Disk I/O as a bottleneck?

[shimi]

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 7:28 AM, Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>wrote:

>
> Instead of buying a huge SSD for "thousands of dollars" another option you
> might consider is to buy a relatively small SSD with just enough space to
> hold your "/" partition and swap space. Even 20 G may be enough.
> The rest of your disk - holding your source code, photos, songs, movies,
> or whatever you typically fill a terabyte with, will be a normal, cheap,
> hard disk.
>
> Several of my friends have gone with such a setup on their latest computer,
> and they are very pleased.
>
>
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.

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.

Performance after > 1 year as mentioned:
# hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 722 MB in  3.00 seconds = 240.27 MB/sec

As always, YMMV :)

-- Shimi
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