I've been having many minor computer wows lately. -- a lot of them -- All starting with Windows7 and iTunes... but I'm not going to get onto that topic. So my primary linux machine tends to have two factors slowing me down. Hard-drive speed, and lack of memory. The memory problem is mostly because I have a need to run 2-3 virtual machines of Windows XP, Win7 and other OSs. My system is maxed at 8G of ram, max for the motherboard. The hard drive speed problem, is the virtual machines of XP and Win7 killing one of my hard drives. Other problem is the postgresql db but that can be solved with larger cache, which takes memory way from the virtual machines adding to the problem.
I started pricing out to replace the motherboard, but then you get into replacing the CPU, memory, and by the time I'm done... I'm up to $1,000. Then I started to think, I wish there was a way to add 100 small drives for raid, and a card for adding 24G of ram. Then it hit me. SSD! Not that I can afford that either, but what would happen if you added a 60G and mounted the entire swap onto it? Would that give the illusion of adding 64G of ram? What about mounting the /dev/shm to a SSD? It's not as elegent as adding a motherboard which can support +24G of ram, but might be the next best thing. -- and if I had the money... slave several SSD into a raid configuration... but now I'm dreaming --
Any ways just an idea I wanted to commit to paper some where.
Speed of my computers ram:
Liandra:
| PC2-5300 DDR2-SDRAM (dual channel 128-bit) | 84.8 Gbit/s | 10.6 GB/s |
| PC2-6400 DDR2-SDRAM (dual channel 128-bit) | 102.4 Gbit/s | 12.8 GB/s |
Solid State Drives:
Speed ranges between 200-300 MB/s No where near the 10-12GB/s but better than the 2MB/s of random seeks on my current HD's
