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

[Zack Williams]

> 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?

Yes.  SSD's have almost no seek time, which is the biggest performance
killer on disks, and is why SSD's have such a high number of
operations per second.   Transfer rate isn't an issue unless you're
copying huge files all the time, and even then a SSD will beat
spinning rust.

> 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?

These are optimized for long, continuous data operations.  It's
unlikely it would perform any better/worse than a standard drive.

I'd probably recommend that you:

1. Buy a smaller SSD.  I'd get one in the 40-80GB range, most likely
an Intel or Sandforce based model.  Keep your main system and
frequently used files on it.

2. Use a large spinning rust drive for bulk media (music/video/ISO
files, etc.), and set it to spin down most of the time.

Here's a good article to help you pick - note that any performance
over 150MB/s isn't going to be helpful with your controller - look for
high IOPS, which may be helpful: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829

Another interesting option - Seagate makes a "Hybrid" drive, the
Momentus XT.  It's got a 4GB SSD on it which works as a huge read
cache (in ZFS parlance, it works like an L2ARC, aka "readzilla"),
which can greatly improve performance:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

For those of you with a single SATA drive bay, this would be the
product to get.

- Zack