[Tfug] SSD plans & disk usage

[Louis Taber]

Hi All,

The computer arrived one week ago on Tuesday.  The Dell T-110 is a bit
louder than I would like, but it is OK.  The Intel X3440 processor is
showing  40430.63 BogoMIPS.  My P4 showed 11178.14 BogoMIPS, so on some
counts the processors/cores are about the same speed, perhaps slower.  The
memory and disk drives arrived Friday.

After looking at the data in /sys I decided that a faster root & /usr drive
would make very little difference I decided not to bother with a SSD.  I had
original thought I might take two external 640GByte SATA drives I have and
take them out of there external cases and put them in the new computer.  I
ended up buying to two $55 1TByte drives instead.  Cheaper than one small
SSD.  Most of it is set up MD.  I will probably have some questions on that
in bootable MD setup in a few days if I can't figure it out.

The on-board 8Mbyte video did support 1280x1024.  I may add a video card
later, but for now it is working fine.  Debian "Testing" figured out the
card and monitor without any trouble on my part,  "Stable" took some
tweaking.

USB audio seem to be the way for me to go.  I hooked up my Zoom H2 Handy
Recorder as an audio output device and it worked just fine.  No setup at
all.  I have two additional cheap audio interfaces coming from DealExtreme (
http://www.dealextreme.com/).  If they don't work it won't be a big deal.  I
would like to get a MIDI interface someday.

  - Louis



On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 11:15 PM, Louis Taber <ltaber at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> "Well, what are your workloads?"  from Tom Rini is an important question.
> With a typically silly answer.
> My "workloads" are usually:
>
> 0) X-window system
> 1) Firefox - with an occasional video.  (12 tabs currently)
> 2) Terminal sessions 10-15 at a time are not unusual.  Most local ones.
> 3) Some GIMP
> 4) Some Audacity  (I would like to do some 4 channel playback too.
> [latter])
> 5) rsync to remote sites for backup and such.
>
> I did find an answer to one of my earlier questions -- what is the system
> doing with each partition.
>
> Take a look at:
> http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-measure-and-read-disk-activity.html
>
> In summary:
> Field  1 -- # of reads completed successfully.
> Field  2 -- # of reads merged,
> Field  3 -- # of sectors read successfully.
> Field  4 -- # of milliseconds spent reading
>        (as measured from __make_request() to end_that_request_last()).
> Field  5 -- # of writes writes completed successfully.
> Field  6 -- # of writes merged
> Field  7 -- # of sectors written successfully.
> Field  8 -- # of milliseconds spent writing
>         (as measured from __make_request() to end_that_request_last()).
> Field  9 -- # of I/Os currently in progress --  should go to zero.
> Field 10 -- # of milliseconds spent doing I/Os -- This field is increases
> so long as field 9 is nonzero.
> Field 11 -- weighted # of milliseconds spent doing I/Os
>
> For my current system at the current time:
>        top - 22:56:14 up 73 days, 14:50, 10 users,  load average: 0.37,
> 0.21, 0.12
>                                           Sectors
> read                                          Sectors written
> Field#          1              2                  3
> 4              5              6                   7                 8
> 9            10              11
> /            88436    246489      2678385    710744       7824      409043
>     3335160      1796452    0    446712     2507092
> /home  883287    262225 135901996  9254264  5200553    8927714 113119328
> 223525832   0  9396364 232783172
> /tmp      45279      22991      5896086    486364    226505    2806769
> 24266992    19119160    0  1236676   19607592
> /usr     746320    102178    11810500   7582124   376402    1428796
> 14476864    22569504    0  3041040   30285364
> /var       91663      14062      1938596     620240   279402    1491145
> 14182000       6994996    0  1093092    7615088
> /home/ltaber/alt-disk
>              43054      10753      4086498    1206724   186631 16174886
> 130917320 226015104     0  4461956 227441464
> *  Several partitions not listed.
> (I moved a lot of data out of /home to /home/ltaber/alt-disk during this
> time because of space issues.)
>
> Or .48% of the weighted milliseconds doing I/O in / and /usr.  Probably not
> worth putting the SSD at all.
> And .08 is the total time (73days) divided by the weighted time doing I/O
> --- what ever that is worth.
>
>   - Louis
>
>
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