# Gentoo on a SSD drive?

## turtles

I am considering moving to a SSD drive for a laptop as I do have a aging HD in the 4yo toshiba a45-s120 as opposed to purchasing new laptop. It has a good battery, good display and 2G of ram and I think i could even upgrade the processor to  2.8 P4 533bus if I wanted to from the celeron 2.6 however

I am not a gammer and not in need of cpu intensive stuff.

Are there any disadvantages to running Gentoo with a SSD drive? I would be purchasing a regular SSD 2.5" ultra ATA IDE drive perhaps I could go with a 16GB.

Do they suffer from the same slowness as the usb flash drives? Any recommendations / user experience?

I am using a little over 17G of a older 40G drive with lots of photo's and music not to mention 5 kernels and hell of alot of cruft created by Gentoo.

I rarely need more storage as I have an old server on a home network for extra archival storage and have not deleted useless stuff in a wile.

thanks for your thoughts

----------

## bunder

Probably would receive better reception in K+H, so moving.   :Wink: 

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Kernel & Hardware.

----------

## eccerr0r

I have an "embedded" copy of Gentoo on a 512MB CF SSD with no X11, it works fine.

An IDE-connected SSD, it tends to be faster than USB.  However the one I have does not support DMA and thus transfers to/from the disk are done PIO which is actually quite slow, slower than HDDs on USB.

Writes are slow.  Also depending on your disk/filesystem, lowering number of writes can extend life of disk.  Since my application, a CF card connected to the IDE bus is embedded, I opted to make the disk read-only by default, thus skirting this issue altogether.  Basically it's installing this disk as if it were a LiveCD.

Not sure if that's the kind of data you're looking for...

----------

## tnt

maybe you would be interested in this topic:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4671758.html#4671758

----------

## Cyker

The Speed will be pretty low.

Your options are Compact Flash cards or 'proper' IDE/SATA Flash HDs.

Compact Flash is much cheaper and works in almost anything but you need to get a pin adaptor, and also if you want decent speeds you need one that supports DMA in it's onboard IDE controller. Most don't.

Flash HDs are pretty expensive, but fit better. Generally they are also slow, but as they tend to support DMA they are on average faster than CF (But not by a lot).

On the cutting edge are stacked parallel transfer Flash HDs which use multiple Flash chips in a sortof RAID0-style thing - These are even more expensve, but have near- hard disk level speeds. I've not seen a SATA one, but the 2.5" Samsung 65GB IDE one I saw benched in the 30-40MB/s area which is about on par with regular disk hard drives.

It costs the same as a semi-decent laptop 'tho.

One advantage of Flash HDs is they have wear-levelling, and on something like that 64GB one, you don't need to worry about wearing it out.

CF cards may or may not have wear-levelling; DMA-capables ones likely will, but cheapo yum-cha ones probably won't... Anything less than 1GB probably won't.

----------

## tnt

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167&p=2

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167&p=3

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/mtron_ssd_32_gb/page5.html#data_transfer_diagrams

...

----------

## Cyker

Ahh forgot about those, good link  :Smile: 

I wonder if they still cost >$1000 'tho...

----------

## AaronPPC

I imagine the price will drop fairly quickly.

It seems odd that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of hard disks.

----------

