On 04/03/15 12:53, Mark Rogers wrote:
I'm considering SSD upgrades to my desktop and/or laptop, likely starting with my desktop.
I generally need a decent capacity on my desktop so that will be traditional storage, but I want the boot device to be SSD.
I know almost nothing about SSD so I'd like some advice.
I'm looking at (eg) Crucial MX100 SATA 512GB (~£140), but I could go up to Samsung Evo 850 for an extra £40. (Or maybe 256GB would be enough and I'd benefit more from spending my money upgrading multiple machines?)
What I want to achieve is (a) O/S boots and runs from SSH, so loading apps etc is faster, (b) any swap space is on SSD, (c) and temp space (including browser caches etc) is on SSD, and (d) (it would be nice if) anything else on slower storage could be cached on SSD.[1]
Getting fast storage is great if my hardware can make good use of it. So how do I find out whether my Linux boxen will support transfer rates that make SSD worthwhile? If my motherboard can only give me 3Gbps, is it fair to assume that I will still see major improvements over traditional hard disks even if not the full benefit of the SSD?
What other things should I know? Any tips?
[1] My typical usage seems to be Firefox or Chrome open with 100+ tabs, maybe a couple of VirtualBox VMs open, maybe a few LibreOffice docs open.
Swap space on SSD? Surely it's easier, quicker and faster to just shove more ram into the machine? RAM should be faster than SSD, and if you have enough of it, then swap space won't be used.
Cheers Steve