CCL: Effect of using SSD for scratch



John, it's anecdotal, but my wife's Macbook Air boots far faster than a similarly configured Macbook Pro - the difference is the 4200 rpm laptop disk in the latter vs. the SSD in the former.  We also have a PC at work with a small/expensive SSD that is noticeably faster with Powerpoint presentations.

This said, I would think that a careful review of read/write/reread speeds (and seek times) would demonstrate that SSD should outperform "normal PC/laptop disks".  The question is the vendor and cost for such an SSD...  I also wonder whether direct methods would outperform any external-storage-based method given the staggering speed difference between chip/cache and I/O pipeline.  I would think this especially important for GPU based codes?

But then, I've been wrong before :-).

Joe
On Apr 24, 2012, at 5:42 PM, John McKelvey jmmckel[]gmail.com wrote:


Sent to CCL by: John McKelvey [jmmckel#gmail.com]
CCLers

I am looking to buy a machine sort of specific for running
Hartree-Fock and DFT codes.  There is always the issue of cpu speed,
but for large systems disk-io can be a significant issue, even for the
usual scratch file.  Has anyone done any direct or reasonable indirect
evaluations around this issue?

Many thanks,

John



--
John McKelvey
10819 Middleford Pl
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260-489-2160
jmmckel^^^gmail.com



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