Re: SSD for Centos SWAP /tmp & /var/ partition

[John Hodrien <J.H.Hodrien@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 26 May 2011, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> But I'm generally puzzled by the emphasis many people put on speed.
> Unless one is a gamer, it doesn't seem to me to make much difference
> if it takes 13 second or 30 seconds to boot up.
> Either way it is going to take the same time to get to an URL.

It all comes down to price.  SSDs aren't massively popular yet just because of
the price per unit of storage.  When the price comes close to that of disk
(and it doesn't have to match it), they'll romp away.

If you're talking from a clean boot, your SSD laptop is going to beat you to
the URL too, as your browser's going to load faster.  And your disk cache for
the browser suddenly becomes much faster and much more useful.  Your URL
happens to contain a java applet, so you'll be grinding away for a bit while
the VM springs itself to life.

It's funny what a diffence it seems to make.  Try running a VM in a ramdisk to
feel what fast storage can feel like.

So the argument is to throw so much memory into your machine that you never
touch the disk, and never reboot it.  Sound argument (as long as you don't
mind risking your data on writes by not syncing), but expensive.  So you go
for the cheaper option of adding a ~32Gbyte SSD into your system.  Cheaper
than RAM, but faster than disk, and faster than being safe with just lots of
memory.  You back all that with a 2Tb 3.5" disk for bulk storage.

Spinning disks seem an awful lot like victorian technology taken too far.  In
the long term, what's *not* to like about the idea of fully solid state
storage?

jh
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