Ted T'so on SSD and journalling

[Taylor, Kaia]

Speaking of tweaking netbooks, I'll have one in hand soon.  I'd be happy to eventually give a brief presentation, following on hans's presentation and the idea that it might be neat to compare price/functionality/value.  Here's mine  http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SkuSearch_v3.asp?SCriteria=BA25872
I have 2 ideas, in terms of such a presentation

OS:
I'm assuming that Xandros (which comes pre-installed) will *have* to go, and while I'm doing that, why not match it up with someone else's OS in PLUG, so we can compare performance with no extra variables introduced by a different OS.  If anyone has an existing netbook, and is interested, give me a shout.  NB my cheapie netbook's SSD is only 4G.

Hardware diags:
I'm also wondering if anyone who has gotten a refurb like mine has a handy link to some baseline/diag tools to test everything before the manufacturer's warranty runs out.  My friend got an EEE which it turns out couldn't reach USB 2.0 speed on a couple of his ports, for instance.  That particular issue is easy to test by, whatever, time ... dd  to the SD card mounted on that port, but I'm guessing there are other hardware check scripts that can save me some work with other hw components.  We might want to run the same diags on different models of netbooks if we want to do side by side comparisons.


Regards,
Kaia Taylor

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-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of der.hans
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 1:18 AM
To: quatsch
Subject: Ted T'so on SSD and journalling

moin moin,

The first paragraph in the quote was a comment on Ted's blog. The second is Ted's response. Read the blog post at the URL given below.

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#  # 2  tytso  Says:
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:15 am

@1: I’d thought that the reason to avoid ext3 on SSDs, at least most of the ones available today, was not the total number of writes but rather the repeated writes to the same place on the disk (that is, the journal)

Norman,

Actually, even the most primitive SSD’s and Flash drives have to get this right, because the Windows FAT filesystem are constantly updating the same locations on disk (namely for the File Allocation Table), which is in a fixed location on disk. So although there’s not a lot we can count on in terms of the quality of flash drives’ wear level, it’s very likely they get that right, since otherwise their reliability on basic FAT filesystems, which are used in essentially every single digital camera on the market, would be pretty bad.
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http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/01/ssds-journaling-and-noatimerelatime/

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
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