On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 8:46 AM, shimi <linux...@shimi.net> wrote: > > I really don't think so. SSDs (IMHO) makes computer much faster due to the > VERY low seek time - the time it takes you to get a block. Compare 10-20ms > with ~0.1ms. A regular hard drive simply wastes a lost of time seeking the > data, instead of... reading it :)
Absolutely correct. However, there is a tiny fraction of the seek time that is not always a waste, and I think it is worth mentioning. There is, I believe, a consideration that is usually overlooked when SSDs are considered for server use, including a "desktop" that is used as a server, which is why I am mentioning it here. In a server, magnetic disk rotation - or, rather the air turbulence generated between the rotating disk and its enclosure - is the only source of entropy that makes random numbers random (seek times have a tiny random component due to the turbulence, and it is captured). This does not apply to SSDs, and as a result your security may be compromised (attacks exploiting not very random RNGs are well known). In a laptop or a desktop entropy is also generated by keyboard and mouse (which may or may not be good enough). In a server that hardly applies. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
