Tell us about your SSD experience.

[Paqman]

I'm going to use this thread to ask you this: since I'm using a Core Solo laptop right now, will a change of HDD to an SSD make a lot of difference or will the CPU speed eventually be the limiting factor (1.86GHz, 2Gb RAM)?

Yes and no.

Some tasks are very CPU dependant. For those, yes, your CPU will be the bottleneck. But for any heavily I/O dependant task, switching to an SSD will show large benefits, regardless of your CPU speed. Magnetic drives are a massive bottleneck even on computers with a very fast CPU/RAM/mobo. Things which are heavy on I/O will be things like booting and opening apps that haven't been pre-cached.

I was under the impression that ext2 was the preferred file system on SSD's.

Only if you're paranoid, or have a very early-model SSD that doesn't have effective wear-levelling. The only reason to use EXT2 is that it does marginally less writes to disk. If your drive doesn't do wear levelling (early SSDs, Compact Flash and SD cards, etc) then cutting down on writes would improve reliability. On a recent 2.5" SSD however, reliability isn't an issue, and you're better off using EXT3 or 4 for the extra performance.

[andrewabc]

I have a 60 gig OCZ Agility2. I wonder if my cpu is the bottleneck because from grub, my system boots into Ubuntu in ~20 seconds. Other than that, I really like the performance of the drive.

You'd have to show us your bootchart, and also system->admin->disk utility->read benchmark

You have Athlon 64 x2 6000+, that is dual core correct?
Your CPU should have nothing to do with bottleneck. I get from grub to desktop in a couple seconds using 60gb vertex which is same as your agility using core2duo 1.8ghz.

Based upon your signature, you have laptop? laptop limited to SATAI speeds. So you are getting 120mb/s read. If you had desktop it would be ~200mb/s

Hey guys,

I'm going to use this thread to ask you this: since I'm using a Core Solo laptop right now, will a change of HDD to an SSD make a lot of difference or will the CPU speed eventually be the limiting factor (1.86GHz, 2Gb RAM)?

Thanks for your feedback.

Your CPU won't be much of a bottleneck (to access data/apps), but it will impact performance.
You are on laptop which is limted to SATAI. So you will get 120mb/s max read.

Show us output of system->admin->disk utility->read benchmark and it will show your read speed from hdd. You will get 120mb/s almost constant from ssd. ssd will be faster but as to whether worth the price is the question.

I am curious what else you notice besides fast bootups and impressive speeds when you do diagnostics. Does it make a big difference in apps you use, etc?

Yes and no. Firefox is much faster, especially when typing in addressbar due to the fact that it is 25mb sqlite database which brought my desktop hdd to a crawl. Lots of random write/read with firefox which ssd help with alot. For other apps there is a small increase in speed. Not enough to go "Wow!", but enough that if you went and opened a lot of apps at once or multitasking with stuff that access data from ssd, then yes you will see improvements especially since if on desktop getting 200mb/s read vs <100mb/s on hdd.

As for ext2 vs ext4, it doesn't matter much unless you are paranoid about speed and longevity. I use ext4 on both my computers that have SSD. It's not something to be overly worried about.

Just use SSD for OS+apps and everyday used small files. Keep your media and backups on hdd.

[Foxcow]

You'd have to show us your bootchart, and also system->admin->disk utility->read benchmark

You have Athlon 64 x2 6000+, that is dual core correct?
Your CPU should have nothing to do with bottleneck. I get from grub to desktop in a couple seconds using 60gb vertex which is same as your agility using core2duo 1.8ghz.

Based upon your signature, you have laptop? laptop limited to SATAI speeds. So you are getting 120mb/s read. If you had desktop it would be ~200mb/s

Your CPU won't be much of a bottleneck (to access data/apps), but it will impact performance.
You are on laptop which is limted to SATAI. So you will get 120mb/s max read.

Show us output of system->admin->disk utility->read benchmark and it will show your read speed from hdd. You will get 120mb/s almost constant from ssd. ssd will be faster but as to whether worth the price is the question.

Yup 6000+ is a dual core chip and those are the specs for my desktop.

[jdong]

I was under the impression that ext2 was the preferred file system on SSD's.

That's a bad idea, unless you can guarantee you'll never have an improper shutdown. Otherwise, your SSD is just as vulnerable as a rotational HDD to filesystem corruption and the need to run a lengthy filesystem check on the next reboot.

[amp711]

80Gb Intel SSD in my machine. Fast as all get out and have had no reliability issues.

No metrics available at work, but I'll try and throw something up tonight..

[andrewabc]

Yup 6000+ is a dual core chip and those are the specs for my desktop.

Ok, you got agility2, and seems to be running at full SATAII speeds.
So it should definitely not take 20 seconds to get to desktop from grub.

I'm guessing something is doing something when loading and your system waits for it to complete before continuing. Bootchart should show this.

[Foxcow]

Ok, you got agility2, and seems to be running at full SATAII speeds.
So it should definitely not take 20 seconds to get to desktop from grub.

I'm guessing something is doing something when loading and your system waits for it to complete before continuing. Bootchart should show this.

Sorry about that, I completely forgot to run that. Its incoming shortly...

[Foxcow]

Here we are:

[andrewabc]

According to bootchart I don't see anything wrong.
10 seconds is normal (they change bootchart settings with every ubuntu release, so hard to keep track of).

You sure it is 20 seconds from grub->desktop?

Here's mine.



I timed from grub->desktop and it was 9-10 seconds. So about same as my bootchart.

[Foxcow]

According to bootchart I don't see anything wrong.
10 seconds is normal (they change bootchart settings with every ubuntu release, so hard to keep track of).

You sure it is 20 seconds from grub->desktop?

Here's mine.



I timed from grub->desktop and it was 9-10 seconds. So about same as my bootchart.

I'll have to time it again when I get home but it was ~20 seconds to desktop. It was actually 23 seconds but I took three seconds off so I could type my password and press enter.