Go buy a Solid State Drive (SSD) right now

Seriously, you can ignore this blog post, just go buy an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD right now. Go ahead.....

Buy it at Amazon.com

Why you ask. Because this my friends is what I like to refer to as silly fast. I've bought the latest processors, filled my memory banks, but I can't remember the last time I got the price to performance ratio of buying the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. Let me share a quick benchmark from my original disk compared to the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD:

Western Digital Cavier Blue 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 

Sequential Read : 48.250 MB/s

Sequential Write : 62.797 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 24.337 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 32.473 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :  0.273 MB/s [66.7 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :  0.820 MB/s [200.2 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  0.661 MB/s [161.4 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :  0.873 MB/s [213.1 IOPS]

OCZ Vertex 3 VTX-25SAT3-240GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD

Sequential Read : 486.503 MB/s

Sequential Write : 303.451 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 412.469 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 299.593 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   31.674 MB/s [7732.9 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :   69.215 MB/s [16898.2 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 185.728 MB/s [45343.8 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 251.923 MB/s [61504.7 IOPS]

I was completly floored by the performance difference. I think Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror said it best:

I can't imagine using a computer without a SSD any more; it'd be like going back to dial-up internet or 13" CRTs or single button mice. Over my dead body, man!

For a much more thorough review and benchmarks checkout Storage Reviews take on the OCZ vertex 3 drive.

DNS Benchmark. And the winner is....

When was the last time you thought about how fast your DNS queries were occurring? I will be the first to tell you that it hadn't crossed my mind in a while, but after Google recently announced a public DNS service I was curious to see how it stacked up against my current provider, Comcast. I must admit I almost changed my DNS settings blindly and was glad I didn't after running a few benchmarks.

Now a few of you may be asking why do I care and Google provides a great answer "The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day." Google's pitch to try their service is based on the expectations that you will get a speed improvement, better security, and absolutely no redirection. I will leave the security claim to others and agree they have no redirection. My main focus was, can it make my browsing experience faster?

Now everyone's results will vary so before you decide to start changing your DNS servers make sure you see who offers the best performance and offers the services, availability, etcetera that you expect. Below are my results for comparison and to see what to expect.

My local providers (Comcast) DNS services outperformed the closest competitor (OpenDNS) by 29%. As you can see from the results Google wasn't even in the top 5! I had anticipated a better showing from a performance perspective from the Google offerings. Even without the performance impact you may wish to use a DNS server outside of your ISP for other reasons, such as URL blocking. Now this is a very narrow test, using only 15,052 URLs to lookup and was limited to a small window of time. I would be curious to see this test executed over a longer period of time and see if the results stick.

The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.
	Why should you try Google Public DNS? By using Google Public DNS you can: Speed up your browsing experience. Improve your security. Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.