[tpm] OT: Are SSDs really worth purchasing to speed up our computing experience?

Liam R E Quin liam at holoweb.net
Wed May 30 21:53:56 PDT 2012


On Wed, 2012-05-30 at 23:53 -0400, Antonio Sun wrote:

> For any old Linux box, with several TB of HD, will investing in an SSD
> really make much different?

Probably, yes. Disk access tends to be a major bottleneck on Unix-like
systems.

The traditional trick was to put /bin and /etc on a faster disk, along
with /tmp and swap. For Linux, /usr/lib64 would be a good candidate.

But it depends on your usage.

If you have 16 TB of RAM and only 12T of disk it'll go even faster if
you have a background process to access all of disk to get it all into
the cache... but most of us have massively more disk than memory.

Boot time is only a few seconds these days anyway, but saving a fraction
of a second on starting every process would very quickly add up.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml



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