + the swap at 38GB for Windows. For me, minimum for Windows itself. Then you get WoW at some 50GB. Diablo 3 is about 15? GW2 may also be 40. We have now exceeded 128GB just like that.

Not even installed anything else.

Well, typical stuff fitting into that 30GB.

Besides, I am measuring this in real gigabytes but the 128GB SSD is going to be effective 120 GB right? And your 500GB EVO is going to be effective 466 but your SSD also likes free space, so you have to maybe take another 40GB off.

It's just clear how tight this all is. Personally what I really want at this point is still my goal of having a 16GB SSD that is fast enough and doesn't bottleneck the system (in terms of writes) and just experiment with that in caching a root filesystem and a data partition at the same time.

It's just that Linux bugs out, that's all.

Otherwise I would already be running it to my great content, perhaps.

But these issues of "And i thought i could move a few games to the non-os partition" I just want to be rid of.

For me it is just not acceptable penny-pinching in this way in terms of storage space. With a good cached solution those worries would be gone for good. With LVM, you can choose what partitions you want to cache. You can choose their cache policy (not much choice there, but still). Ideally the cache and the origin device would work asynchronously; both serving requests independently whenever needed.

Then, the cache is something you can take out just like that. A single Linux command and your cache is disconnected. You can then physically disconnect the SSD while your system is running if you want to. You can replace it with a bigger or faster one. You can use it on another system. You can upgrade the storage independently of the cache. You can connect a new disk and set it to cache your existing partitions. You can create multiple caches on the same disk. You can tell someone to die and walk away (you can tell the cache to die and walk away). If your cache fails, ideally you are still good. You do not require instant replacement, you have some room. You require much less SSD space for some of the same performance boost (only on regular reads of course, not random access tasks) and you can spend that money on buying real storage space.

Personally I have used a small part of that mini SSD I had as a scratch space for some compilation tasks and it worked well. But my harddisk worked equally well really (I was booting off USB stick, so slow). I think there is a reason and a place for such workspace, but loading games is not part of that use case right.

Loading your OS and loading your games is not really a "random access task" requiring new data to be written.

That is perfectly something that can be cached just fine.

But again, I am just asking a technical question (informative question, not normative) and the debate that springs up is completely normative.

"Where can I find apples?"
"Don't buy apples, buy oranges instead".

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:41 am

Smanci wrote:Those answers mean: they might, they might not or they might even make infrasonic sounds. Depends on the components used. No guarantees.
That's the same as giving no answer at all.

"Will it be warm tomorrow?"

"It might, it might not. It might be shady, it might be cool. It might be cloudy, it might rain. The sun might shine, or it might not."

Someone else:

"Yeah, they predicted about 30 degrees during the day".

"Oh, alright, thanks."

:-/.

You could also just answer the question, but I think you just don't know the answer ;-). You can also just say that you don't know the answer ;-).

Giving every possible possibility is the same as giving no answer at all. If I ask you for the current temperature and you answer "somewhere in the range between -273 degrees C. and + 2.000.000 degrees C." then that is not really an amazing answer, you know. I already knew that.

Although I must admit I have little knowledge of the frequencies of componenents, although I have seen some of that in the graphics cards reviews I've read.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:53 am

Vicotnik wrote:If we forget about SSDs and HDDs for a moment and instead look at the tech behind them. Surely you can agree that solid state has some appeal over the mechanical movements of parts? No matter how much you develop the latter it could never beat the responsiveness of the former.
If responsiveness is your only goal, sure. If it's not, then what?

Again, of course I intend to use them as hybrids but not as a readymade solution within a single drive, if I can.

I personally also like consistent vibration. I think 5400 is a nice number (90Hz). I think 7200 is less so (120Hz, it is more nervous, more impatient).

Ideally, I would want that number to be at 80Hz to feel best (about myself, the environment, etc.).

I think 80Hz is a healthy number. You know that usually you cannot audibly hear a disk spinning although you notice the difference when it spins off.

I also prefer spinning fans at about 800 RPM (~14 Hz). I always try to tune my fans to be about this number. I prefer a 800RPM spinning fan over no fan at all; in that sense that I prefer a continuously, stable spinning fan over a fan that ramps up when needed but is still otherwise.

Meaning, the default RM650i behaviour (for instance) is not to my liking. I would change the fan curve to a stable 800RPM and be done with it.

Maybe less than that if it is a big fan like some 120 or 140mm like that.

Maybe even no more than 400RPM. It should be able to handle it I think.

But I like stability in this sense.
Starting firefox takes about a second on my system (Linux Mint XFCE), but it's kind of heavy. I normally don't get that sense of delay. Most of the applications I use seem to start instantly. Not all of course, Calibre takes four seconds, but then the book collection is on the server. Don't want to waste that precious SSD space.
This is a x2 5050e, I don't know what you have. Also running Cinnamon (Gnome 3). I have no clue why it would be so slow. There is ample of RAM (5GB available and 2.4 in buffers) but I don't know.
I don't feel any difference between Windows and Linux in this regard btw, I think it has more to do on how one uses the computer. Windows uses crap like Superfetch to make the HDD less sluggish. It works almost constantly in exchange for perhaps better responsiveness. I always disable that one.
You're probably not going to notice <0.1 second differences ;-).

Back in the day Opera also used to start much slower on Linux than on Windows (the 12.14 version). Linux generally has very much non-optimized GUI paths. There are so many subsystems that have to cooperate and interoperate. Microsoft can make everything fall in line, Linux can't do that. Maybe Wayland will improve things, I don't know.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:05 am

If you value big space over responsiveness, get a HDD. But I don't think that HDD would be that much greater if the SSD never existed.

Zero RPM is my sweetspot. ;) A sweet stable zero RPM.

Opera has been my browser of choice for a long time, it's always been quick for me both on Linux and Windows. I'm on 12.16 now btw. Of course with this old thing as a primary browser, you also need a secondary.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:27 am

Vicotnik wrote:But it's the same thing with HDD space. We used to have small efficient things but with almost unlimited storage came a lot of bloat. That sacrifice you mention is universal, hard to escape it.
A Linux system still installs on 5GB of space if you are really strict. The only real bloat I see is 1080p video and beyond, not so much on the part of the software.

Something I also try to stay away from, 720p is still really sufficient for me (well maybe not anymore).

I thought you were talking about the "laziness" thing here. But that is not the sacrifice I just mentioned. That was about the overall effect on developer laziness or greed, so to speak. The effect on people beginning to consume vastly more resources.

I meant the opposite: suddenly now you are tight for resources when video games or the OS itself are not *that* bloated compared to the past (relatively speaking). Compared to the storage space we have (e.g. > 2TB) that has no relation whatsoever to the size of the OS of games.

Those terabytes only go into video mostly.

For normal consumers, people, those terabytes just go into video. Maybe music. You know. Not really much else?

Sure maybe the developers have loosened the reigns a bit on that one. But. There is just no point in letting your program grow physically beyond what it needs, in the sense that making very large software is rather hard to do; a game stores game data, this is real data, a OS does not store any such data.

An OS does not store all that much video or image or sound material. The only thing perhaps that has happened is System Restore points and all of that. I don't see the OS expanding like mad (except in RAM usage). Storage space consumption for the OS has not drastically gone up and for games it is obvious why it would.

So there is no sacrifice to make when using or buying a HDD. That only happens when you buy into 4K or 1080p video. Then suddenly your many terabytes seem like nothing. That is when you sacrifice your money and your sanity for something that does not approach either of those things ;-). Today, of course, you can say that not using an SSD is like a sacrifice.
In the first world, all problems are first world problems. The 256GB SSD I got at a great price, 128GB is usually enough for me but that nice Intel 730 at close to 50% off was to good to pass on. The latest SSD I bought was a cheaper 128GB model, it was 399 SEK (about 42 euro). They are getting cheaper.
Not true. Some problems equally exist for "second or third" worlds, this is why we call them "first world problems'. They only exist for the first world whereas other problems exist for all worlds. Requiring food is not a first world problem, it is a 3rd world problem in that sense, that we happen to also have, it is a stacking, layering system this ;-).

It is likened to the three modes of production: primary, secundary and tertiary. Primary production is something everyone needs: food from the fields, energy, perhaps, from the earth. Secondary production is manufacturing. The moment you develop yourself as a culture and society you reqruire more production to take place based on those primary products. Then when you go beyond that you require the manufacturing to be managed with ideas, knowledge, science, design and management. This is tertiary production, or tertiary services.

As you go up the scale from the 3rd to the 1st world, you also go up the scale from primary to tertiary production.

That is not to say that the 1st world doesn't need primary production, we just take it from the 3rd world countries ;-).
The latest SSD I bought was a cheaper 128GB model, it was 399 SEK (about 42 euro). They are getting cheaper.
Sure, I am not arguing against that. I just feel many of the problems people are trying to solve are not important and do not actually make life better. Meanwhile we see Windows becoming one hell of a bad system and that is a much greater issue than anything else hardware wise currently going on. We also see Linux not really going down a great path even though it is getting more important as a desktop by the day and this also bears no relation to hardware. There are many other issues in the world that have absolutely zero thing to do with hardware and only with software, in that sense. Hardware is not a solution to anything that I can see, apart from allowing more detailed, advanced, and sophisticated design strategies (ie. around caching and RAID) -- those new designs have tangible, meaningfull benefits in the long run for devising systems that are more resilient and all of that; it's not just about speed. It's also about being able to work in a virtual space the way the cloud does, to decouple your operating system from the actual hardware, and to be able to run it on any platform that you want (e.g. through virtualisation).

This liberates a lot and could make it very easy in the future to just take your system with you wherever you go because you can run it everywhere. That depends on how well the underlying foundations are done and LVM is not good enough for that I think.

What benefit does an SSD have if your operating system does not even know about the hardware it is running on? Can you tell me that? How are you going to "partition" or "ration" your "drive speeds" when your operating system is getting installed on virtual hardware?

This depends on how good the virtualisation infrastructure is (KVM is a good option, although it's a little bit dark and hostile) but LVM is really a consumer product and not meant for the real work. Big corporations do not use LVM on their servers, they only use it on their clients. They will iSCSI some disk and then LVM it locally to create local snapshots or whatever.

LVM is too feisty, too funky, and too... woolly, too much of an art style, a toy, a cozy environment, a bliss to have but wiping entire harddisks is not harder than issuing 3 commands. Backups require the creation of partitions -- the same partitions you are running your OS on, and now you are deleting and creating them on a daily measure for having snapshots. That is just not safe.

LVM would need to have some more responsibility from the maintainers (Red Hat, and all) in ensuring a system that NEVER FAILS and they don't care about that, they consider that the administrators job. "Oh yes if you write too much to a thin pool the entire system will hang, well, you should have monitored that in advance, tough luck to you, you are to blame". LVM seems too much "up in the hierarchy" with woolly tools and a toy that is getting developed quite rapidly but never consolidated and most documentation is rather poor or outdated, apparently the people doing it are feeling rather distracted, as if they are doing it in their spare time for the kicks of it. Just a fancy thing, nothing really serious. Just a hobby. Something like a vanity project. That's how it feels to me. If you wanted LVM to take over RAID systems it would need to be more down to the core, more low-level, more low-level commands and tools and then build higher level functionality or access on top of that, not make higher level access the only access there is. md-raid feels much better in that sense and also performs better, but I am not sure whether or not that is converging or almost identical now. Md-raid in any case is solid once configured even if the tools are lacking. It is a "set up and never look again" kinda system. The sort of stuff that feels like a service, a server running in the background, oblivious to user failings or interaction. Anyway, this goes a bit far here.
With free software you can distance yourself from the world a bit if you want. My Linux is mine to do with what I want. I don't interact much with the community. Me going from Windows to Linux was a reaction to the way Microsoft is going with it. There's little hope of escape there; Windows is not mine to to with as I wish. Bloated crap if you ask me. ;)
Not if you are a developer. You have to work with the community, you are compelled to work with the community, you cannot stay outside the community.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:58 am

Vicotnik wrote:If you value big space over responsiveness, get a HDD. But I don't think that HDD would be that much greater if the SSD never existed.
No I never said that the SSD shouldn't exist. I am saying that you shouldn't be using it as your OS drive.

You should be using it as a cache drive. That is what it is really meant for. There is a history of caches everywhere. Your CPU has caches that would function in exactly the same way as an SSD cache. Your OS has caches that it calls IO buffers.

Nobody would seriously recommend expanding the Level 1 or 2 cache of the CPU to take over the role of RAM, but this is what has been happening with SSDs. If SSDs are expensive, just like on-die cache, then it makes sense to use them as a cache and nothing else. Of course, perhaps depending on the price.

But apparently the status quo is mostly ruled by an ineffective implementation, save for Intel, or a scarce availability, of this simple caching technology. Almost not a single normal Linux user has this functionality enabled. We just don't have it.

LVM is considered too advanced for the beginning user and I guess it is. But there is nothing in Linux that will sit "in between" your applications or OS and the data it reads, unless you explicitly design it to. In Windows you can just insert a caching layer in between, boom you're done.

It is really the job of the motherboard manufacturors but AMD is slacking behind again as usual.

No mention whatsoever of AMD doing anything of the kind and their support on RaidXpert is also abysmal. Just no support whatsoever. No information, no one with information responding on the forums, etc. Meanwhile Intel is going full out on it. (Guess what my next motherboard might be likely to be? :P :(). So the situation for cached RAID is really terrible unless you are content with the Microsoft solution (just uses a file on the root of the flash device) OR you are using the Intel solution.

Linux users DO NOT have it available. Some may but not many. There is only really a single person who has written about it and it is easy to find. Linux is also getting fragmented between BTRFS and LVM+ext4/XFS and I think in the end LVM+ext4/XFS is going to win out because they work closely together. I hope and I wish that LVM RAID actually becomes viable instead of something to do in your spare time when you feel like it. That sort of sentiment.

Zero RPM is my sweetspot. ;) A sweet stable zero RPM.
I won't sacrifice for that ;-). But of course, you can.

I like spinning electrons, let's call it that. But I don't like the spinning electrons of modern and current SSDs.

I think their technology is flawed and not necessarily perhaps the NAND technology itself, but rather the firmware, the system, the architecture interfacing with it, the fact that it has to distribute writes, the fact that it needs free space in order to do so, the fact that some of these cheaper SSDs have a lifetime of just 200 full-disk writes or something similar. Take the one I have: the endureance is 2.26 TB which is 141 full writes.

During testing I have overwritten the thing already 20 times at least. I just consumed 14% of its lifetime. Ouch! Within a few days!!!!.

How the crazy fuck can you consider that reliable technology? Okay some 128 GB drive then. A Kingston 120GB one. 50 TB. That is 417 times its capacity. Okay, a little safer here. You are not quickly going to run into 400 overwrites even while testing. Yet each time you could clone a system to it, it would be gone, one overwrite. If you wipe the cache (if you used it as a cache) and allow it to refill: one overwrite. If you reset the HDD it is used for, one overwrite. Only a system that will not be changed is really reliable here. Its supposed "reliability" depends on you not doing anything with it!!!.

(That also means the little device I have is *absolutely* not suitable as a cache device unless you create a stable system and limit the promotion to really stabilize the cache). A cache would ordinarily see more activity than some OS disk so ironically, the main benefit, to my eye, of an SSD, the cache, is something it is not very suitable for. Because it is rather unreliable when greatly written to.

By nature they are cache devices, and yet, they are not suitable for being caches ;-). Now I will have to look for devices that have the longest endurance.
Opera has been my browser of choice for a long time, it's always been quick for me both on Linux and Windows. I'm on 12.16 now btw. Of course with this old thing as a primary browser, you also need a secondary.
Oh my god. I was once an egg too. And then I became a dinosaur too ;-). :P. And then I died too :P.

Nah just kidding, in part I am really quite impressed. That you still do it. It's like, wait, people said those things 5 years ago and you are still doing it?

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Smanci » Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:13 am

xen wrote:
That's the same as giving no answer at all.

"Will it be warm tomorrow?"

"It might, it might not. It might be shady, it might be cool. It might be cloudy, it might rain. The sun might shine, or it might not."

Someone else:

"Yeah, they predicted about 30 degrees during the day".

"Oh, alright, thanks."

:-/.

You could also just answer the question, but I think you just don't know the answer ;-). You can also just say that you don't know the answer ;-).

Giving every possible possibility is the same as giving no answer at all. If I ask you for the current temperature and you answer "somewhere in the range between -273 degrees C. and + 2.000.000 degrees C." then that is not really an amazing answer, you know. I already knew that.

Although I must admit I have little knowledge of the frequencies of componenents, although I have seen some of that in the graphics cards reviews I've read.
I see. I took a shortcut by assuming you knew more about hardware as you're a programmer, have built PCs and are posting on SPCR forum :)


SSDs produce ultrasonic noise if some coils on the PCB are able to vibrate at high enough frequency. The noise produced can also be audible but normally it's well above our hearing range. The volume of that noise is case-specific but can easily reach 1-2 meters away.

The reason it isn't tested is because it's desirable. Nobody wants to buy a whiny component and if it whines, it better be inaudible.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:35 am

So you are saying that basically some SSDs do produce enough sound to be audible, but most (if they do produce this level of sound) end up in the inaudible range?

But my question is: is this volume loud enough to be audible had it been in a lower frequency range? Is this typical of SSDs to have that kind of a volume of (inaudible) sound?

Of course I can agree that people would rather not hear it if it does whine. The question is: does it whine or not (and how much) even if we can't normally hear it?

Would a dog hear it?

How expensive would be the equipment to test/register this? I mean, any sensor or microphone tool with the software to display the results?

Even if the stuff is inaudible, and it is desirable that it is inaudible, that doesn't mean it is desirable that it is there in the first place.

Frequencies affect the human form anyway, whether you can hear it or not. Your ears are not the only "sensor" you body has. In fact, perception is not required for something to be influenced. Thanks for responding anyway now ;-) :P.

I have no real electronics background in that sense, just computer hardware and a mediocre amount of a recollection of having used measurement devices while in "high school" and such.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:42 am

xen wrote:No I never said that the SSD shouldn't exist. I am saying that you shouldn't be using it as your OS drive.

You should be using it as a cache drive. That is what it is really meant for. There is a history of caches everywhere. Your CPU has caches that would function in exactly the same way as an SSD cache. Your OS has caches that it calls IO buffers.
So what? In all my systems I should install an extra HDD? And put my OS on that HDD? Using my SSD as "cache"? I don't know what that means. Should I do something similar on the Raspberry Pi?
For me it's simple. One OS drive. Make it low power, silent and perhaps fast. Storage (movies, music, all that) on the server.
xen wrote:I think their technology is flawed and not necessarily perhaps the NAND technology itself, but rather the firmware, the system, the architecture interfacing with it, the fact that it has to distribute writes, the fact that it needs free space in order to do so, the fact that some of these cheaper SSDs have a lifetime of just 200 full-disk writes or something similar. Take the one I have: the endureance is 2.26 TB which is 141 full writes.

During testing I have overwritten the thing already 20 times at least. I just consumed 14% of its lifetime. Ouch! Within a few days!!!!.

How the crazy fuck can you consider that reliable technology? Okay some 128 GB drive then. A Kingston 120GB one. 50 TB. That is 417 times its capacity. Okay, a little safer here. You are not quickly going to run into 400 overwrites even while testing. Yet each time you could clone a system to it, it would be gone, one overwrite. If you wipe the cache (if you used it as a cache) and allow it to refill: one overwrite. If you reset the HDD it is used for, one overwrite. Only a system that will not be changed is really reliable here. Its supposed "reliability" depends on you not doing anything with it!!!.
I don't write much to my SSDs, I use a RAM disk as a cache. :)

Any storage media can die at any time. I don't think SSDs are reliable, I think they are fast. There is no reliable way to store data, as I'm sure you know. So I backup, and backup my backups and so on, until I feel reasonable safe.
xen wrote:Oh my god. I was once an egg too. And then I became a dinosaur too ;-). :P. And then I died too :P.

Nah just kidding, in part I am really quite impressed. That you still do it. It's like, wait, people said those things 5 years ago and you are still doing it?
My phone is on its 10th year also, and so on, and so on.

But seriously, this is my point. I don't care much about systems where the OS doesn't know what hardware it runs on. I'm at the Raspberry Pi level (but still my desktop runs circles around yours ;)).

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