Everyone loves SSDs. Very good thing to use for Minecraft, it'll speed the world loading time up a lot. With a normal HDD and in singleplayer, you get a little bit of chunk loading lag when you move really fast, like with Railcraft's high speed trains. Or when you move between dimensions. With an SSD this all becomes buttery smooth. Friend of mine has an SSD and doesn't even get a loading screen when going into the nether. Of course, we'd also notice the improvements if Alice gets an SSD, though not as much since the data still needs to be sent over the internet.
I'd thought we'd used RAM drives for the past couple years, so the gains wouldn't be THAT huge... or am I very mistaken?
Ram is WAY faster than a SSD I believe. Although CPU cache is even faster (Have fun with that idea). You still need to read/write to the disk at some point though. RAM is lost at reboot(At the loss of power but whatevs).
We have used ramdisks in the past but that has limited extra dimensions and such. With an SSD we will have more possibilites to do fun stuff.
Still, SSDs will be inherently faster because of the way they work. And they provide a lot more space than a ramdisk. The only place where you might notice it is when generating new chunks, and that shouldn't be happening often anyway.
It's correct, HDDs can handle way more write operations than SSDs. For a normal PC user/gamer, an SSD will still live for 8-10 years just like an HDD (if you handle your stuff with care at least), but on a server it might die after a few months, maybe only a few weeks even. I don't have much experience with SSDs so I can't say how long it would actually last us. There are tools to observe SSD health of course, so if admins regularly check that then its approximate lifespan can be calculated. Edit: lolnope. SSD can't even touch ramdisk. Nevertheless, they do have more space - ramdisk will, in this situation, only be useful if we have >100 GB RAM, and that would just be too expensive. Anyway, SSDs are way faster than HDDs even if those are in a RAID setup, so they'll still be a big performance boost.
When I said "SSDs are inherently faster" I didn't mean faster than a ramdisk, I meant faster than a standard HDD. Sorry :3
Umm, dunno, google it. I don't have an SSD, and the last time I worked with one all the software stuff was set up by my boss. (I was in an internship back then.) So I can't remember the tool's name. It was a SanDisk SDD, maybe the tool is from SanDisk too?
