On 12/30/2014 10:25 PM, Rodney Baker wrote:
Hi all. A question for those with a little more experience with SSD's. I want to move oS 13.1 from conventional HDD's to a 128GB SSD, everything except /home. /var and some other general data storage partitions (so basically /boot, /, /usr, /usr/local and /opt.
I have these already as separate partitions - can I use dd to copy the boot sector and relevant partitions to the SSD and then connect it up in place of the first hdd (currently /dev/sda) and expect the system to boot?
Would it be better to dd the boot sector, then create the new partitions and rsync them across?
Ultimately migrating is just ... Migrating. That this is HD->SSD is no different from migrating from HD(IDE) to HD(SATA) for example. What you do need to consider is your underlying strategy. First, the system as a whole, distribution plus either KDE or Gnome, boot, ROOT, /usr, /usr/share -- that I have partitioned off, /usr/local, /opt, can all fit in less that 20G. Yes, you can put all of that on the SSD. But what else? How much parallelism do you want? A lot gets back to your application set. I do a fair bit of photo processing and in my case there is little advantage to having /boot, root, or any binaries on ultrafast storage. Once the program is loaded, that it. Neither do I need fast ~/Photogrphs since I only ever load and save and speed isn't that critical there. But I do need huge buffers and scratchpad, and if I direct them to /tmp and put /tmp on fast storage, since I don't have the RAM for a tmpfs ... Oh wait, if I make the SWAP fast storage and use /tmp as tmpfs overflowing onto SWAP .... And paging to SWAP ... And SWAP is SSD. You see what I mean about strategy? But then again, some people run a web site and some people run a database backed web site and others run a database server or network file server ... Some might want to put all of /srv and/or /var on the SSD. What you put on the SSD depends on your context, 'cos Context is Everything To me the idea of putting all of /boot on fast storage that I can use to accelerate an application that I spend most of my time in seems like an ${EXPLETIVE} waste. I boot only when I have new hardware or a new kernel. (or a extended power fail) I can make another good strategy case to have /mnt/ssd/{bin,lib} and set PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and of course LD_PRELOAD, and move the binaries that are applicable to the particular application set you are using that day. I have a 20G /tmp on the hard drive, and think of using an overlay tmpfs over that when I run some applications. Focus, Focus, Focus. Of course if you have a big enough SSD all this is much softened. As I say, with your 120G SD the basic system isn't going to be more than 2OG leaving you 100G to play with. 10G swap, 10G /tmp. Who needs a 12oG device? Oh right, its a web server or SAMBA master. But even so, stop and think about WHERE you will need the speed. * How often do you reboot your system? * How often do you log out and log in? * What applications do you run that consume /tmp or SWAP? It may be that having a SSD will not speed up your work and workflow. For me and the applications I run, moving from 2-core CPU to a 4-core CPU produced a dramatic speedup because the application I use for photo-processing has code that can make use of that. Right now, more memory would be the cheapest possible upgrade for speed. However I'm more concerned about backup and archiving. I know the cloud is the right answer to part of that but my cable provider has a odd sales plan: to get more total byes per month I have to upgrade speed, which I don't need, and that means upgrading equipment etc, at their price sheet. So while a larger capacity SSD might be a nice toy to play with its doesn’t fit in with my workflow and my strategy. Until .. http://ark.intel.com/products/82930 http://www.techpowerup.com/176640/eurocom-ships-first-8-core-xeon-e5-2690-ba... Or 12 core http://www.notebookcheck.net/Eurocom-s-Panther-5SE-is-world-s-first-12-core-... quote> Now this powerful heavyweight laptop becomes the world's first one to be equipped with the 12-cores/24-threads Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 processor designed specifically for mobile servers. The Eurocom Panther 5SE can be configured as needed and the top processors available are the Intel Xeon E5-2695 v2 or E5-2697 v2. In addition to these, the Panther 5SE offers support for the entire E5-2600 v2 family, from E5-2620 v2 to E5-2697 v2. The quad channel memory setups can go up to 32 GB of DDR3 1600 MHz, while storage available on this mobile server can reach 6 TB (four internal 1.5 TB drives) with RAID 0,1,5,10 capability. </quote> Dream on, Anton! -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org