[ltp] solid state drive?

[Theodore Tso]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 02:51:39PM +0100, Laurent wrote:
>
> They work fine if you know how to handel them. There
> are some tricks and problems you should know about
> ( http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669 ), but google
> will tell you more then you ever wanted to know.

The article you quote is specific for the Intel X25-M drive, and not
necessarily for all SSD's (certainly not the older first generation
SSD's.)

> The runtime will not change much. Buying a bigger battery is
> the better way.

You might see 20-25 minutes additional runtime.  So, not a lot, but
there should be at least some improvement if you are using one of the
newer SSD's that have a native SATA interface.

> Using a CF Card for SSD works fine on PATA-Thinkpads. Even
> MLC-cards will survive several years desktop usage. But
> don't use EXT3, don't write lots of small files, never
> defragment. EXT2 works very fine, tmp mounted on a ramfs
> helps a lot.

Using a tmpfs is definitely a good idea; at least with the Intel
X25-M, using ext3 shouldn't be a problem.  The X25-M is rated for
100GB of writes a day for five years, and that's plenty for a journal.
My system currently has about 10GB of writes over two day's worth of
uptime, and this includes e-mail and kernel compiles, and this is with
an ext4 mounted filesystem.  (You can measure this using iostat.)

   			     	      	      - Ted