Your choice of software tooling, it seems to me, stems largely from the way in which you use your machine. I look at my macbook, and the idea of developing software on it fills me with horror – the screen is just too low res – claustrophobia.
So, I have a messy desktop, and a messy desktop. I develop software much in the way a chimp with Attention Deficit Disorder might – closing windows is for losers, and if the compile takes more than a minute, I get bored and start running up web pages and generally tinkering. Which gives the hardware a hard time – my working set is probably *huge*. Which in turn is a problem as I end up shouting at the slowness of the environment.
Hopefully, the answer may be the X25-M SSD. I had ordered one, that failed to get fulfilled by some dodge-o vendor; and I then got worried by the ‘it slows down’ internet pages. In the end, I just got too impatient – the only other game in town was a 300Gb Raptor – and that is sufficiently expensive to mean I couldn’t really justify that *and* an SSD in the near future. So I re-ordered, and helpfully Anandtech have a newer review that says ‘yeah, they slow down, but still trounce magnetic media even then’. So, here we go.
Sidenote : If I were an expensive database vendor, I’d be worried. Consider – part of the database proposition is that given
* Dataset size >> Memory
* Memory speed >> disk speed
* Disk Latency >>> Memory Latency
therefore you spend $$$ to have some clever code try and mitigate these factors. But consider – our current app generates about 1Gb of data per year. It barely needs a database, let alone an expensive one. And if the disk were quick enough, merely serializing object graphs to disk becomes a viable option…
