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by kscaldef 5755 days ago
Not to knock the SSD, but I actually don't understand why it should help significantly in the use case that the author was primarily talking about: large numbers of tabs open in your browser. My instinct there would be that more and faster RAM, and then to a lesser extent CPU cycles would be what's important. Unless it turns out that you've got so many tabs open, and you're cycling through them enough that you're going to swap and your swap partition is on the SSD. But then, again, it seems like more RAM is at least as good a solution as an SSD.

Can someone explain to me why an SSD should be a big win for web browsing?
2 comments
chadaustin 5755 days ago
Conventional drive: on the order of 800 IO ops per second.

Good SSD: on the order of 20,000 IO ops per second.

Now consider a hard page fault or disk access (browser cache, whatever) and reverse the above numbers:

Conventional drive: ~1 ms / disk access

Good SSD: 50 microseconds / disk access

That adds up quickly.

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nuriaion 5755 days ago
In my experience the browser still saves/load a lot from the Harddisk. (OS X with 4GB RAM, YMMV) So a SSD also helps when i'm only using the browser with many tabs.
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