All the noise about all flash arrays and acquisitions set me thinking a bit about SSDs and flash; how it has changed things for me.
To be honest, the flash discussions haven’t yet really impinged on my reality in my day-to-day job, we do have the odd discussion about moving metadata onto flash but we don’t need it quite yet; most of the stuff we do is sequential large I/O and spinning rust is mostly adequate. Streaming rust i.e tape is actually adequate for a great proportion of our workload. But we keep a watching-eye on the market and where the various manufacturers are going with flash.
But flash has made a big difference to the way that I use my personal machines and if I was going to deploy flash in a way that would make the largest material difference to my user-base, I would probably put it in their desktops.
Firstly, I now turn my desktop off; I never used to unless I really had to but waiting for it to boot or even awake from sleep was at times painful. And sleep had a habit of not sleeping or flipping out on a restart; turning the damn thing off is much better. This has had the consequence that I now have my desktops on an eco-plug which turns off all the peripherals as well; good for the planet and good for my bills.
Secondly, the fact that the SSD is smaller means that I keep less crap on it and am a bit more sensible about what I install. Much of my data is now stored on the home NAS environment which means I am reducing the number of copies I hold; I find myself storing less data. There is another contributing factor; fast Internet access means that I tend to keep less stuff backed-up and can stream a lot from the Cloud.
Although the SSD is smaller and probably needs a little more disciplined house-keeping; running a full virus check which I do on occasion is a damn sight quicker and there are no more lengthy defrags to worry about.
Thirdly, applications load a lot faster; although my desktop has lots of ‘chuff’ and can cope with lots of applications open, I am more disciplined about not keeping applications open because their loading times are that much shorter. This helps keeping my system running snappily, as does shutting down nightly I guess.
I often find on my non-SSD work laptop that I have stupid numbers of documents open; some have been open for days and even weeks. This never happens on my desktop.
So all-in-all; I think if you really want bang-for-buck and to put smiles on many of your users’ faces; the first thing you’ll do is flash-enable the stuff that they do everyday.
My comment has nothing to do with flash; just that I find it amusing that you keep “stupid numbers of documents open” on your work laptop… me too! I generally only boot my workstation about every 90 days or so and only when a bunch of updates need applying. I sometimes have two or three Word .docs open, a couple of .pdf’s, an .xls or three, at least one Visio, several Chrome windows with monitoring apps and dozens of tabs in Firefox for work related stuff and a small gathering of personal things in IE and possibly another traditional app or two for whatever. Certainly has changed A LOT from years past when there was simply not enough RAM to do this and system stability was nowhere near what it is these days. My next desktop will absolutely have an SSD though.
Wish I was going to be on your end of the pond to join you for your upcoming #storagebeers!
[…] Flash Changed My Life – Storagebod – Storagebod ( aka Martin Glassborow) make a great point about how flash has changed his personal computing experience. But flash has made a big difference to the way that I use my personal machines and if I was going to deploy flash in a way that would make the largest material difference to my user-base, I would probably put it in their desktops. […]