Which OS Performs Best With SSDs? 255
Lucas123 writes "Linux, Vista and Mac OS perform differently with solid state disks. While all of them work well with SSDs, as they write data more efficiently or run fewer applications in the background than XP, surprisingly Windows 2000 appears to be the winner when it comes to performance. However, no OS has yet been optimized to work with SSDs. This lost opportunity is one Microsoft plans to address with Windows 7; Apple, too, is likely to upgrade its platform soon for better SSD performance."
Re:Awful article (Score:5, Informative)
Several problems with the article. No mention of metric, as parent said. No mention of what Linux-based OS they used. Choice quotes like the following, "but Linux is 'always faster' than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, 'it never runs anything in the background.'" What do background applications have to do with anything? And both Windows 2000 and all Linux distros run stuff in the background. Even DOS does that.
To top it off, the article is spread out over 3 pages. Here's the print link: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Storage&articleId=9123140&taxonomyId=19 [computerworld.com]
Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX (Score:0, Informative)
NTFS is terrible. It's ability to fragment itself into tiny little pieces that cripple server performance and stability is proof of that.
Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX (Score:5, Informative)
Also, it's "its" not "it's".
Re:Do we just need a new filesystem? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX (Score:2, Informative)
Hear it now. I use to work at a digital invoicing company which used ext2 on linux. We were seeing extremely slow reads and writes to the disk. Now, in this environment, we were writing upwards of 10 gigs of data a day(spread amongst thousands of files). We would also delete 9 gigs of that daily. Compound this behavior over a couple of years and we were left with a heavily fragmented disk. The solution was simple... we re-wrote all the data.
Fragmentation has nothing to do with data integrity which is the only thing that would affect stability.
Wrong again, fragmentation makes the disk have to work harder. Think about it... the disk could read 10 bytes incrementing a byte at a time or it could be required to skip 20 gigs to read each byte(this is an over-simplification). This will increase wear and tear on the moving parts as well as extra heat. So, extreme fragmentation will likely decrease the life of your disks.
Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX (Score:5, Informative)
i alwasy got a kick out of the NT4 documentation for how to defragment a partition.. the "best pratice" was to back the data up to tape then format the partition and restore from the tape..
alwasy gave me a good laugh..
Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX (Score:3, Informative)
Who said anything about the desktop market? (Score:3, Informative)
Linux is not a "very major OS" [...] that has less than a few percent of the desktop market
Who said anything about the desktop market? There are plenty of subnotebooks, handhelds, and embedded devices that boot from flash into a Linux-based environment. I would imagine that even servers could benefit from the faster seeks and lower heat dissipation of SSDs for some workloads.
Re:Do we just need a new filesystem? (Score:4, Informative)
Bad analogy. This is a totally different issue. Memory fragmentation means you leave little gaps in the allocated blocks which are too small to reuse, effectively wasting memory.
Given a sufficient number of small files, this can happen with filesystems, too. Of course, it's usually not as pronounced, as most filesystems won't pack more than one file into a block...
Keep in mind, the block leveling algorithm will be abstracting the actual disk organization; defragmenting wouldn't accomplish anything on an SSD
It would, at the very least, consolidate extents.
I would also say, it's sad that SSDs have block leveling in hardware -- I mostly blame Windows for that.
Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX (Score:3, Informative)
ext3 and a lot of modern filesystems do not need defraging.
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Tuning-the-Linux-file-system-Ext3--/features/110398/3 [heise-online.co.uk] This article explains how an Ext3 filesystem can be less fragmented than say NTFS but still need defraging under extreme conditions.