On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
Yeah, true; the write caching and queuing of some of the lower-end drives are crap, from what I've heard. The primary reason I haven't spent on and SSD yet is while I could afford a low-end drive, I can't afford a smaller-size drive that's a good implementation. > >> 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. That's *exactly* the kind of thing I was hoping was being worked on. I hadn't heard anyone was actually *doing* 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. They've sounded interesting, yes. -- :wq
