SSD on desktop linux

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

This fall I decided to spend a little (very little - $60) on a small SSD
to act as my primary hard drive - for /, /tmp, /var /usr - basically
everything except /home.  I had heard a lot about them, and though my
motherboard does not support SATA3, it does support SATA2, so I thought
it might be worth a try.  At worst, I knew I could put it into an old,
enfeebled laptop that would then be rejuvenated by the new drive and the
installation of linux.

I put the drive in and started the installation process - I chose to
manually partition so that I could specify a bigger swap partition.  I
don't actually have much RAM in the machine, so I thought that a big-ish
swap might pay off.

The first thing I noticed was how fast the installation went - I haven't
installed on the same hardware in a couple of years, so I don't have
metrics, but it happened too fast to leave unattended.  I found staring
at a root prompt on the rebooted machine in something like 10 minutes.

I install Debian, and once I get the stable distribution up and running
I install a few key things (sudo, vim-full) and then I change
/etc/apt/sources.list to use Debian testing and do an apt-get
dist-upgrade.  I like the compromise between stability and recency in
the testing distribution - most upgrades work perfectly, with perhaps
one every 3 years that requires post-upgrade intervention.

I figured this upgrade, which typically involves hundreds of packages,
would be a good test of the new hardware.  It was, in that it happened
extremely quickly - downloads seemed to happen at the same speed
(unsurprising) but the unpacking and installation of packages happened
at blazing speed.  In an hour I had my machine set up with all the same
software I previously used, from playing with screwdrivers and mounting
rails to looking at the web in Iceweasel (Firefox).

Launching Firefox is particularly telling - it used to take about a
three-count, but now it happens before I can exhale.

Installing an SSD in my desktop machine makes a *huge* difference - it
is the best upgrade I've made to a desktop since I hooked up an LCD
monitor.

One thing of note - I did not realize that Mushkin shipped their
2.5-inch drives with mounting rails, so I bought mounting rails with the
drive, which was a waste.  Live and learn.
-- 

yours,

William

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