(OT) Questions About SSDs for a Laptop

[Michael Butash]

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
>