[Tfug] Questions on unusual hard disks - AV, SSD

[Jim March]

Folks,

The other part I ordered for my Thinkpad T60p finally came in - a
caddy for a second SATA hard disk that swaps in for the DVD drive
whenever I want.  So, I can run two internal hard disks.  Given that
this thing is a 2006-vintage rig, I assume these are "SATA/150"
original spec SATA ports.

I have it running right now with a 250 boot and a 160 in the new
chassis.  The build quality on the chassis is clearly not "vintage IBM
grade", more like "modern cheap Chinese" but it does work and for $15
was worth getting.

So.  It seems I have a bit of cash coming in soon, time to "pimp it out".

I'm considering an SSD boot drive and bigger conventional drive for
/home.  Would an SSD boot drive give me any actual advantage with my
older SATA controller?  I can tell my BIOS to boot from either SATA
slot so I can mount the physically tougher SSD boot/OS drive in the
non-rubberized chassis that goes in the DVD slot, and mount the real
"disk" in the internal rubber-mounted slot.

If SSD isn't worth it, I might as well just do a pair of conventional
drives and use one for near-continuous backup.

Looking at 500gig drives, I came across this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136561

It's only $5 more than a standard WD drive of the same capacity and
RPMs, but it's the "AV" edition - supposedly runs longer and cooler,
and is optimized for speed in "long sequencial reads" as opposed to a
lot of short choppy stuff.  Apparently Lucid at least can understand
the slightly odd formatting on these suckers (something about 4k
blocks or boundaries?).  What happens when you use something like this
as your main disk in Linux?  Is Ext4 a good idea, or some other file
system?

Jim