[Discuss] SSD

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Stephen Adler <adler at stephenadler.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking at upgrading my workstation by adding a couple SSDs as system
> disks. I'm going to keep my regular drives (reconfigure them) so that they
> are used for storage, backups etc. I've been reading some reviews on
> newegg.com and there are a lot of postings about the drives gone bad. Anyone
> have any advice, preference with SSDs? Any linux specific advice?

Popping back up to your original question...

You might want to look into ways to use your new SSDs and old disk
drives in a more integrated fashion:

Some people suggest combining an SSD partition and a disk partition
into a single MD RAID1 partition.  If you use the "write-mostly" and
"write-behind" options to mdadm, you can supposedly get some of the
advantages of both fast random reads from the SSD and
allay your concerns about data loss by having it all replicated on
spinning platters.   OTOH, your maximum sequential write peformance
will end up being limited by SSD write speeds.    Which matters more
to you?  Google for "hybrid", "SSD", "RAID1".   Any modern Linux
should include the tools to do this.

If you are willing to hack your kernel the bcache
(http://lwn.net/Articles/496782/) block device uses an SSD as a fast
cache for your spinning platters.

Good Luck,
Bill Bogstad