[ltp] Re: solid state drive?

[Micha Feigin]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:47:18 +0100
Marius Gedminas <marius@gedmin.as> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 05:09:42PM +0200, Micha Feigin wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:21:50 +0100
> > km <km@grogg.org> wrote:
> > > See this article on toms hardware for power comparisons:
> > > http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968.html
> > > 
> > > The wins on the other hand is:
> > >  - speed (my x300 boots XP to desktop in 7 seconds and ubuntu in 15)
> > >  - robustness (no moving parts)
> > >  - sound (no moving parts)
> > 
> > Yes, but AFAIK write is a lot slower than standard disk
> 
> It may depend a lot on the SSD in question.
> 
> E.g. my Asus EeePC 900 is horribly slow; basically you can't use Firefox
> while downloading a file in the background because those fsync() calls
> make it freeze for five seconds every ten seconds or so.
> 

That is because the op asked about cheap SSDs. There was a thread somewhere on
one of the mailing lists I'm registered to, can't remember at the moment which
one. Apparently IIRC there are two technologies for SSD. The cheap one that is
probably in the EeePC which is very slow to write and has a life span of about
10000 write cycles and the expensive one (a 80gb costs about as much as the
whole EeePC) which is fast (at least on par to regular disk) and has a life
cycle of around 100000+ writes.

They can't give the cheap ones away. And they are not recommended. It's probably
going to be still another couple of years before SSDs are worth while.

> On the other hand there's
> http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html
> 
> Marius Gedminas