[ltp] Buying a New Thinkpad

[Robert Tomsick]

On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 19:41 +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 4. Mai 2011 schrieb Robert Tomsick:
> > On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 13:40 +0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> > > On mer., 2011-05-04 at 04:08 +0000, Steven J. Owens wrote:
> > > >   One thing I forgot to mention; it's not clear to me that the t520
> > > > 
> > > > has space for an SSD drive.  I've seen forum postings, etc, mention
> > > > that it's possible to use the stock hard drive but add an SSD for a
> > > > swap drive, without having to jettison other hardware (e.g. we're
> > > > not talking about swapping the multiburner out for the SSD).  How
> > > > do I check on that?
> > > 
> > > Putting swap on a SSD looks like a weird idea, you might kill it
> > > reallyt soon by constantly writing to it.
> > 
> > It may or may not be a weird idea depending on the SSD.  The Intel MLC
> > drives are rated for something like 10-20 GB of writes per day for 5
> > years straight, and SLC drives seem to be at least an order of
> > magnitude above that.
> 
> Hmmm, but who wants to use swap for anything else than hibernation, 
> considering that its possible to equip a T520 with 8 GiB of RAM for a IMHO 
> quite low fraction of the price of the complete laptop?

Because every once in a while you need to do something that uses a whole
ton of memory?  Or at least I do.  I've run into swap on my workstation
before, and that has 12 GB of RAM.  It's not *that* hard to do if you're
running a big IDE plus a couple VMs for testing.  IMHO, hitting swap is
preferable to OOM kills.

> I think I will also use noatime and put /tmp, maybe some others, into a 
> tmpfs.

Why not use relatime instead?  That way you still get most the
performance benefits without the potential breakage that noatime
introduces.

To be clear: I'm not saying that you definitely should put swap on an
SSD.  I'm just of a mind that it's not really a big deal if you do.

-Rob