Comment Re:Not really (Score 5, Interesting) 130
Generally, I disagree with the statement as written. I would say that there are other LIMITS. Not bottlenecks. Although for something like video encoding you could easily turn things around and say 'Look! Your hard-drive is bottlenecked by your encoder!'. Yeah yeah. So I guess I agree more than I want to admit.
Almost by definition, there's always going to be a bottleneck somewhere in your system: the chances of ALL of your PC's components working at *exactly* 100% of their capacity is pretty close to zero. And that's for a particular task. Randomize the task and it all goes to hell. So the question we are discussing is really 'If I remove bottleneck n, how many seconds does it shave of the time to run task x?', averaged over a set of 'common' tasks. But if we made our external drives all as fast as DRAM (or whatever. as above), there would be no other single bottleneck left in the system that you could remove which would give you even a handful of percentage points of improvement. Except maybe un-installing Outlook. Or banning Subversion repositories from your enterprise environment -_-.
For most components in a PC, you have to square the performance to see a significant performance difference, all else being held equal. Tasks that lag noticeably, and that are not dramatically improved by a simple doubling of disk performance, ( 3.5ms seek, 150MB sustained transfer ) are pretty rare. Video encoding, for instance. Certainly getting more common. But with a good video card and a cheap harddrive, you're getting pretty close if not exceeding maximum write speeds on the drive while doing a CUDA rip.
I think that if Microsoft had released a little monitor that displayed the cumulative time spent blocked on [Disk|CPU|Graphics|Memory|Network] (a column in Task Manager, for instance. Hint, hint) back in Windows 95, spinning disks would be considered quaint anachronisms by now. Look at how much gamers spend on video cards, for almost no benefit.
Minute 2 of the Samsung SSD advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs is pretty interesting, if you haven't seen it yet.