Linux Format forums

[M0PHP]

Rhakios: That's because you don't have an SSD
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[Rhakios]

[tophee]

Out of interest then, what SSD drives are people using? I've begun to read the linked articles (on the previous page), but what hardware are people pleased with?

[Rhakios]

I am using a Kingston 64GB SSDNow V SSD 2.5" SATA-II drive as a replacement in my MSI Wind U90. You will read many reviews on-line telling you that this drive is no better than a high-end SATA desktop drive. This is true, however it is a lot faster than the 4200rpm drive it replaces (booting is about 10s quicker overall), it is silent, it doesn't impart odd gyroscopic effects spinning up (because, of course, it doesn't spin up) and it wasn't as expensive as the high performance drives which a netbook doesn't really have the power to take full advantage of.
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Bye, Rhakios

[LeeNukes]

If it were me, I'd wait a while. At the moment SSD's are just getting to the sizes to make them realistic alternatives, however they're still not mainstream yet. There is more innovation and costs savings to be had yet. I'd save the money for now, or buy a bigger monitor or something.
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[tophee]

I was already thinking of a monitor / gpu upgrade before the VAT hike. While I was at it I thought I'd improve my boot times too.

I'd like to go the whole hog and get a whole new machine - as the extra CPU support for virtualisation of an i7 would be nice, but my current Q6600 does a reasonable enough job.

So I thought I'd ask for some advice on the SSD front.

[tophee]

Having read a majority of the linked articles (on the previous page by M0PHP) I decided to get a OCZ Vertex 2 40GB SSD.

I think I've set it up right (got confused on the alignment thing).

I put the / and /cache on the SSD and my /home on my 1TB drive.

I'm not seeing the speed I was expecting. Though Ubuntu does boot reasonably quickly and software seems to be quick, I was expecting faster.

Have I missed something?

Regards

Chris

[Rhakios]

Not heard of /cache before.

Is it faster? How much faster were you expecting? It's not going to be instant, the best you should realistically hope for is to halve boot and software loading times.
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Bye, Rhakios

[tophee]

Oops. Meant /swap.

Having said that - things like open office are much quicker. I dunno, I expected almost instantaneous...

[Rhakios]

Notice on this site, it starts off by saying that seek times on SSDs are about 100 times faster than a conventional HDD, but then goes on to quote data transfer rates that are only just over twice as fast (hence my expectation of reducing times by about half isn't too far off from their figures).
Other sites give comparisons of HDD and SSD performance in the same machine (you can google around if you want to), the best figures I have seen for software loading times are about one third of the original time. Presumably limiting factors of processor, motherboard and RAM speeds and resource availability will not allow SSDs to achieve the maximum theoretical performance they are capable of. I'm not sure what the maximum speed of the SATA interface (I think we're up to the third revision now) is, but in the end that's always going to be a limiting factor.
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Bye, Rhakios

[Dutch_Master]

Data rate of SATA-II is at 3 Gbit/s (about 300 MB/s), SATA (or SATA-I) is at 1.5Gbit/s (150 MB/s), SATA-III hasn't been seen in the wild, at least not by me but would be 6 Gbit/s. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

[LeeNukes]

[nelz]

SATA is certainly a limitation, which is why the properly fast SSDs come on PCI-e cards.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

[Rhakios]

[tophee]

Ah, the SATA300 might well be the bottleneck.
I see however you can pick up a PCI-Express controller card for under £30 that provides both SATA 6GB and USB3.