Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo on ssds? intel anyone?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Saturday 19 December 2009 12:19:05 Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> Am 19.12.2009 09:08, schrieb Stroller:
> >> Could anyone comment?
> >
> > Might it help if you said WHY you're unimpressed?
> 
> might be ;-)
> 
> It seems as if my system doesn't benefit that much:
> 
> With 8 gigs of RAM, suspend-to-ram, preload and only a handful of rather
> lightweight binaries in regular use this system is already pretty fast
> with hdds only.
> 
> I expected more WOW in terms of overall speed ...

SSDs are not a magic bullet, it's unlikely they will give you a killer 
performance improvement that makes you go "WOW!!!"

SSDs suck at random writes.
Typical usage scenario on a workstation is lots of random writes compared to 
relatively few random reads - reads tend not to be all that random as you 
re-read the same thing often and it gets cached.

Intel SSDs are far superior at random writes than any other SSD out there but 
it's still nowhere near as optimised as spinning drives, and kernels by and 
large are still optimised for spinning drives too.

This may account for your overall feeling of under-whelmedness why still 
seeing a significant boot-time speed up. You also have enough RAM so that 
almost an entire typical workstation session could fit in RAM and seldom touch 
the disk especially with a large interval between disk syncs

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com