PCIe SSD

They actually aren't going to perform that much faster than your standard SSD.

Consider that SATA II give 300 MB/S transfer speeds, and SATA III takes that to 600 MB/S. A PCIe x4 slot will get you about 1 GB/S, so only about twice SATA III, or 4 times SATA II, and you don't have the ease of expandibility that come with having a SATA drive (i.e., it's more likely you'll have another SATA port than that you will have another PCIe slot for that drive).

That's not to say they don't have utility. After all, it IS 4 times faster than your SATA II SSD on transfer speeds, so if you are transferring large amounts of data back and forth routinely, then it WILL be noticeable. For MOST folks, however, the biggest improvement offered by SSDs is in the reduction in seek times, and the number of IOPS that can achieved as opposed to HDDs. That means that for MOST usage scenarios, the issue is less of 'how long does it take to TRANSFER the data' and more of 'how long does it take to FIND the data'. PCIe offers little significant performance advantage over SATA in that regard, AFAIK.

For servers there are even SSDs on memory sticks, so you can have your SSD right on the memory bus just like your RAM. Now THAT is some seriously bad-*** tech for performance.
 
Yeah, thanks!
I was wondering too. I ended up getting a Samsung 120 GB SSD drive for $120
I love it!
Runs so fast with Mint
 
I bought a pair of Crucial M500 960GB SSDs for my laptop, and I'm completely blown away by how responsive they are. They completely DESTROY my 8-drive SAS RAID array in my server for responsiveness.

I manage a mail server for another company, and we were having problems with the system becoming I/O starved when hit with heavy spam loads. I dropped a single 64GB SSD into the box and moved a few key mail processing directories onto that drive, and the system absolutely flies now. It's a server-class SSD, which cost over $500, but the choice was either that or spend several thousand implementing a new RAID store to get the performance we needed.

Spinning rust is dead for anything but hot bulk-storage, IMO.
 
960GB SSD's?
Wow, how much?

I got a Supermicro server for free and it still has SATA rust-spinnin drives.
But its great because I store all of my files, games, movies, music and then back it up regularly.
I can't imagine puttin SSD drives in it...
 
Gizmo said:
I bought a pair of Crucial M500 960GB SSDs for my laptop, and I'm completely blown away by how responsive they are. They completely DESTROY my 8-drive SAS RAID array in my server for responsiveness.

I manage a mail server for another company, and we were having problems with the system becoming I/O starved when hit with heavy spam loads. I dropped a single 64GB SSD into the box and moved a few key mail processing directories onto that drive, and the system absolutely flies now. It's a server-class SSD, which cost over $500, but the choice was either that or spend several thousand implementing a new RAID store to get the performance we needed.

Spinning rust is dead for anything but hot bulk-storage, IMO.
Click to expand...

Wow!
 
Gizmo said:
I bought a pair of Crucial M500 960GB SSDs for my laptop, and I'm completely blown away by how responsive they are. They completely DESTROY my 8-drive SAS RAID array in my server for responsiveness.

I manage a mail server for another company, and we were having problems with the system becoming I/O starved when hit with heavy spam loads. I dropped a single 64GB SSD into the box and moved a few key mail processing directories onto that drive, and the system absolutely flies now. It's a server-class SSD, which cost over $500, but the choice was either that or spend several thousand implementing a new RAID store to get the performance we needed.

Spinning rust is dead for anything but hot bulk-storage, IMO.
Click to expand...

Yeah I bought some too and they are faster than my 16 SCSI RAID 0.5 array :D

Just saying!
 
Dude keep sayin it, I love ssd, I can't wait to put one in my Chromebook
 
Hmm... Not sure how to answer that...
Wait, yes I am!!!
Geeeettttt onnnnnneeee!!
 
booman said:
960GB SSD's?
Wow, how much?
Click to expand...

I got a deal on them at the time from NewEgg, and they were stil almost $500 each. I picked the Crucials over similarly priced 1T Samsung 840 Evos because they use MLC technology as opposed TLC and thus have a longer life expectancy (more writes per cell). Also, the Crucials have on-board capacitors which help to ensure that any writes currently in progress during a power failure will get completed, thus reducing the likelihood of drive corruption.
 
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rolandttg said:
Have you tried linux on a chrombook?
Click to expand...
Actually yes, I used it several times a week.
There was only one distro I could select from for my model: ChrUbuntu
If you get a Chromebook with an Arm processor, there are different distro's available.

Gizmo - Wow, still... that is a lot of money. I'm glad you did your research (as I figured you would) :D
 
There are a couple things that you really should do if you're going to run an SSD.

1) Disable swap. Modern systems shouldn't need to use swap anyway, because they will have plenty of RAM, and swap just slows things down. Running a heavily used swap on an SSD is a good way to reduce the lifetime of the SSD.
2) Enable 'discard' option in /etc/fstab for any file systems mounted on the SSD. This allows the file system to perform TRIM operations, informing the SSD of what blocks have been released and can be reclaimed by the drive for wear-leveling. Failure to do so is also a good way to reduce the lifetime of the SSD.
 
I have not performed either of these....
I only have 4 Gigs of RAM and play a lot of games. Would disabling Swap cause problems for me?
I don't think I have any filesystems mounted in fstab besides the DVD-ROM and the Windows 7 Drive.
Win 7 Drive probably isn't even mounted.
 
At a MINIMUM, you've GOT to have / mounted, because that's your root filesystem; without that you aren't going anywhere.

Most systems will have /, swap, and /boot partitions. Some will also have /home. (That's ignoring things like /proc, /sys, /dev, which are system, which are tmpfs or some variant, like proc).

Also, filesystem type plays a role in the 'discard' option, as not all filesystems support the TRIM operation (e.g. ext2, DOS, FAT, tmpfs, proc). Ext4, BtrFS, JFS, and XFS all currently support TRIM.

I also forgot to mention that you need to have the partition aligned on an SSD block boundary. The block size varies according to manufacturer, but aligning on 1 MB boundaries seems to provide the best option, and with drive sizes being what they are, 1 MB is inconsequential.

As for RAM, 4 GB is probably fine unless you routinely have a lot of tasks open, or you run applications that use a lot of RAM.
 
To list what filesystems you CAN mount:

Code: 
cat /etc/fstab

That will give all the filesystems and devices currently 'registered' with your system so that you can mount them. To find out what you have mounted CURRENTLY:

Code: 
mount
 
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