[tlug] SSDs

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

Just in case anybody's curious, today I replaced a 5200 RPM 2.5" HDD
in a Thinkpad x61 with a Silicon Power 32 GB SSD. On the old drive the
Thinkpad (which is a reasonably powerful beast, having a dual-core 2 GHz
T7300), was somewhat sluggish with Ubuntu 9.04, and a dog with Windows
XP. (My T42, with a single core worth about 80% of a core on the x61,
felt considerably faster under Windows XP, possibly becuase of the 7200
RPM drive.)

Anyway, the 32 GB SSDs are down to about 10,000 yen now, so I figured
I'd give one a go. It's a definite improvement (except for the disk
space); Ubuntu now feels pretty darn reasonable on this machine,
and starts up as quickly as anything else I've ever seen. It's not
quite competition for my i7; but for single-threaded stuff (such as,
unfortunately, building and testing my trading system), it's over 2/3
the speed now.

The sequential read/write rates are not what's claimed; rather than the
120 MB/sec read and 70 MB/sec write, I'm seeing more like 80 MB/sec
read and 35 MB/sec write (though this is through the filesystem, and
is eating up a reasonable amount of CPU given that it's encrypted). I
also sometimes see my system wedge for a dozen seconds or so during
very heavy disk activity. Still, it's a great improvement overall. And
it's fun to see the system occasionally peak at 500-750 transactions
per second on that drive, which is easily three or four times what any
non-enterprise IDE RAID array will do.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com