(OT) Questions About SSDs for a Laptop

[Mark Phillips]

Michael,

Thanks again for your comments, they are very helpful. I have been googling
RAID1 and LVM and finding lots of good information.

I really like your idea of a RAID1 for the two SSDs. Does it matter if one
is msata and one is not?

I am trying to decide on the merits of using LVM with the RAID1, since I
only have 1 disk and I normally don't partition it so I don't have to worry
about running our of space until the disk is almost full. Could you explain
to me the benefit of using LVM + RAID1 for these two drives? How would you
partition the drives? My current drive has about 420 GB of data in /home,
about 9GB in /opt, and some misc stuff in /var, all of which I need to
transfer that to the new system.

Thanks,

Mark

P.S. One benefit of using both LVM and RAID1 is learning something new! ;)


On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Michael Butash <michael at butash.net> wrote:

> I really never hit any io constraints on disks honestly since using
> ssd's.  I watch gkrellm like a hawk and tend to notice if something is
> amiss, and disks are never it, unless one dies.  I tend to abuse my system
> with 32db of ram and chrome and firefox each have seen using 10gb of ram
> each, nothing really ever slamming disks.
>
> Some games/graphics intensive apps that use bitmap caching to /tmp or
> somewhere in home I'll give a ramdisk to ease it's pain.  This works well
> for things like minecraft servers to ease killing my ssd's prematurely.
>
> I've never honestly benchmarked my disk i/o with raid, crypto, lvm, and a
> fs atop them, but honestly until I'm aggravated with a visible bottleneck,
> it's doing it's job.  I haven't had that in a desktop setting since going
> to SSD's, period.
>
> I'm pretty happy with the msata mx100 micron's in my dell laptop so far.
> The fact I can have 2x 512gb ssd disks in my 12" laptop and 16gb of ram is
> frigging great.
>
> Do yourself a favour, get a usb3 spindle disk for the bulk data and get a
> smaller ssd.  I used 32, then 64, then 128, then 256, now up to 512gb disks
> that I don't feel I'm getting utterly screwed having to buy 2x for
> resiliency.  Slice your data partitions adequately and learn to live within
> your means.  You quickly figure out what data you really need or don't when
> you have to add space, but lvm's make that painless.  At home I just do
> this with a nas direct, but I rsync a lot of stuff against that for backups
> and working between laptop/desktop on the road or not.
>
> My worst offenders are email, everyone else's data I carry about (hoards
> of data and docs from customers), stupid windoze xp vm as my visio runtime,
> and a few games if they go local.  I'm fairly glad being a linux zealot I
> was weaned off pc games by mid 2000's, seeing some actually want a few
> hundred gigs of space these days. Same reason I don't use win7, they have
> the audacity to ask for 25gb for a base install, just so I can run visio
> somewhere.  Not when I have a 64gb drive. and xp is fine as a hypervisor
> for visio in seamless vbox mode.
>
> Enter lucidchart, it's actually a decent replacement for visio now.  Then
> I'm finally free of any real need for windoze at all.
>
> -mb
>
>
>
> On 09/03/2014 10:20 AM, Mark Phillips wrote:
>
>>
>> Michael,
>>
>> Great info...Thanks!
>>
>> Are there any performance (or other issues) between a raid1with two 1tb
>> msata ssds and rsync between one 1tb msata ssd and 7200 rpm 1tb hdd? I like
>> the idea of raid1 with two ssds, but not sure if I am ready to buy 2 1tb
>> ssds. And yes, I really need a 1 tb drive.....Just consider me a hoarder of
>> data...;)
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
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