On 10 Sep 2009, at 09:30, Alan McKinnon wrote:
...
But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine
itself:
1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles
...
No harm in compiling on a hard-drive, via NFs or otherwise. I believe
read speed of SSDs is fast, writes are slow.
However, I am sceptical of wear claims, at least of you're using ½-
decent flash memory (and SanDisk & Kingston are cheap these days, at
least in "modest" but usable sizes like 4gig).
I have read many people talk about wear of flash memory to be a
problem, but I don't think from anyone who's actually HAD a problem
with it. I have read of many people using it happily for root
filesystems over periods of years.
I concede that syncing the portage tree & the compilation of emerging
packages results in an above-average number of writes, but I have this
notion that the wear / limited writes problems have been largely
overcome with modern flash memory (c.f. "write levelling").
Furthermore I have heard figures bandied about in the order of
100,000s per block and such as "you'd need to write to the flash card
constantly for years" in order to kill it.
I would really love to hear empirical evidence either way on this
matter, but I don't think the OP needs to be too cautious of wear. (Of
course this advice is worth what he paid for it, and warrantied to
that value).
Some previous comments:
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/msg_d6e65b4d64a51c97f7c43c723e525e06.xml
Stroller.
