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

[mashton]

You'd be amazed at the impact on your linux boot ups.

I just built a new 1U server, with 2 120GB Intel 520 series Sata3 SSDs
mirrored and 2x1TB SATA drives. I use centOS as my server OS. On
installation I made a small partion for /boot on the SSD , then I had 2
mirrored LVMs one the balance of the SSD and the other the SATA mirror. On
installation I put /etc on the sata mirror, and the balance on the SSD
mirror. At first boot up after installing I thought something was broken or
wrong, since after the last bios post I had a login prompt in under 9
seconds (that 9 seconds includes he 3 second image countdown centOS does,
from there 6 seconds).

So I rebooted, same thing. Now I had done a minimal install, so I then
added KVM ( which is what this server was to be used for ), and all the
other tools and utilities.

Rebooted, and dang prompt was now only 10 seconds! Was very impressed. The
server is still on my testing bench and I'm playing with a few different
configurations for the VM's to maximize the speed of hosted VM's on
different image types and disk partioning methods.

Right now I have 2 VM's, one a Win2000 server running SQLServer ( have to
due to legacy apps not yet ported ) and a centOS VM for mySQL. So now when
I boot, the host and both VM's are up and running in about 25 seconds from
last bios post.

The 500 series of intel SSDs are not cheap, these were about 180 each, but
they are commercial grade and in a server should last 5 years.

Mike

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:53 AM, Liam R E Quin <liam at holoweb.net> wrote:

> 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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