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Living Room / Re: A three drive system - the sweet spot
« Last post by 40hz on March 25, 2014, 06:58 AM »Brian Trapp over at Linux Journal agrees with Cranioscopical, Innuendo and xtabber regarding SSDs.
Brian's article goes on to discuss SSDs primarily from the viewpoint of a Linux user. But he includes a discussion of the technology and the results of his real-world testing that should be of interest to anybody regardless of which OS they're running.
He concludes with the following remarks:
So there you have it...
Seems to me that (a) the people who actually own an SSD love these little guys; (b) reliability doesn't seem to be as much a concern as it originally was; and (c) regardless of what you've read (or been told) SSDs are just like any other piece of hardware (i.e. YMMV.)
I guess the only real way to find out is get one and see for yourself.
Solid-State Drives: Get One Already!
Mar 18, 2014 By Brian Trapp
I've been building computers since the 1990s, so I've seen a lot of new technologies work their way into the mainstream. Most were the steady, incremental improvements predicted by Moore's law, but others were game-changers, innovations that really rocketed performance forward in a surprising way. I remember booting up Quake after installing my first 3-D card—what a difference! My first boot off a solid-state drive (SSD) brought back that same feeling—wow, what a difference!
However, at a recent gathering of like-minded Linux users, I learned that many of my peers hadn't actually made the move to SSDs yet. Within that group, the primary reluctance to try a SSD boiled down to three main concerns:
- I'm worried about their reliability; I hear they wear out.
- I'm not sure if they work well with Linux.
- I'm not sure an SSD really would make much of a difference on my system.
Luckily, these three concerns are based either on misunderstandings, outdated data, exaggeration or are just not correct. <more>
Brian's article goes on to discuss SSDs primarily from the viewpoint of a Linux user. But he includes a discussion of the technology and the results of his real-world testing that should be of interest to anybody regardless of which OS they're running.
He concludes with the following remarks:
Summary
If you haven't considered an SSD, or were holding back for any of the reasons mentioned here, I hope this article prompts you to take the plunge and try one out.
For reliability, modern SSDs are performing on par with HDDs. (You need a good backup, either way.) If you were concerned about longevity, you can use data from your existing system to approximate how long a current generation MLC or TLC drive would last.
SSD support has been in place in Linux for a while, and it works well even if you just do a default installation of a major Linux distribution. TRIM support, some ext4 tweaks and monitoring via tune2fs and smartctl are there to help you maintain and monitor overall SSD health.
Finally, some real-world performance benchmarks illustrate how an SSD will boost performance for any operation that uses disk storage, but especially ones that involve many different files.
Because even OS-only budget-sized SSDs can provide significant performance gains, I hope if you've been on the fence, you'll now give one a try.
So there you have it...
Seems to me that (a) the people who actually own an SSD love these little guys; (b) reliability doesn't seem to be as much a concern as it originally was; and (c) regardless of what you've read (or been told) SSDs are just like any other piece of hardware (i.e. YMMV.)
I guess the only real way to find out is get one and see for yourself.
This time with a review of his RaspberryPi project. Read it 
and goes into the issue with their usual mind-numbing level of attention to detail.
