[GRLUG] Solid State Drives

[Michael Mol]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 4:26 PM, David Pembrook <david at pembrook.net> wrote:
> Michael Mol wrote:
>>
>> Western Digital's VelociRaptor can sustain 77MB/s, but seeking will
>> blow that.  I believe Intel's SSD offerings include a drive capable of
>> 80MB/s.  I don't know about the vanilla Caviar line.
>>
>>
> It think some of the disagreement comes back to the use of the computer
> in question. On a desktop many (not all) users never touch their swap.
> Would I ever run a server without it? no!
>
> On a desktop I have turned it off in xp before. When I first put 2gb of
> ram in a system a few years ago, I only found one case where it used
> more than the first gig of ram and that was a game. If the sum of my
> work uses 50% (or less) of my ram, why even allow the system to swap
> from memory to hard drive. I'm just breaking a gig now after working all
> day. I'm also booting more as I'm shutting down to cut back on electric use.

I'm looking forward to the 8GB desktop machine I'll have by the end of
the week.  It's going to pretty much be an always-on system, so having
8GB of RAM means that the 6-7GB worth of most-frequently-accessed
files will be in the file cache.

On the lesser side, my work machine has 2GB of RAM, and I'm storing a
lot of cruft data off in the page file with only two or three copies
of Visual Studio (130MB apiece) and lots of pieces of collaboration
software.

The only machine I work with that I would say uses swap excessively is
the old XP box in the basement.  It can't even finish booting without
using an excessive amount of swap; Any activity leads to disk thrash.
(Yes, I tried defragging.  Didn't help.)

-- 
:wq