Mon, 24 Sep 2007
Fast seek slash
My laptop feels slow. Having run no metrics, I'm going to guess a lot of the reason that apt-get takes more than a second or two to load its database is the seek time of the hard drive. It's some boring 5400 RPM sucker, and it has moving parts which have to move. Totally lame.
So I'll replace it with flash of some kind. Flash is expensive for lots of space, so it's probably wasteful of dollars to make it my /home partition. But if / were fast, then at least apt and application launching would be faster. And swap would be faster in a world where seeks are almost free, too.
Solid State Disk, or CF card
Here are the contenders in pre-packaged solid state land:
- Transcend's solid-state hard drives. Unfortunately no one on products.google.com seems to have these in stock.
- SanDisk SSD (formerly FFD) UATA 2.5”. Apparently these are an OEM-only part.
So it's off to CompactFlash cards then. Cards compatible with the CompactFlash 4.0 spec can do Ultra DMA mode 4, which I don't even remember how many megabytes a second but it should be fast. The cards themselves should be fast, too; no point putting a slow card on a fast bus. It looks like Transcend's 8GB TS8GCF266 is the best in price-performance, around $140.
What about the flash media dying tragically and abruptly?
It's true, flash media have a maximum number of writes they can take before tragedy. Hopefully things will be fine; Transcend's specifications seem to say has "1 000 000 times" endurance, which presumably means writes. And consumer-grade Flash cards do wear leveling, from what I hear.
If I plan to keep the 2.5" hard drive in this wonderful T43's hard drive bay, I can get the UltraBay Slim HDD adapater (Lenovo, IBM PN 62P4554) for around $50.
I'll try this, I think.
