Re: [LUG] Bah! Disks! Bah!

On 5 February 2010 09:35, Rob Beard <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Quoting James Fidell <james@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Terry Hill wrote:

So would a good setup be to have an SSD drive to boot off and a ram drive as
the swap area so the SSD is buffered from the reading and writing that goes
on there?

If you were going to have a RAM drive as swap, wouldn't it be better
to just put more memory in the machine to start with and have no swap
at all?

I was thinking the same, unless he means something like the Gigabyte PCI Express card which uses DDR2 memory. IIRC it appears as a physical drive but has the speed of memory (so it's used as a drive rather than system memory).

The only other case I've seen for using RAM as swap is on the PS3 where you can use the video ram of the graphics card as swap (since it can't be used for owt else in 'Other OS' mode).

Despite my time here, I am only very recently the proud owner of a 'buntu laptop. My understanding was that whatever you did, swap was essential to the successful running of a nix machine. So I was thinking of a RAM disk, eg: a physical device recognised as a hard drive, and using it to speed up access to what is (to my limited understanding) essentially a "throwaway" area.

It does make sense though if possible to throw a few extra sticks of ram in and get rid of it altogether if possible.

The SSD's on amazon look pretty good, plenty of people seem to be writing favorable reviews, and the capacities dont look bad either - depends what you need really. I guess perhaps the way to go is using a magnetic/high capacity drive for medium term storage (with regular backup) to supplement the SSD and enjoy booting your programs/system a hell of a lot quicker.

Eg:

Enough Ram to make a swap file redundant - how much do you need?

SSD for the system areas - prices/capacity doesn't look prohibitive.

HDD for medium term storage - already got plenty!