Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
Grant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. I yesterday send some test results If you use a UFS clone like ext, you will not get much better speed. You should use ZFS or another COW filesystem that tries to write bigger blocks in order to avoid high latencies. I recommend Intel or OCZ. Other SSDs have been reported as slow I tested OCZ Jörg -- EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [EMAIL PROTECTED](uni) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
Joerg Schilling schrieb: Grant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. I yesterday send some test results If you use a UFS clone like ext, you will not get much better speed. You should use ZFS or another COW filesystem that tries to write bigger blocks in order to avoid high latencies. I recommend Intel or OCZ. Other SSDs have been reported as slow I tested OCZ Jörg Hi this German article says that AXFS will be available up from kernel 2.6.28. This is a new file system named for its main future: Advanced Execute in Place Filesystem. This means the CPU can execute stuff from the ssd without loading it to ram, first. As far as I understand there is an upside. It is a read only file system you need to create for every program. I am not the geek in that but I wanted to mention it. Oh and it does not work if you connect your ssd by ata or usb. http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2008/13093.html kh
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On 27 Nov 2008, at 02:08, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Grant wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html I would rethink that after reading that post. From TFA: Postscript: Yes, this analysis is based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, but I can't afford the time to do real research unless someone pays me to. If you know someone who will, send me email! I've read a number of other reports, also based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, from a number of people who have very happily been using flash as root volumes for years. Their opinions disagree with TFA. Typically the reports I've read have been from people using CFcards - 4gig is now unbelievably cheap, and CFcards talk EIDE with only a small, cheap physical adaptor - on MythTV frontends low-overhead servers. CFcards look ideal for these purposes because they're quiet - you want to minimise noise when playing back video in the living room, for instance. I think the last anecdote I read on this subject was written by Trubox (Truebox?) on the Openmoko-community list a month or two ago. They sell Aserisk systems to small business (in my area, as it happens) and I would imagine that typically the system sits in the corner of an office and is untouched for years at a time. I would imagine that have plenty of installed systems throughout the UK (otherwise they'd be going hungry). They report a very low failure rate, as did someone else on the MythTV-users list who also bases a commercial offering on flash-based hardware. Whilst I would probably, myself, install a second flash drive myself back-up (to a stage 4?) periodically, and avoid disk-writes when logging, I get the strong impression that there's little to be scared of using flash memory. Everything I read that says flash - and particularly its wear- levelling - is unsuitable for this purpose makes sense to me, but it doesn't jibe with the real-world experiences of those who ARE using flash VERY happily. I've yet to see empirical evidence on the longevity of flash for this purpose, but I'd advise anyone considering it - anyone thinking flash unsuitable - to search the mailing lists I've mentioned. The Trubox post should be easy to find, and the subject comes up on MythTV-users every few months. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. Typically the reports I've read have been from people using CFcards - 4gig is now unbelievably cheap, and CFcards talk EIDE with only a small, cheap physical adaptor - on MythTV frontends low-overhead servers. CFcards look ideal for these purposes because they're quiet - you want to minimise noise when playing back video in the living room, for instance. Great idea. If I'm only putting the main system on flash, I could use a CFcard instead of an SSD. Storing music and videos on flash will be too expensive for awhile. How does CFcard performance compare to SSD or conventional hard disk performance? - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 5:26 AM, Stroller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 27 Nov 2008, at 02:08, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Grant wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html I would rethink that after reading that post. From TFA: Postscript: Yes, this analysis is based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, but I can't afford the time to do real research unless someone pays me to. If you know someone who will, send me email! I've read a number of other reports, also based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, from a number of people who have very happily been using flash as root volumes for years. Their opinions disagree with TFA. Typically the reports I've read have been from people using CFcards - 4gig is now unbelievably cheap, and CFcards talk EIDE with only a small, cheap physical adaptor - on MythTV frontends low-overhead servers. CFcards look ideal for these purposes because they're quiet - you want to minimise noise when playing back video in the living room, for instance. I think the last anecdote I read on this subject was written by Trubox (Truebox?) on the Openmoko-community list a month or two ago. They sell Aserisk systems to small business (in my area, as it happens) and I would imagine that typically the system sits in the corner of an office and is untouched for years at a time. I would imagine that have plenty of installed systems throughout the UK (otherwise they'd be going hungry). They report a very low failure rate, as did someone else on the MythTV-users list who also bases a commercial offering on flash-based hardware. Whilst I would probably, myself, install a second flash drive myself back-up (to a stage 4?) periodically, and avoid disk-writes when logging, I get the strong impression that there's little to be scared of using flash memory. Everything I read that says flash - and particularly its wear-levelling - is unsuitable for this purpose makes sense to me, but it doesn't jibe with the real-world experiences of those who ARE using flash VERY happily. I've yet to see empirical evidence on the longevity of flash for this purpose, but I'd advise anyone considering it - anyone thinking flash unsuitable - to search the mailing lists I've mentioned. The Trubox post should be easy to find, and the subject comes up on MythTV-users every few months. Stroller. The catch, though, is that I'd guess commercial offerings of MythTV boxes like that would be updated infrequently and that the actual recording storage, and likely logs and other frequent write files, is done on a normal disk. It doesn't seem logical for the average Gentoo user that follows the 'update often' mentality, and someone looking to milk the very top in the way of speed out of their system through disk throughput is very likely a 'ricer' in other respects. When you start using it for frequent writes (like your average system with everyday use and frequent upgrades) you start getting a little closer to the line on write cycles for small-sized MLC... but SLC is going to, by my guess, outlast its speed benefits by far (much like the old 800MB harddrives I have around that have far outlasted their size benefits from their day). Looking at SLC from a $$/GB standpoint you'll find they're horrendous, but from a $$/performance... at the very least Intel's X25-E starts to look a lot more reasonable for its cost (it's easily enterprise grade and mops the floor with just about anything else that holds data through a reboot)... which is around $760 for the 32MB model. On the topic of using CF for the job... just looking at http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007, which doesn't take CF - SATA adaptors into account, the highest read speed across the board is about 50MB/s, which is half of what the Velociraptor averages (and 1/5 of its burst read). -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Grant wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. Typically the reports I've read have been from people using CFcards - 4gig is now unbelievably cheap, and CFcards talk EIDE with only a small, cheap physical adaptor - on MythTV frontends low-overhead servers. CFcards look ideal for these purposes because they're quiet - you want to minimise noise when playing back video in the living room, for instance. Great idea. If I'm only putting the main system on flash, I could use a CFcard instead of an SSD. Storing music and videos on flash will be too expensive for awhile. How does CFcard performance compare to SSD or conventional hard disk performance? - Grant well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec? cfdisk - 18mb/sec?
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. On the topic of using CF for the job... just looking at http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007, which doesn't take CF - SATA adaptors into account, the highest read speed across the board is about 50MB/s, which is half of what the Velociraptor averages (and 1/5 of its burst read). I think my real reason for posting this is I'm unhappy with my IO performance. I've got a 320GB Seagate SATAII drive. How much better can I do with conventional hard disks? Is there a test I can run to make sure my Seagate is performing as it should? - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On Thu, November 27, 2008 11:05 am, Grant wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. Typically the reports I've read have been from people using CFcards - 4gig is now unbelievably cheap, and CFcards talk EIDE with only a small, cheap physical adaptor - on MythTV frontends low-overhead servers. CFcards look ideal for these purposes because they're quiet - you want to minimise noise when playing back video in the living room, for instance. Great idea. If I'm only putting the main system on flash, I could use a CFcard instead of an SSD. Storing music and videos on flash will be too expensive for awhile. How does CFcard performance compare to SSD or conventional hard disk performance? - Grant Flash is pretty slow. There are some expensive but fast SSDs out there. I would wait a year or two.
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
I think my real reason for posting this is I'm unhappy with my IO performance. I've got a 320GB Seagate SATAII drive. How much better can I do with conventional hard disks? Is there a test I can run to make sure my Seagate is performing as it should? How about you go to single user mode issue the command hdparm -tT /dev/yourdisk three times, and post the results here? Second, here are some basic hints about disk performance. 1) Disk speed is faster in the beginning of the disk (because the beginning of the disk is stored in the outer border of the disk, which has greater linear velocity than the inner border). It may be a good idea to put you swap partition first (and don't exaggerate on its size, since it is occupying valuable space in the beginning of the disk), then your main partition, then other partitions. 2) Your filesystem should not be too full; one of the problems this causes is fragmentation 3) If your filesystem is very old, it is probably fragmented. While fragmentation in LInux is a much smaller problem than in Windows (specially Windows 95/98/ME), it happens over time, specially if the filesystem is too full. I don't know how easily you can defragment in Linux though. Have other people in this list tried sys-fs/shake? I am afraid of it because it is ~x86 and would operate on important areas of my filesystem. 4) file access is slower if there are too many files in the directory. Consider cleaning up your system (such as by wiping out software you never use, and unmerging software you rarely use after creating a package of it with quickpkg) 5) Use lighter-weight software such as Xfce (yeah, obvious).
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:42 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Grant wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. Typically the reports I've read have been from people using CFcards - 4gig is now unbelievably cheap, and CFcards talk EIDE with only a small, cheap physical adaptor - on MythTV frontends low-overhead servers. CFcards look ideal for these purposes because they're quiet - you want to minimise noise when playing back video in the living room, for instance. Great idea. If I'm only putting the main system on flash, I could use a CFcard instead of an SSD. Storing music and videos on flash will be too expensive for awhile. How does CFcard performance compare to SSD or conventional hard disk performance? - Grant well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec? cfdisk - 18mb/sec? The Velociraptor is the only one I know of that easily tops 100MB/s (outside of SAS drives, particularly 15k rpm) but most good drives easily beat the high end CF speeds of 40-50MB/s. It's also quiet compared to a lot of drives, uses less power, and runs cooler (of course, SSD wins here). On a vaguely related note, though, my system drive rarely spins up after boot, as I have local.start prefetching all of my major applications and libraries (makes Firefox startup comprable to IE on Windows)... only my storage drive does very much reading in a day, and that's simply because my 4GB of ram can't begin to hold all my music ... though an MLC based SSD would actually do wonders for that side of things, as I seldom write, but often read from my mass of music and seek times are actually noticable when I start hopping from one song to the next (though this could just be buffering delays in mpd). Testing with hdparm... I come up with uncached read speeds of 72MB/s on my system drive and 81.5MB/s on my storage drive. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec? cfdisk - 18mb/sec? You may talk about cheap small USB solutions. The OCZ SSD I tested last week gives 120 MB/s read and 82 MB/s write speed. Jörg -- EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [EMAIL PROTECTED](uni) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On 27 Nov 2008, at 16:37, Joshua Murphy wrote: ... I think the last anecdote I read on this subject was written by Trubox (Truebox?) on the Openmoko-community list a month or two ago. They sell Aserisk systems to small business (in my area, as it happens) and I would imagine that typically the system sits in the corner of an office and is untouched for years at a time. I would imagine that have plenty of installed systems throughout the UK (otherwise they'd be going hungry). They report a very low failure rate, as did someone else on the MythTV-users list who also bases a commercial offering on flash-based hardware. ... The catch, though, is that I'd guess commercial offerings of MythTV boxes like that would be updated infrequently and that the actual recording storage, and likely logs and other frequent write files, is done on a normal disk. The commercial offering that I recall mentioned on the MythTV-users list wasn't MythTV-related. The discussion of flash memory arose and a poster mentioned his experiences using flash memory in his day job - I think the employer did something like till systems, and I have this idea that the poster said the flash cards were put under a reasonable workload. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Joerg Schilling wrote: Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec? cfdisk - 18mb/sec? You may talk about cheap small USB solutions. The OCZ SSD I tested last week gives 120 MB/s read and 82 MB/s write speed. no, I talk about 'standard' cf-disks. Slow ones are 3mb/sec. Fast ones are up to 30mb/sec. Insansely expensive ones are up to ~50mb/sec
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Joerg Schilling wrote: Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec? cfdisk - 18mb/sec? You may talk about cheap small USB solutions. The OCZ SSD I tested last week gives 120 MB/s read and 82 MB/s write speed. no, I talk about 'standard' cf-disks. Slow ones are 3mb/sec. Fast ones are up to 30mb/sec. Insansely expensive ones are up to ~50mb/sec What do you understand by cf-disks? Are you talking about CF cards in a sata or ata adaptor? I was taking about a 2.5 inch 128 GB SATA SSD at ~ 360 Euro This is still cheaper than cheap and slow Sandisk CF or SDHC cards. Jörg -- EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [EMAIL PROTECTED](uni) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Joerg Schilling wrote: Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Joerg Schilling wrote: Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec? cfdisk - 18mb/sec? You may talk about cheap small USB solutions. The OCZ SSD I tested last week gives 120 MB/s read and 82 MB/s write speed. no, I talk about 'standard' cf-disks. Slow ones are 3mb/sec. Fast ones are up to 30mb/sec. Insansely expensive ones are up to ~50mb/sec What do you understand by cf-disks? Are you talking about CF cards in a sata or ata adaptor? excatly, because Grant wrote: Great idea. If I'm only putting the main system on flash, I could use a CFcard instead of an SSD. Storing music and videos on flash will be too expensive for awhile. How does CFcard performance compare to SSD or conventional hard disk performance? I was taking about a 2.5 inch 128 GB SATA SSD at ~ 360 Euro This is still cheaper than cheap and slow Sandisk CF or SDHC cards. and for 360€ you can also buy 3 1TB Sata Harddisks and make a little Raid5.
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
well, harddisks go up to what, 100mb/sec? cfdisk - 18mb/sec? ssd in future might be a lot faster: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/BHzT0mM7DRw/article.pl kh
[gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
On Donnerstag 27 November 2008, Grant wrote: I'm considering buying a solid-state drive to improve I/O performance and even reduce noise. Has anyone tried this? I was considering getting the lowest capacity I can find and putting most of the system on it. There is a roundup on tomshardware.com and it sounds like some are very much better than others. SLC sounds vastly superior compared to MLC, but also much more expensive. - Grant http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html I would rethink that after reading that post.
