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On 26/10/12 09:18, Neil Winchurst wrote:
Not quite sure what you mean about getting a SSD drive. Will research it. Thanks Neil
An SSD drive is a solid state disk, i.e. Flash memory as a drive. It's in a way similar to a USB drive but a whole lot quicker. IIRC speeds are something like 400 or 500 Megabytes a second read speed and around 175 Megabytes a second write speeds (although it does depend on the SATA controller, in my case my laptop has a slower SATA2 interface so I'd be limited to 300MB/sec).
Looking at a Seagate 1TB 3.5" SATA3 desktop drive it looks like the data transfer rates are around 175MB/sec.
I was looking at this Crucial drive: http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=91747533A5CA7304So that would give you 128GB of very fast storage. The idea is you install the OS (so the root partition, and maybe swap too, not sure if this is generally a good idea or not?) and then have a separate hard drive for your /home directory.
Of course you can put everything on the SSD drive (root, home and swap) but then you're more limited to space, although SSD drives are getting cheaper.
I'm considering an SSD upgrade to speed up my laptop a little bit. I currently have a 320GB hard drive in the machine but the drive is nearly full. I dare say I could probably clear out some of the stuff on the drive and even put some of it on an external USB drive (a lot of it I don't access) and benefit from the speed upgrade.
Other options to consider if you want a compromise between speed and storage capacity is a hybrid drive. These are hard drives with some flash memory built in to store some of the more commonly used data on the drive, such as the operating system. I gather they are faster when reading cached data from the flash.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq