<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 7:28 AM, Nadav Har'El <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nyh@math.technion.ac.il">nyh@math.technion.ac.il</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<br>
Instead of buying a huge SSD for "thousands of dollars" another option you<br>
might consider is to buy a relatively small SSD with just enough space to<br>
hold your "/" partition and swap space. Even 20 G may be enough.<br>
The rest of your disk - holding your source code, photos, songs, movies,<br>
or whatever you typically fill a terabyte with, will be a normal, cheap,<br>
hard disk.<br>
<br>
Several of my friends have gone with such a setup on their latest computer,<br>
and they are very pleased.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br></font></blockquote><div><br>I have set up my latest system just like that. Though mine was a bit pricey: I went for the Intel X25-E 32GB. The OS and homedir are on it; Large datasets go on various Samsung SpinPoint 1TB F3 drives I've installed as well. The system is already more than a year old, and the free space is < 20%, which, I am assuming, means I've already filled the disk (due to deletes and the SSD wear-leveling algorithms) and already doing erases, and....the performance is still nothing short of AMAZING - sub-1ms seek time is a great thing when you scan the filesystem etc.<br>
<br>It just feels as if Disk I/O is no longer my bottleneck (and the CPU is a Quad Core AMD PhenomII 955 with 8GB RAM...). Of course - I don't use swap.<br><br>Performance after > 1 year as mentioned:<br># hdparm -t /dev/sda<br>
<br>/dev/sda:<br> Timing buffered disk reads: 722 MB in 3.00 seconds = 240.27 MB/sec<br><br>As always, YMMV :)<br><br>-- Shimi<br></div></div><br></div>