SSD partitioning

[Chris Snook]

max bianco wrote:
> 2008/7/22 Rich Emberson <emberson.rich at gmail.com>:
>> For a non-laptop machine with the following target
>> characteristics: energy efficient, non-gaming, powerful
>> and fast; should SSDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive)
>> be used and, if so, how? SSD have very fast seek times and
>> can have fast read speeds (http://www.datamarck.com/benchmarks).
>>
>> Specifically, what directories ought to be allocated to
>> the SSD drives?
> 
> Are you combining a SSD with a regular old HDD? That's what it sounds
> like. Is there going to be any real performance benefit here? If you
> have one 7200 rpm and one 10000rpm, AFAIK you'll be limited to the
> 7200 speed. You can only go as fast as your slowest man. Is that not
> true with SSD? Can you in fact combine them with regular drives
> without sacrificing performance?
> 
> 
> -Max

If you're doing RAID, you'll get the slowest speed, but that's not what 
he's talking about.  If you put your random-access data on a small, 
expensive, low-latency device, be it SSD or high-end disk, and put your 
sequential-access data on a large, cheap, high-latency disk, it'll 
perform quite nicely, because the sequential access pattern hides the 
latency of the slow disk quite well.  This is why high-end streaming 
media servers use 7200 RPM SATA drives, even though everything else in 
the data center is using SAS or Fibre Channel storage.

-- Chris