On 08/01/2013 03:42 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
I'm now doing quite a lot of compilation on my Chromebook and my Trim Slice. It's OK, provided that two processes don't try to hit the disk at the same time, at which point everything grinds to a halt.
I'm using cheap SanDisk cards in both (not exactly sure of the model, but they're the cheapest branded ones).
Question is, would I be better to:
- Use cards such as the "SanDisk Extreme Pro" http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B005LFT3QG (Does it make a difference, or is it designed to separate me from my hard-earned money?)
Yes. They are one of few SD/CF/USB flash devices that offer performance comparable to mechanical disks on random writes. See here: http://www.altechnative.net/2012/01/25/flash-module-benchmark-collection-sd-... (link at the bottom of the article, scroll down to the 2nd table for random read/write performance).
Another thing you can do is use nilfs2 for your compile FS-es to make all the writes always linear. This effectively negates the poor random-write performance, at the expense of garbage collection churn. I used this approach for a while on my AC100s, but eventually I just got a SuperTalent RC8 USB stick which is a full fat SATA SSD with a USB-SATA adapter in front of it, in USB stick form factor. Very expensive, but extremely performant. Performance figures for it are in the list linked above. Also, you may be interested to see this:
http://www.altechnative.net/2012/02/07/morebetter-internal-storage-on-the-to...
- Try again with using network drive, eg. iSCSI? NFS? NBD? gluster ..? (Note: the Chromebook kernel doesn't support NFS)
Or use one of the SSDs with both SATA and USB interfaces, such as some of the Integral Z series models. That gives you a cost effective SSD you can run off of USB.
I used various network block device and file system options on my build far, which good success, it should work fine over wired ethernet.
- Is there a good performing network device which is less horrible to configure than iSCSI?
iSCSI is not that bad, you need about 5 config lines on the server, and bout 2 lines on the command line on the client. NBD might be a tiny bit simpler.
Gordan