[Gllug] performance boost for linux

[Peter Corlett]

On 11 Feb 2009, at 15:13, Jose Luis Martinez wrote:
[...]
> "Modern USB flash drives claim speeds of as high as 30 megabytes per
> second (MBps) when reading, and 15 MBps while writing. USB 2.0 ports
> have the potential for greater speeds, up to 60 MBps, but limits in
> the flash technology do not currently allow it to make full use of
> this." ( http://www.flashmemory.cc/usb-flash-drive.php )
>
> From Wikipedia, the current speeds of SATA disks is 300 MB/s give or
> take ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA ).

Firstly, that 300MB/s is the SATA300 interface speed, not the speed of  
the disk. It might be able to do 300MB/s out of its tiny cache (32MB  
or whatever) but current disks top out at about 100-150MB/s off the  
actual platters.

In any case, that's mostly moot. You're rarely streaming data but  
instead are scatter-loading stuff from all over the disk, and the seek  
time dominates. The seek time on SSDs is about a four hundredth of a  
hard disk, so it can do this scatter-loading 400 times faster.


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