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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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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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> 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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I believe DM-Cache provides this kind of functionality in Linux. I've |
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never tried it. |
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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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