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

[Steve Franks]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Zack Williams <zdwzdw at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.

I put a 30GB PATA SSD in a ~5yr old compaq V2000 (1.7GHz/512MB), and
it absolutely smokes with Ubuntu.  Boots usably in 10 seconds.  I was
going to junk the thing until it got the SSD; it was completely
useless by modern standards with XP and a 5400rpm PATA; took like 90
seconds to boot, and took forever to load apps.

Steve