On 12/21/2012 11:51 AM, Alan Evans wrote:
On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 6:35 AM, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. wrote:
You mean that all this hype over SSD's and they're LIMITED? I thought they were supposed to be BETTER than the spinning drives of today? Exaclty how are they better if they come "out-of-the-box" with limitations? Just curious...

It's well known that flash devices have a limited number of writes. This number is pretty high, though. And with caching and load-balancing built into the drive's firmware, it is typically not a major concern.

However, although SSD devices have lightning-fast read performance, writing to them is considerably slower. Think of the difference between reading a big file from a flash thumb drive versus writing a big file. That doesn't mean that you should never write to them, but if the intended use involves writing very frequently (like /var or /tmp) then it might not be a good fit.

Also, SSD is much more expensive, byte-for-byte, than a hard drive. If you want a lot storage (my /home partition is well over a terabyte) then SSD is pretty cost prohibitive.

On the other hand, my system drive is SSD and, because of the fast read performance, my computer boots, after the BIOS screen, in four seconds. From the login screen to my desktop is another 2-3 seconds. Starting even very large applications is pretty snappy.


WOW!.....talk about speeding up. Well I have a Gateway laptop so there's not physical way I could do 2 different types of drives, but I also have a CentOS desktop, maybe I can do it there, is SSD something that an old "Pentium 4" PC could use? I think I'll look into this...do some Googling! Thanks for the info!


EGO II