I just plopped down $400 for a 6G 4 core 3Ghz box with respectable performance ratings on PassMark. Its amazing what you get nowdays, Moore's Law is a wonderful thing.
I then added a OCZ 60G drive for Linux and proceeded to install various Linux distros. I started with the latest Fedora but ran into some installation issues. Anaconda has always had it out for me. Since I'm not really particular about distro I moved on to the latest Ubuntu. I am experiencing amazing performance with SSD. Everything is so quiet yet so fast that it's eerie. I'm old school and expect to hear the machine whine, hum and grind when I hammer it. The silence is, however, very nice. Unfortunately Ubuntu wouldn't run some of the enterprise software I want to experiment with so I moved on to RHEL 5.6 after plopping down another $49 for the distro. I have to wonder if CentOS would have been fully compatible, but suspect that the software installer was explicitly checking for RHEL. One thing I wonder about is with a total SSD environment is should I even bother allocating swap given that I believe that I have enough memory to handle the task for which this box is destined for? Given the nature of SSD it seems that allocating a swap partition will greatly reduce the MTBF of this drive since the write leveling for any swap spillover would be confined to that partition. Am I correct in my thinking? Should I favor one filesystem versus another for a drive of this type? I'm currently using the drive primarily formatted as an ext3 filesystem with a small swap partition of 2G. In the old days we'd set aside 1.5x or 2x swap based on memory. However given 60G of hard disk and 8G of ram can't see blowing 12G on a swap partition for a presumably antiquated rule of thumb. - Pat
