The $99 Dollar Ssd Has Arrived

I just upgraded my computer today, no longer do I use a hard drive. I'm sure many of you will find this interesting, useful, and my even try this out.

I posted this at phoronix for the obvious reasons, if it's wished by the mods I'll gladly do a cut and paste per any forum rules.

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3424

This is one heck of a tweak! lol

What I'd really like is to see one of the Novell Devs take a look at this thing. Despite the smaller size, this has alot of potential.

I have pics up, in case anybody is curious.

http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/tweakit/index.html

Thats kind of neat.

Out of curiosity, how did you end up partitioning your Linux? What Linux partitions did you put on the Compact Flash?

Do you have any worries that the large number of read-writes to the Compact Flash could end its life prematurely?

Thats kind of neat.

Out of curiosity, how did you end up partitioning your Linux? What Linux partitions did you put on the Compact Flash?

Do you have any worries that the large number of read-writes to the Compact Flash could end its life prematurely?
[/b]

Heh, yeah it is.

I've just got it set up as one partition, the card is too small IMHO to start cutting it up. The CF is set as / and my hard drive is set as /spare.

And no, I'm not worried about the read/writes. I don't have a swap partition defined. Besides, (and I'm not sure how accurate this is, but it seems to make sense) I've got a new whiz-bang SSD here. I'd think that not only is it higher performance in terms of reads/write performance, but it's also going to be able to do more writes before it implodes. And if I'm wrong, I'm only out a hundred bucks. Worth it in testing IMHO.
Myths of SSD longevity - http://www.embeddedstar.com/weblog/2...ssd-longevity/

Running a CF as a drive is nothing new, the DSL linux guys have been doing this for a long time, but I'm pretty sure I'm one of the first to do it with something as high performance as this card is so as to have something faster than your average hard drive. There are several motherboards on the market that come with IDE/CF adapters right on the motherboard, some of those microATX and picoATX/via C3 boards.(for embedded applications)

I'm really looking forward to the 8GB version coming down i price, I'll be picking one up as soon as they do. I'd like to put most of my daily/used files onto this. I don't always have my hard drive hooked up and I've noticed that the computer makes a lot less noise, and also doesn't create as much heat when the HD is disconnected. I can put most of my files on CD and DVDRWs and just run it all from there.

I like this a lot.

I've just got it set up as one partition, the card is too small IMHO to start cutting it up. The CF is set as / and my hard drive is set as /spare..... I'd like to put most of my daily/used files onto this. I don't always have my hard drive hooked up and I've noticed that the computer makes a lot less noise, and also doesn't create as much heat when the HD is disconnected. [/b]

Any comments on the change to the computers execution times for booting and execution times for various system applications, as a result of this?

Any comments on the change to the computers execution times for booting and execution times for various system applications, as a result of this?
[/b]

Of course. Everything feels faster, especially YaST. Even webpages load faster. The low access times of a hard drive bottleneck webpages.(think thousands of tiny little files all at once)

Kind of like how the google page is so fast because it's so simple, other more featured pages load more like the google page.

I had an IDE/CF adapter which didn't support UDMA properly. My new HDPARM is as follows:

[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 558 MB in 2.00 seconds = 278.31 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 110 MB in 3.01 seconds = 36.50 MB/sec

I had an IDE/CF adapter which didn't support UDMA properly. My new HDPARM is as follows:

[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 558 MB in 2.00 seconds = 278.31 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 110 MB in 3.01 seconds = 36.50 MB/sec
[/b]

wonder how much servers would benefit from such a technology

I had an IDE/CF adapter which didn't support UDMA properly. My new HDPARM is as follows:

[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 558 MB in 2.00 seconds = 278.31 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 110 MB in 3.01 seconds = 36.50 MB/sec
[/b]

Thats slow, slow as a snail.

wonder how much servers would benefit from such a technology[/b]

I'd assume that it would depend on what kind of server it was, how much space was needed, and etc.

A lot of servers do massive multitasking/parallelism via SCSI/RAID infrastructure, I don't know if the reduced access times can overcome that from a purely performance oriented point of view.

Unless you intended on throwing a bunch of SSDs into RAID. Then of course, that would be awesome! :-)