My 486 ran totally fine on 1.44MB floppy disks as well, what is your point?
As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. Not the best one, still faster than a hard disk. NVMe are a little more expensive than that, and even faster. The price is not really a valid excuse.
Yes, my 2TB NVMe is $300, and does sequential read/writes of 3,000 MB/s, which is close to 100x faster than an HDD. It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already.
>> As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80.
You ever think about the college kid who can't afford that price? What about the family of five living on food stamps who can't just pony up the money for better hardware? What about large swaths of the population who are on fixed incomes?
The way software companies are going and your general attitude is, "Eh, this is old technology, anybody should be able to afford it, what's the big deal?"
Totally tone deaf to the poor and people living on the edge and others living on a fixed income. My mother in law is pushing 80 and I had to build her a new PC since she couldn't afford to purchase a new desktop to do her taxes on since now our state requires you to file electronically and shockingly, her tax software no longer runs on her 8 year old desktop.
So instead of helping her learn one of the many (free) web-based tax applications, you built her a new computer to run a new (paid) version of the tax software she was already using? How does that even make sense?
She tried several of the "Free" web based tax apps, and always had problems with them. And yeah, I built her a PC that could run a current version of the software she paid for.
It makes sense when you want to help someone to use the software they already paid for, instead of pointing an elderly person to the web and saying, "See? They have FREE versions, go grab one and figure it on your own!"
Sorry, but that to me is kind of a callous solution compared to what I did.
> It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already.
You're exaggerating. The first really plausible SSDs to appear in consumer PCs appeared in around 2006 or 2007, so maybe 15 years tops. For instance, Dell offered a computer with 32 GB of SSD storage in mid-2007. This was already not much storage at the time, and the drive alone cost over $500. This was arguably not a consumer affordable product at that price, and the laptops involved were actually the Latitude series (targeted to businesses) anyway. Apple followed this up in 2008 with a 64 GB SSD, but this was a $1000 upgrade.
Suffice it to say that a vast majority of people were only buying (and could probably only afford to buy) computers with rotational drives well into the 2010s. Many of the computers they bought are still running today. Many affordable computers that shipped with Windows 10 still had rotational drives. It's absurd to overlook a whole class of people who can't, unlike the wealthy, upgrade their MacBooks every 2 or 3 years. They probably don't have MacBooks to begin with. Parents are passing old hardware between children like hand-me-downs. That's before you even leave the United States.
I think your comment misses the point at a deeper level, which is that most people in this thread already have SSDs (I certainly do), but are disappointed that performance matters so little to many developers that they are fine with seeing software run at the same speed on today's insanely fast hardware that its predecessor did 20 years ago. Software is much more powerful than it was in the days of floppy disks, but it's not much more powerful than it was 15 years ago. We've seen a generational increase in performance, but we've wasted it. I think that's worth some disappointment.
On my 2012 mbp I have the OS and software running on the SSD in the drive bay, and a beefy hdd in the disk slot for storage. I set this up back when a 256gb SSD was pretty expensive, but maybe that sort of strategy would work for you now that SSD prices have gone up again, having a fast drive for software and the system and a big drive for storage.
I've had massive issues with Ubuntu on a HDD. Every time a big file was added to disk (like a download), the indexing system would run and render the whole system unusable for minutes (100% disk and CPU). Upgrading to an SSD solved the issue.
That depends how good Linux's support for very-low-priority background tasks is.
UNIX priorities don't handle this situation well because a low priority process is still technically immediately runnable and can cause priority inversions by clearing out all kinds of system caches that your foreground app was using.
