Re: [tlug] SSDs

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-08-12 11:30 +0900 (Wed), Kyle Hasegawa wrote:

> Still, I feel better avoiding write-heavy applications on expensive SSD....

I would too, which is why I bought a cheap SSD. :-) (I've usually ended
up paying around 10,000 yen for a drive anyway, so 10,000 yen for an SSD
feels the same, if I don't need a huge amount of storage capacity.)

> I even disabled the swap partition on my SSD notebook for that reason.
> Whether it will make a difference in the performance or life of the
> drive is unclear....

It's pretty clear that it's going to make a pretty significant
difference in the performance of your computer if you start swapping,
though! :-)

Personally, my guess would be that swaps are such a small component
of the total number of writes you do (unless you're swapping awfully
frequently, and thus really ought to add more memory, anyway) that it
makes no difference. Lots of applications write and update various
little temporary files and the like. It would probably make a much
larger difference to mount a memory-based filesystem of some sort on
/tmp. (I've always wondered why Ubuntu doesn't do this by default,
actually.) To make it reasonably large, you'll want to allocate a good
chunk of swap space, but it should be fairly rare that any writes to
that filesystem actually go to disk via the process's memory being
swapped out.

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