On 19 July 2013, at 19:58, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Fri, 19 Jul 2013 19:45:36 +0100, Mick wrote: > >> I have a MUCH smaller /home than Dale and on a new box I was thinking >> of having it on a HDD, along with all things portage related. >> … /home is written all the >> time with mail and various application profile folders, browser cache >> and what have you. > > Which is why you want it on the fastest device possible. The whole point > of a faster drive is to speed up IO intensive operations. If you then > consign specifically those operations to the old HDD, why bother?
I don't know how any Linux apps compare, but I've found on the Mac in the past that defragmentation of a single browser file - I think it was the history file, and I think it was around 100meg in size - made a significant difference to Safari's behaviour. The difference can be so much on a heavily fragmented system that the browser could become unusable, yet snappy and responsive after copying the file and replacing it. This really illustrated to me how unaware I was of SSD / hard-disk behaviour. I aways thought I knew when ~ was being accessed - that's when I'm opening a photo or saving a letter, right? Well, I was wrong - files in home are being read and written not only every time the browser opens a webpage, but also lots of other times we're unaware of the activity. IMO this is why it's flawed to try and pick and mix which directories to put on an SSD. I mean, if you've ripped your DVD collection and you have terrabytes of movies then it's easy to exclude those, but nevertheless it's easy to accumulate so much crap that it'll no longer fit on an affordable SSD. IMO it should be left to the o/s to decide what should be on a spinning platter and what on an SSD. I don't know if these are yet good enough, but they're what I'd look at first: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/What-s-new-in-Linux-3-9-1845705.html http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM2ODM Stroller.
