Status of SSDs under Fedora ?

[Roberto Ragusa]

Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
> On 06/10/2010 04:53 PM, Linuxguy123 wrote:
>> I'm thinking of getting an Intel 160 GB SSD.   How would it work under
>> Linux ?
> 
> F12 and F13 both work awesomely with the Intel SSDs. Run, don't walk, 
> and buy some!
> 
> I've replaced ~6 drives here at work with the 80 GB drives.
> 
> The speed difference and the silent operation are really, really, really 
> nice.
> 
> Best thing ever! Spinning disks seem so quaint now. (Well, OK, the 
> fileservers still need spinning disks.)
> 
> Did I mention I was impressed by them? :-)

I switched to a 128GB Toshiba 1.8" SSD a few days ago (they have a 256GB too).
The difference with a (7200rpm) disk is immense. Random reads really fly,
everything starts up as if already cached.

I tried this benchmark:

  echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  time find $HOME|wc -l

It drops the disk caches (so we force a worst case scenario) and then
counts how many files I have in my home dir.
I have 450,000 files and the command finished after 35 seconds.
That is 12,000 files/s.
The throughput measured by gkrellm was 6-10 MB/s.

These are *wonderful* numbers; try it on a spinning disk, if you
do not believe me.

(for completeness, the filesystem was reiserfs)

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it