Time Trials

It finally arrived. By the time I finally got used to the idea of paying _that_ much for a mere 160GB of SSD storage, NewEgg had sold out, re-stocked, and raised the price by like 75%. But Amazon came to the rescue.

Before I installed the SSD I clocked the startup time using the HDD, which is comprised of two distinct sections:

(1) boot time and login time. Boot time starts when I hit the power button and ends when the login screen appears.
(2) login time starts when I hit Enter and ends when the last of my login applications (Safari, iCal, Terminal, Xcode, BBEdit, iTunes, Mail, iChat, Skype, PGAdmin) finishes loading.

Then I installed the SSD and clocked it again. The results are as follows:

HDD: 42 secs (boot), 74 secs (login) = 116 seconds
SSD: 37 secs (boot), 3 secs (login) = 40 seconds

I read about advancements in Ubuntu's initd replacement that adds significant parallelization and resulted in sub-10 second boot times. And Haiku (aka BeOS) is apparently capable of 4 second boot times. Apple should follow suit.

Also, I think the firmware itself might be part of the "problem". I don't hear the startup chime until 13 seconds after hitting the power button. Thankfully I only tend to reboot when I buy a new boot volume.

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This brings me one step closer to my dream of a purely solid-state desktop machine. Every time I have to not-so-patiently wait because the OS decides it needs to spin up the half-dozen attached disks I think about how the next generation will laugh at tales out these our outmoded times.

Decent quality SSD storage still costs more than 10x its HDD equivalent.