Re: Re: SSD and VMWare Server 2... spicy!

[Jamie Bennett <jamie.bennett@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/02/11 at 10:40am, Paul Gordon wrote:
> Hmm... I'd imagine (or at least hope) that the technology should
reduce
> power consumption over a traditional fully mechanical drive though...
- in a
> laptop you don't want the sole system drive to spin down whilst the
machine
> is awake, so it would surely have to be going all the time... I
believe part
> of the operating characteristics of hybrids is supposed to allow the
> mechanical part to spin down for a good proportion of the operating
time -
> the SSD portion keeping the OS happy with good fast responsive storage
and
> able to commit writes to the drive without having to spin up the
platters...

It depends on how the drive is organized. Obviously if the common OS files
are on the spinning part of the drive then it will constantly be in
operation negating any power consumption advantages of an SSD. These
drives do have some intelligence but are marketed on their speed
improvements rather than their power consumption.

> I'm >this< close to ordering one... - now that I can't order a
new Sandy
> Bridge system for at least another couple of months, I need something
else
> to play with!

Yeah, we just enabled Sandy Bridge support (I work for Canonical on
Ubuntu) its a shame that the hardware is delayed.

I've had an SSD in my Macbook Pro for 6 months now, an OCZ, and to say
its given it a lease of life is an understatement. I was using an 24"
3.2ghz iMac for day-to-day work but the SSD has made this 2.4ghz laptop
much faster than the iMac for me. Granted I'm a developer, VM user and
general user of many files per day so YMMV.

As a side note, I went for a lowly 160gb version and concentrated on
getting my server storage solution in tip-top shape. I now have
everything on a PPC Mac Mini server (serving the Apple TV v2's in the
house) which is backed up locally to USB drives and to the cloud, both
using CrashPlan. I find that I still have plenty of space locally for
things I use day to day (and I travel a lot) and when I need them extra
files, the server has it all.

> Paul G.

Regards,
Jamie.
--
http://www.linuxuk.org


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