[conspire] (forw) Re: ubuntu 11.04 ssd drive for boot disk + hard disk for rest

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Les Usenet <les.groups at gmail.com> -----

Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 22:10:33 -0700
From: Les Usenet <les.groups at gmail.com>
To: installers at linuxmafia.com
Subject: ubuntu 11.04 ssd drive for boot disk + hard disk for rest

I have a laptop that supports 2 disk drives. Already have a hard drive with
Ubuntu 11.04 installed. Bought a 96GB Kingston SSD and want to put
read-mostly files there such as programs. Help!
Regards ...Les Faby

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 01:06:54 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Les Faby <les.groups at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: ubuntu 11.04 ssd drive for boot disk + hard disk for rest
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Les Usenet (les.groups at gmail.com):

> I have a laptop that supports 2 disk drives. Already have a hard drive
> with Ubuntu 11.04 installed. Bought a 96GB Kingston SSD and want to
> put read-mostly files there such as programs. Help!

Hi, Les!  I got your voicemail on my cellular, which probably arrived as
I was on my way home from the SVLUG meeting, this evening.

Sure, we can absolutely move some normally-static trees of your Ubuntu
system (notably, /usr) onto the SSD drive.  The easiest technique for
doing so is to boot a 'live CD' Linux distro, which thus permits us
access to your full system without also running anything on it at the
time.  While thus booted (from the live CD + RAMdisk), create
filesystems on your SSD, pick out parts of your Ubuntu system to move
onto it,  move them, create mountpoints for the moved portions on your
root filesystem, and update your /etc/fstab to implement the new mounts.

Here's a philosophical question for you to bear in mind:  Has the
duty-cycle characteristics of SSD drives now become competitive enough
that you want to move write-intensive files to yours?  Alternatively,
even if you're concerned about early wear, is the huge performance gain
of SSD's super-face random-access times so compelling that you want to 
put write-intensive traffic there, anyway?

In my work environment, some co-workers have gotten enormous
benefit from putting, say, their Linux homedirs on SSD so that apps that
manage high-traffic indexes, e.g., Mozilla Thunderbird, maintain those
indexes on the high-speed SSD drive instead of on the relatively pokey
hard drive, thus saving a lot of time when searching and sorting mail.

By the way, just a reminder, this Saturday is not a CABAL day.  It seems
that way to many people, because it'll have been two weeks since the
prior CABAL day -- but July was a 5-Saturday month, and this Saturday
will be the 1st Saturday in August, you see.


----- End forwarded message -----