On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Kyle Bader <kyle.ba...@gmail.com> wrote: >> - SSD vs 10000rpm vs big-and-cheap hard drive for rootfs/system files. >> I lean toward the latter since RAM caches it anyway. > > SSDs can make things snappier for boot times. Having lots of ram for > disk cache eliminates the benefit after booted since ram is even > faster than a SSD.
I decided on a hard drive for the primary disk rather than SSD. For a combination of size (1TB), performance (according to benchmarks) and price (according to my pockets) I chose a Samsung HD103SJ (7200rpm, 1TB, 32MB cache, 2x500gb platters) drive which appears to have great overall performance and low operating temperatures. I haven't received the disks yet so for now I'm just playing with an old spare drive and installed Windows 7 (trial) for configuring/testing the overclock settings since all of the motherboard tools are in Windows only. Once I have it running fast & cool, it's Gentoo time! I also tried the Gentoo LiveDVD 10.1, written to a USB flash drive (with unetbootin), and it worked great. I had the PC hooked up to my TV with HDMI and it used proper 16:9 resolution, got DHCP address automatically and everything seemed to simply work properly. It will be great to use Konsole and Firefox during install, compared to having a 80x25 terminal like I did many years ago in my last install. Good job to the LiveDVD team!
