Randall R Schulz said the following on 06/11/2011 04:22 PM:
On Saturday June 11 2011, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Saturday 11 June 2011 21:46:48 Randall R Schulz wrote:
I am considering an OCZ RevoDrive SSD that takes the form of a PCI-Express x4 card. I have not been able to find compatibility or support information for Linux, though apparently it works OK under Windows 7.
I want to make this a system / boot drive.
Any information, especially direct experience, would be welcome.
No direct experience I'm afraid, I'm staying away from SSDs until they become big enough to warrant my attention, but here is a review that says they tested on Ubuntu 10.10 with no issues, which should mean it works in openSUSE 11.4 as well
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/ocz_revodrive_50gb/
Anders
The board I'm looking at is a 120 GB drive. Plenty for a system install.
I'm trying to go for tiered storage, so I want the SSD as the system drive, a 10,000 RPM, 600 GB VelociRaptor (SATA III / 6 Gbps) in the box with a gigabit Ethernet-connected NAS with 8 TB RAID 5 (5.5 TB available) as my near-line storage.
Feedback and better ideas are welcome.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'tiered', Randall, but I will observe that I have 11.4 running on an old laptop with a 60G drive. That includes the user space: documents, PDFs, music, video. So I think a 'system' could fit on a lot less than that! I'd bank for 40G. It depends on what you call 'system'. There is a lot of /sbin that doesn't get used much; the same goes for /lib, /usr/[s]bin and /usr/lib -- and the subdirectories of /usr/lib. But it all depends... "Context is Everything" ... as I keep saying. Is this a desktop or a server? What applications? My view is that there are things like _some_ fonts and _some_ icons/graphics that get used heavily, so perhaps parts of /usr/ and /usr/share need to be on fast access (but only parts!). Or are things like this cached? Globally or a per-user basis? The way I see it we need to implement an overlay file system. There is a /usr/bin and /usr/lib on the SSD that overlays the fully populated version on the hard drive, and _somehow_ (!*!*!) the most used items get migrated up onto the SSD. SOMEHOW. If the "somehow" is smart, then creating a directory on the SSD enables the migration for that ... so we can easily add /usr/share/fonts. Then again, my ~/.kde4/cache-${HOSTNAME} is on /var/tmp/kdecache-anton and /var/tmp is vartmp on /var/tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=1048576k) so perhaps having swap on the SSD would help too. What? No Swap? Perhaps. For some reason I see tmpfs using swap on a system that doesn't have enough going on to want to use swap for processes. My view is like this: 1. SSD is still expensive and will continue to be for some time, and probably will always be more so than hard drives. 2. Use the space on the SSD as efficiently and effectively as possible That is; don't use it for things that won't be used. This leads to it acting like a cache for the most used items rather than for the whole of the "system". This leads to a secondary problem: what happens when you run and update or patch? -- Fiction is a noble pursuit. Ideally, it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their experience. --Norman Mailer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org