Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?

[Joshua Murphy]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:42 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann
<volker.armin.hemmann@××××××××××××.de> wrote:
> On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Grant wrote:
>> >>> I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance
>> >>> and even reduce noise.  Has anyone tried this?  I was considering
>> >>> getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system
>> >>> on it.  There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some
>> >>> are very much better than others.  SLC sounds vastly superior compared
>> >>> to MLC, but also much more expensive.
>> >
>> > Typically the reports I've read have been from people using CFcards -
>> > 4gig is now unbelievably cheap, and CFcards talk EIDE with only a small,
>> > cheap physical adaptor - on MythTV frontends & low-overhead servers.
>> > CFcards look ideal for these purposes because they're quiet - you want to
>> > minimise noise when playing back video in the living room, for instance.
>>
>> Great idea.  If I'm only putting the main system on flash, I could use
>> a CFcard instead of an SSD.  Storing music and videos on flash will be
>> too expensive for awhile.  How does CFcard performance compare to SSD
>> or conventional hard disk performance?
>>
>> - Grant
>
>
> well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec?
> cfdisk - 18mb/sec?

The Velociraptor is the only one I know of that easily tops 100MB/s
(outside of SAS drives, particularly 15k rpm) but most good drives
easily beat the high end CF speeds of 40-50MB/s. It's also quiet
compared to a lot of drives, uses less power, and runs cooler (of
course, SSD wins here).

On a vaguely related note, though, my system drive rarely spins up
after boot, as I have local.start prefetching all of my major
applications and libraries (makes Firefox startup comprable to IE on
Windows)... only my storage drive does very much reading in a day, and
that's simply because my 4GB of ram can't begin to hold all my music
... though an MLC based SSD would actually do wonders for that side of
things, as I seldom write, but often read from my mass of music and
seek times are actually noticable when I start hopping from one song
to the next (though this could just be buffering delays in mpd).
Testing with hdparm... I come up with uncached read speeds of 72MB/s
on my system drive and 81.5MB/s on my storage drive.

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy