SSDs

[Alex Volkov]

Short answer is yes,

SSD give a big improvement insofar as I'd say on laptops they are a 
must, as an added benefit, battery life somewhat improves and that 
grinding sound disappears, now only CPU fan annoys me.

Mine has read write speed of 500-550 MiB/s. compared to realistically 
200MiB for hard drives. Also SSDs don't have  seek time issue so small 
files are copied significantly faster.

I used not to have swap partition, but since the easiest way of enabling 
hibernation is to dump everything into swap, now I have one, I also 
moved /tmp to RAM, besides that and some tweaking of block allocation in 
lvm/ext4 I use it as a normal disk, though mine drive is slightly old 
now, you might not even need to do that.

Disk IO is the slowest part of any computer these days and apart from 
the fact that RAM is dirt cheap and everyone should max out their 
systems with it, switching to SSDs for root/home should be the next upgrade.

Besides that you might want to tweak IO scheduler, also how many CPUs 
your system has?

As a second thought, if you get SSD that is big enough, mount home 
partition under it as well, and mount all the directories that contain 
large files into /home.

Alex.

On 23/04/12 01:38 PM, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
>  From time to time I am curious about using an SSD for the OS on my
> desktop.  Is anyone keeping /, usr, /tmp, /var (and other directories as
> appropriate) on an SSD on their desktop?  Is there an improvement in
> performance?
>
> The slowest and most annoying thing I do on my desktop is moving files
> around - pushing video onto the network, copying large collections of
> files, etc.  Whenever I have big IO going on my desktop becomes very
> unresponsive.  Would moving that activity to a non-root disk help?
> Would an SSD help for general system performance?
>
> Any experiences would be welcome.  Thanks!

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