phoronix benchmarks ext4 vs. btrfs

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 7, 2012, at 3:31 PM, drago01 wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:14 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Mar 7, 2012, at 3:01 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
>>> Yes, such a feature was submitted[1], but it has never been committed by Chris AFAIK. There is also a OS-agnostic method of this. Seagate XT drives use a small SSD as a cache. Then there is also a Windows method with Intel's SSD Cache using a dedicated SSD as only a cache. Either way gives you a similar result.
>> 
>> I think I'd rather see a portion of the SSD be a discrete device so that the system and application scratch/swap can be pointed to it -
> 
> Swap? Really? That is a waste of (expensive) disk space. There is no
> point on having swap on SSD if you have another disk around. You
> wouldn't notice any speed difference if your system starts swapping
> you are in serious trouble (i.e everything crawls) the best fix here
> is to just buy RAM which is *very* cheap now days.


You're probably right that system swapping is a situation to be avoided. But I can imagine runaway situations that might be more easily recovered from with swap on SSD, just because everything won't come to a complete crawl.

As for application scratch, absolutely SSD should be an option when working on very large files. While not a default or routine dependency, one shouldn't have to suffer with HDD scratch when SSD scratch could be available. A typical pro laptop will max out at 16GB of RAM, and heavy duty Photoshop users can occasionally and not unreasonable bust that limit and need scratch.

Chris Murphy