On 2017-10-12 15:19, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 12/10/17 08:05 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Well, as you may know I replaced my laptop rust hard disk with an SSD (~500GiB), and added a 250 GB SSD to my desktop, which holds the swap and the root filesystem (including /usr this time). I keep all the rust hard disks for home and data.
Although my SATA speed is low for today (3 Gb/s, rev 2), after two or three weeks I must say that I'm impressed: having the swap in SSD has improved my desktop experience awfully.
I guess it is not only the higher read/write speed of the swap, but the seek time. I also guess that swap is very fragmented, or the equivalent term. I mean, the kernel has to recover many memory chunks that are not contiguous, and an SSD shines in seek speed.
Some people note that an SSD for the system improves the application load times, but not "usage" times, once the apps become loaded. True, but some apps like LibreOffice do benefit: it feels faster in use, too.
It is interesting that you bypass the code/data aspect of the SSD and emphasise the swap in the light of the $SUBJ.
Of course if you didn't have the memory shortage, never swapped, then e could get back to arguing about whether the code or the data (system vs Home, web's /var) is a better use of (limited) SSD capacity.
I use a different strategy on the laptop than on the desktop. The laptop is a single disk, so it holds all, data, swap, and system on a single SSD of ~500 GiB. I found it expensive. The desktop SSD only holds system and swap, so it is smaller, around 250 GiB and thus cheaper. I plan to program a cron job to sync the SSD to rust, as backup.
Of course with falling price and increasing size, it all becomes moot. We've been though this cycle before.
I find them quite expensive, thus useful only for a portion of the storage, or when one really needs the speed and can pay for it.
A century or so ago I wrote a disk optimizer for SCO/86. By the time I had it written and working a new generation of rotating rust had come out: more tracks under the head so less movement, more platters, denser encoding, faster electronics/transfer, better pricing. It's not that my app couldn't speed up the dinosaurs, its that anyone actually interested in speed would buy a faster drive. My serious -- that is corporate -- customer base vanished and I was left with argumentative nitpicking hobbyists who were too cheap to buy new hardware.
I can get a brand new 1T SATA SSD for around what paid for my rotating rust 1T SATA four years ago. So there's a Moore's law in effect but it has a ratchet. I can't buy another of those rotating rust drive for one fifth the price of four years ago. I can't replace my Dell Optiplex with the same for one fifth the price even though I can buy a new, faster (etc) for the same price.
I doubt it. My rotating disks were all in the 60..80€ range. The cheapest 1 GB SSD I can find is 300€. 448 for a Samsung Pro. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" (Minas Tirith))