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On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Paul Hartman |
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<paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com> wrote: |
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>> Something that's been tickling my brain for a couple years now, and |
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>> you guys are probably the right ones to ask. |
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>> |
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>> I haven't dropped coin for an SSD (yet), but I was wondering about |
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>> uses for them beyond using them for / or /home. |
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>> |
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>> 1) What about sitting swap (partition, file, whatever) on the SSD? |
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>> Presumably, in scenarios where expanding the RAM in a system is |
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>> prohibitively expensive, an SSD could reduce the impact of swap |
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>> thrash. |
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> |
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> Swap on flash memory is faster than on disk, but it is still swap and |
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> still sucks. :) There's no reason why it won't work, but I doubt it'll |
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> have as much of a positive impact as you're hoping. In fact depending |
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> on the SSD some don't cope with a storm of tiny simultaneous random |
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> reads and writes and might block even worse than a fast HDD. IMO. |
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Yeah, true; the write caching and queuing of some of the lower-end |
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drives are crap, from what I've heard. The primary reason I haven't |
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spent on and SSD yet is while I could afford a low-end drive, I can't |
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afford a smaller-size drive that's a good implementation. |
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> |
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>> 2) While my system rarely goes above using 2-2.5GB of RAM, I enjoy |
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>> having 6-8GB of RAM, just for the file cache. Of course, I lose that |
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>> when I reboot; the cache needs to be repopulated. Has there been any |
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>> work in the kernel for doing things like Vista/Win7's ReadyBoost? |
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>> ReadyBoost has a ridiculous limit to only using 4GB of a flash drive, |
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>> but I'd think that an 80GB SSD would be a massive performance |
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>> improvement. |
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> |
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> I believe DM-Cache provides this kind of functionality in Linux. I've |
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> never tried it. |
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That's *exactly* the kind of thing I was hoping was being worked on. I |
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hadn't heard anyone was actually *doing* it. |
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> |
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> You can also buy a hybrid hard drive, it is a traditional HDD with SSD |
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> built-in for caching. That is transparent to the operating system. |
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They've sounded interesting, yes. |
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-- |
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:wq |
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