PeterKellner.net

Important Update 5/13/2011: …/nasty-problem-with-ocz-vertex-3-ssd-on-lenovo-w520-solved/

Let me get the fireworks out of the way first so you don’t need to wait for the numbers

OCZ Technology 240 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-240G: Electronics

For those that don’t know what these numbers represent, let me tell you, this is a screamer!  The W520 actually supports the SATA III interface spec which goes up 600MB.  I was wondering if it would actually work and I have to say, if it’s showing Sequential reads of 472.2 MB/second, it must be working.  The drive holds 240Gig and currently costs about $600.

In contrast, the drive I had before in my Lenovo W520 was no slouch.  It was a 256Gig Patriot Torqx M28.  The numbers are below run from the same Lenovo W520 computer.

Patriot Memory 256 GB 2.5-Inch Torqx Solid-State Drive PTX256GS25SSDR: Electronics

Just by way of comparison to a rotating disk, my configuration in the Lenovo W520 is I put my boot drive (the SSD) in the slot normally used by the DVD and I put my data disk (mydoc’s, etc.) where the normal built in disk goes.  I’ve got a 750GB Hitachi drive that simply rotates platters around (but costs less than $100).  The numbers are not quite as impressive.

Seagate Momentus 7200 500GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 16MB Cache 2.5 Inch Internal NB Hard Drive ST9500420AS-Bare Drive: Electronics

And for those of you that like graphs, here is the Sequential Read Speed by Drive

And a computer very similar to mine:

I’m hooked, hope are also now.  Hard to go back to read and write speeds of .5 MB/second.

Background

About a month ago,  purchased to Level 3 VPS (Virtual Private Servers) running Linux for about $50 a piece.  I’m close to launching a new product and that’s product customized shopping experience, forums and web site are all built with php.  I had several things that were important to me.

1. Full Service Linux Hosting
2. PCI Certified for processing Credit Cards
3. First Class Customer Service

I’ve always known of HostGator by it’s excellent reputation so it was an easy choice.  Up until this week, I did  not realize what an excellent decision I had made.

A Little History

Let me start off by saying that the HTC EVO has raised my expectations of what to expect from a smart phone.  About two years ago, I switched to one of the first Android phones that came out.  It had a very clunky keyboard slideout, it was very heavy, the interface was awkward and overall it was just not a good user experience.  Even things like GMail did not work well.  You could not do basic things like go from one email to the next without returning to the inbox first.

Fast Forward 18 months.  I have a Palm Pre which I’m pretty happy with.  It has a nice keyboard, nice email client for Microsoft Exchange, and though not many apps, it’s a pretty nice phone.  It is pretty slow though.  For example, sometimes a call comes in and the UI is so slow you can’t get it to actually answer the phone before it goes to voice mail.

Last Month, I took the plunge and bought the HTC EVO.  I knew it did not have a keyboard, but I was hoping I could get use to that (not the first time I’ve been wrong).  I did install a 3rd party application called SlideIT that did help some but still was not good enough.  I made a huge number of mistakes in emails I sent out, practically to the point that I was about to put a message in my email signature saying “Sent using my Mobile SlideIT keyboard, pardon the mistakes”.  I did not do that because somehow, as a technology guy, that just seemed wrong.

Andrew Siemer has written an excellent book about how to best use .Net (specifically with asp.net as the front end web technology) to build a social networking site.  He literally starts at the beginning and builds service by service, screen by screen, data table by data table what is necessary to build the site.  A lot of Andrew shows is not only just web type stuff, but he shows many best practices for building .Net applications in general.

Among other things, the goes in to great detail on the following topics:

(Windows 7 Beta, Build 7000 put through the paces)

Background

I don’t seem to have a pile of computers laying around anymore so testing new operating systems can be a bit time consuming.  In general, I don’t like testing OS’s in VM’s because performance on the actual hardware is what I’m trying to measure.  So, luckily, I do seem to have an infinite number of SATA hard drives for my Lenovo Thinkpad W500 ( Lenovo 4062-27U ThinkPad W500 15.4" Notebook ) so I figure the best thing to do is install the OS on one of those.  Microsoft recently sent me two DVD’s (a 32bit and a 64bit).  Since I have a 64bit machine with 4gig of RAM, I figure I should test the 64bit.  So, here we go.