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

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 26.07.2013 um 01:35 schrieb Chris Lott:

> I don't think it's arguable that traditional drives have a longer lifespan,

That's not my fear. My fear is that my own data grows and grows (like me) and the SSD becomes smaller and smaller (like my trousers)…


The article you are citing seems to only SLC, Single-Level Cell, FLASH memory. This is not the consumer level. This kind of hardware is known to be reliable. The cheaper MLC, Multi-Level Cell, design is the critical one. (An MLC can store in one cell more than one bit, typically four. They are "encoded" as resistance levels or amounts of charge in the floating gate of the MOS-FET. When the cell looses its ability to store and isolate that charge from discharge, half-a-byte is lost. And, well, four bits in one cell is mathematically true, but not physically. Every byte stored does not occupy eight bits but some more – because of error correction bits added. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCH_code)


IMO hybrid approaches are pretty good – best without wearing-out FLASH! There is NVRAM (Non-Volatile RAM), quite as fast as usual DRAM, but without the need to dynamically refresh the memory contents at short intervals.

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