Trite, contrived, mediocre, milquetoast, amateurish, infantile, cliche-and-gonorrhea-ridden paean to conformism, eye-fucked me, affront to humanity, war crime, should literally be tried for war crimes, resolutely shit, lacking in imagination, uninformed reimagining of, limp-wristed, premature, ill-informed attempt at, talentless fuckfest, recidivistic shitpeddler, pedantic, listless, savagely boring, just one repulsive laugh after another.
is that hard disks are actually perfectly fine and usable, the real problem is that software developers no longer bother to consider their constraints and limitations while writing software
today's hot take is brought to you by installing Windows 10 on a machine with an HDD
i’m curious how you would design software to work with spinning disks better? you may just be observing the inescapable fact that ssds are like 10-1000x faster than spinning disks
from what I'm told/have observed, the tricks that game developers used to get games to run well off of optical media work pretty well for HDDs too;
with tricks like this, you can improve performance a lot. you're not gonna magically make the computer run like it's got an SSD, but it doesn't have to be glacially slow either.
(glares at Windows 10 machine to my right taking 30 minutes and counting to apply updates and reboot)
i feel like a lot of techniques (mainly the first you listed) would only work sometimes, for certain filesystems, on hdds, and otherwise could have no benefit or slow things down. devs can do whatever they want with optical media because the data on it never gets reorganized.
maybe if the os had tooling to handle things properly for different storage mediums and use cases? but that's certainly not happening and plenty of devs would find ways to fuck that up
anywhere i look online i still see tons of advice that only applies to hdds and would simply not work or ruin an ssd. i wouldn't want any software that isn't the os or some disk tool to try anything funny.
maybe there could be a tool to analyze program startup and reorganize the files so that it becomes one long continuous read? that would be really nice especially if you could get the whole os boot sequence into one long read
in my experience/observation, the first method actually works really well regardless of FS on hard disks and SSDs alike; the point of a tarball is to concatenate a bunch of files into one large file, so that they don't get strewn about carelessly by the FS/OS; a lot of modern games do this with assets, they just don't literally use the .tar format because mmmmm yummy yummy bespoke proprietary formats
can't many filesystems spread single files all over the disk too? and i'm pretty sure no ssd has any sense of "strewn about" in the first place because the hardware intentionally shuffles things around to increase the drive lifespan
i mean if benchmarks say it works that's neat but i have no clue why it would work
If you want to do a REALLY deep dive into this, look at what ZFS is doing under the hood. Everything about ZFS is designed to make mechanical drives work as good as possible, with a lot of queuing and optimization.
I saw a video (conference talk) about optimizing ZFS for running on high bandwidth NVMe arrays and a lot of that work was basically undoing all of the stuff put in place for mechanical drives, because modern NVMe is so fast that it's better to just blast it direct instead of say, queuing a batch of reads or writes.
👀 you have my attention, what's a good starting point to read up on this?
Here's the talk I saw, warning there's some major audio issues (drops out for a while, static later on) but does eventually clear.
Past that, frankly it starts getting a bit above me. Even that talk is more in depth than anything I'd actively be touching, but hopefully that's a good starting point for finding other material short of just... digging into the ZFS code lol.
Modern windows on a mechanical was pure suffering, like holy shit yes that OS has zero respect for what a disk might be doing it just wants to SLAM BACKGROUND IO AT ALL TIMES MUST BE INDEXING MUST BE OPTIMIZING SEARCH (note: search still sucks)
Very very upsetting last time I encountered it.
i boot windows twice a week to run games and in my experience it's still suffering on an ssd
I mean windows is suffering for many reasons but I didn't wanna get too deep into that lol
twice a week
That's probably why it's suffering even on an SSD. Windows always assumes it is your default OS so if it hasn't booted in four days it freaks the hell out and starts checking EVERY POSSIBLE THING, pulling all the updates and re-indexing every possible thing in the background as it tries to CATCH UP because being dormant for more than 8 hours is clearly a sign that SOMETHING IS WRONG, why would anyone not boot Windows every single day?
i dunno, this is one of those rare cases where i'm not sure
i think it was more true in the past, then SMR drives showed up everywhere because Density/cost, and now write performance on HDDs is so fucking bad I'm considering moving all my storage to NVMe
true! i still run a relatively older system (first gen i5, two hard drives (320+160GB), 8GB DDR3, and a GTX1050), and it’s actually pretty good… until i try to run newer software. oh well.
enormous respect if you use this as your main machine
