[OS X TeX] TeX performance: SSD vs ATA on MacBook Pro

Peter Dyballa Peter_Dyballa at Web.DE
Fri Jul 26 01:04:26 CEST 2013


Am 25.07.2013 um 23:53 schrieb William Slough:

> I'm thinking of getting a new MacBook Pro and I'm curious what others have
> to say about SSD versus a 7200 rpm hard disk, since I need to choose.

I chose the rotating disk. But I tend to use my Apple hardware for a decade… (I'm not sure how good SSDs are; their memory cells are wearing out, they are guaranteed for a few thousand or ten thousand erase and write cycles, much less than the surfaces of a rotating platter. So if the formatted disk does not come with a fair amount of reserved extra cells the disk's capacity will become less and less. And Mac OS X is writing a lot: the file system's journal, metadata for SpotLight, swap files to extend virtual memory, directory information upon when a file or folder was last accessed or modified, …)

OTOH, today it seems to have more manufacturers of SSDs than of rotating disks. So there might be some competition, which could be healthy for the price. But – there are only two or three companies that produce the chips in which the data is stored. Therefore there cannot that much competition. At least it cannot have much influence on the price (per GB). In the future the number of disk manufacturers and chip manufacturers might diminish… and the price raise. So it might be wiser to buy the SSD now and gain some advantage from the speed of disk operation. (Which cannot be that much. The change from PowerPC, G4/G5 hardware to intel hardware is a much bigger step.)

--
Greetings

  Pete

Hard Disk, n.:
	A device that allows users to delete vast quantities of data with simple mnemonic commands.




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