Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 12th Aug 2008 00:00 UTC
There's a new hype going on in the world of computing. I used to call them 'tiny laptops', but somewhere along the way, Intel's marketing got at me and now I call them netbooks. Every self-respecting manufacturer has a netbook product line, or is about to introduce one (Apple?), so I figured I would take a look at what all the fuss is about: I bought a netbook.
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Member since:2006-01-08
You're confusing reads and writes. For reading lots of small files, flash memory are much faster than HDD, as the seek times (which are dominant when reading small non-contingent blocks) of flash is at least an order of magnitude better.
However, unlike HDD where reading and writing are roughly the same speed, writing on flash is typically much slower than reading. On NAND flash, you can't just flip bits at will. Data is written in pages which are many (sometimes even hundreds, depending on the total size) of kilobytes. Anytime a single bit in a page needs to change from 0 to 1, all other bits in the page needs to be erased/reset to 1 as well. This is especially bad (relatively speaking) for very small writes.
Member since:2006-07-30
You're confusing reads and writes.
Ah yes, that's it.
Makes me wonder though if the limited number of writes could become a problem after all (if it's mainly small files).
But whatever, it doesn't cost a fortune and it fails rather gracefully (on writes instead of on reads).
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Member since:
2006-07-30
I've been thinking about getting a netbook quite a lot lately.
It's odd that you complain about write performance for _small_ files since this is one area where (in theory) SSDs should do better than HDDs.
Can any expert comment on this?
For me, however, the main reason to choose SSD over HDD is rough handling. An object this small and lite is bound to get dropped. I'd probably forget I put it in my backpack and just drop it on the floor like I always do...
The only reason for me not to buy one this minute is that I don't really travel that much...