Partitioning between SDD and HDD

[Alan Evans]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 6:35 AM, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. wrote:

> You mean that all this hype over SSD's and they're LIMITED? I thought they
> were supposed to be BETTER than the spinning drives of today? Exaclty how
> are they better if they come "out-of-the-box" with limitations? Just
> curious...
>

It's well known that flash devices have a limited number of writes. This
number is pretty high, though. And with caching and load-balancing built
into the drive's firmware, it is typically not a major concern.

However, although SSD devices have lightning-fast read performance, writing
to them is considerably slower. Think of the difference between reading a
big file from a flash thumb drive versus writing a big file. That doesn't
mean that you should never write to them, but if the intended use involves
writing very frequently (like /var or /tmp) then it might not be a good fit.

Also, SSD is much more expensive, byte-for-byte, than a hard drive. If you
want a lot storage (my /home partition is well over a terabyte) then SSD is
pretty cost prohibitive.

On the other hand, my system drive is SSD and, because of the fast read
performance, my computer boots, after the BIOS screen, in four seconds.