slackware-friendly netbook
in [Slackware]
|
Prev: Slack 13 breaks ss
Next: What's the point?
From: Sylvain Robitaille on 30 Mar 2010 11:41 Martin wrote: > What was the problem with solid-state drives on netbooks? It's the same technology as other "flash" media (compact flash, USB keys, memory cards, etc.) There are a limitted number of write cycles. Incidentally, that's also true of hard disks with rotating magnetically coated platters, but the limits on those are usually significantly higher. The question that it seems many don't consider, though, is whether or not the system will ultimately fail in some other way before the lifetime of the SSD/SD/HDSD/CF/MMC/ETC is exceeded. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sylvain Robitaille syl(a)encs.concordia.ca Systems analyst / AITS Concordia University Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science Montreal, Quebec, Canada ----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: JohnF on 30 Mar 2010 12:01 Sylvain Robitaille <syl(a)alcor.concordia.ca> wrote: > Tune your mounts. relatime/noatime? What's the best way to mke2fs/tune2fs/mount a flash drive type device? Did somebody in this ng once recommend fat fs for data only backups? -- John Forkosh ( mailto: j(a)f.com where j=john and f=forkosh )
From: Martin Schmitz on 30 Mar 2010 12:03 Sylvain Robitaille wrote: > It's the same technology as other "flash" media (compact flash, > USB keys, memory cards, etc.) There are a limitted number of write > cycles. No, that's not that relevant anymore. They all use a technology called "wear leveling" which guarantees you more write cycles than you could ever use in real live. Martin
From: Pirillo on 30 Mar 2010 13:02 On 30 Mar, 16:33, Sylvain Robitaille <s...(a)alcor.concordia.ca> wrote: > Pirillo wrote: > > ... Some of these netbooks have no ... hard drives. The OS runs > > entirely on flash cards or similar. They have a limited life, a > > standard distro like Slackware would probably wear them out very > > quickly. ... > > Tune your mounts. This isn't terribly difficult. This is one possibilty, probably not for all and certainly not for the general public. I would like to see a good tutorial on how to mount noncritical directories on a ram based filesystem. I haven't found a good one. You can mount some files in /var and certainly all /tmp in ram but the whole filesystem is full of cache files, temporary files, etc. Is it worth the pain? Isn't it better to use a live image with a permanent /home directory instead?
From: Michael Black on 30 Mar 2010 13:39
On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Martin wrote: > On 03/30/2010 03:03 PM, Michael Black wrote: >> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, notbob wrote: >> >>> On 2010-03-30, Pirillo <remailer(a)reece.net.au> wrote: >>>> >>>> It's not only about memory and processor power. Some of these netbooks >>>> have no moving parts.... >>> >>> Some, not all. My Asus eee comes with a 160G hdd and is most >>> certainly a "netbook". >>> >> The solid-state only netbooks didn't last very long, maybe about a year. >> Now, it looks like few if any do not have a hard drive. >> >> It wasn't clear if they switched to get around the issue of all that >> writing to the solid state drive, or if they did it for marketing, >> nobody really wanted something with "only" 8gigs of "hard drive". >> >> Michael >> > > > What was the problem with solid-state drives on netbooks? I'm not sure I > understand the last couple of posts. > Each location on the solid state drives can only be written to a fixed number of times, the exact number I don't know but which is far less than the number of times one can rewrite to a hard drive. The number is large enough that routine use doesn't matter, but when you get things that are constantly writing to the solid state drive, such as logging and cache, then that will limit the life of the solid state drive. They have mechanism in place inside the drives to spread the useage over a better spread of the drive, so instead of repeatedly writing the log to certain sectors the sectors used vary around the drive so no sector gets too many writes. The issue for Slackware on a netbook isn't that it's inappropriate, but that if there's a solid state drive, one might be best to turn off as much as possible that writes to the "hard drive", such as logging. My Aspire One actually has 1gig set aside for swap, but doesn't seem to use it. Swap is another thing that might wear out the solid state drive fast, so I assume they have it set up to keep an image of RAM when the computer goes to sleep or whatever. On the other hand, I don't think the netbooks went to real hard drives about a year after the first netbook came along because of this issue. I think it was marketing, too many people looked at those 8gig solid state drives and felt it was way too small. Maybe, but on the other hand, netbooks aren't meant as general purpose portables, they are intended for light use. I think the manufacturers started adding hard drives to make the netbooks look more appealing. The hard drives are cheap, even the standard 160gig ones, so it looks like the company is being generous, when it's likely marketing to increase sales. I have a 160gig hard drive at home, bought five years ago, and I'm still barely using it, I can't imagine needing that much space in a netbook. Michael |