Hi everyone,
Just to resurrect this thread and let you know what happened.
I tried rsyncing the contents of my system partition to a new
partition on the same disk and surprisingly that gave a significant
speed-up, around 10-20% at a guess. This is with ext4 fs. Not sure why
that would be, but perhaps different placement on the platter meant
less head movement, or defragmentation if that affects ext4?
THEN I splashed out £40 at eBuyer for a 60GB OCZ SSD. I put the old
system disk into an external caddy on USB with all my data, so the SSD
is just for the system. Wow! Start-up times for the computer and for
applications are fantastic (about 45 seconds from power on to using
firefox, of which the first 10s or so are for POST and grub, compared
with over 2 minutes total before). The CPU is now maxed out (all four
cores) and the disk activity indicator hardly flickers.
Time will tell if reliability is a problem, but I figure that keeping
my precious data on the original spinning medium lessens the impact of
SSD failure (plus everything is kept backed up to another disk and to
Wuala anyway).
CONCLUSION: £40 well spent!!
HTH, Peter
On 14 March 2013 22:39, Peter Salisbury
<peterthevicar@???> wrote:
> Well I've been looking at iotop when things are lagging and there
> isn't really anything surprising going on. I do have a couple of
> things causing a fairly constant low level of disk activity (around 1%
> iowait) which are java (for Wuala cloud storage) and jbd2 (the ext4
> filing system house keeping daemon). I put a commit=15 onto my fstab
> entry and that reduced jbd2 quite a bit.
>
> Looks like a faster disk might be the only way out!
>
> Thanks again for all the suggestions.
>
> ATB, Peter
>
> On 14 March 2013 08:30, Michael Pavling <pavling@???> wrote:
>> On 13 March 2013 21:57, Paul Stimpson <paul@???> wrote:
>>>
>>> >Maybe a good cheap quiet boot device for an Openelec media player
>>> >though?
>>> >(assuming the media files are on a server somewhere else in the
>>> >house...)
>>> >
>>>
>>> An OpenElec machine will keep its database and all the downloaded movie
>>> and album art on the boot volume so you do want something quite spritely if
>>> you don't want the GUI to be chunky. I got a 64GB SanDisk SATA SSD from
>>> Novatech for mine for about £40.
>>>
>>
>> The DB can be anywhere (I share a MySQL DB between three XBMC boxes at
>> home), and with a little fiddling, so can the artwork. And if, as he says,
>> it's only "slightly worse", it won't be clunky...
>> But yeah, given the price of a 32GB CF card against a 'proper' SSD hard
>> drive, there doesn't seem to be much sense in setting out to build with
>> that. But if the bits were all spare in a box, I'd not hesitate to use them.
>>
>>
>> --
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>> LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
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