On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Michael Mol <mike...@gmail.com> wrote: > Something that's been tickling my brain for a couple years now, and > you guys are probably the right ones to ask. > > I haven't dropped coin for an SSD (yet), but I was wondering about > uses for them beyond using them for / or /home. > > 1) What about sitting swap (partition, file, whatever) on the SSD? > Presumably, in scenarios where expanding the RAM in a system is > prohibitively expensive, an SSD could reduce the impact of swap > thrash.
Swap on flash memory is faster than on disk, but it is still swap and still sucks. :) There's no reason why it won't work, but I doubt it'll have as much of a positive impact as you're hoping. In fact depending on the SSD some don't cope with a storm of tiny simultaneous random reads and writes and might block even worse than a fast HDD. IMO. > 2) While my system rarely goes above using 2-2.5GB of RAM, I enjoy > having 6-8GB of RAM, just for the file cache. Of course, I lose that > when I reboot; the cache needs to be repopulated. Has there been any > work in the kernel for doing things like Vista/Win7's ReadyBoost? > ReadyBoost has a ridiculous limit to only using 4GB of a flash drive, > but I'd think that an 80GB SSD would be a massive performance > improvement. I believe DM-Cache provides this kind of functionality in Linux. I've never tried it. You can also buy a hybrid hard drive, it is a traditional HDD with SSD built-in for caching. That is transparent to the operating system.
