[Watford] New machine

[David Edmondson]

On 28 June 2012, at 4:22pm, Alain Williams wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 02:32:17PM +0100, David Edmondson wrote:
> 
>> It's your decision, of course.  I bought the smallest I could (40G MSATA for a
>> laptop, so the spinning disk is still there) and keep just the OS and the core
>> parts of my home directory on it.  The difference in performance for many
>> operations really is astonishing.
> 
> That might be interesting; my /home / and /usr come to ~ 35G allocated, used
> about 60% of that.

I'm at about 28G (Debian testing, X, xmonad, emacs, mail, documents, …). Music and photographs are on the (500G) spinning disk, which is usually spun down (you're talking about a desktop so this matters less, but keeping the disk spun down is good for battery life and ambient noise).

> Given that I will have RAM by the bucketfull I would have thought that I/O on /
> would have been minimal ... but running atop shows a lot of writes to /, I
> wonder why (/tmp is a separate partition) ? Looks as if the lm-profiler tools
> will help ….

Time is money - will you spend more than £100 of time looking? :-)

The place where the SSD really shines is something like 'apt-get update' and the install phase of 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. Booting is faster, but I don't expect to do that often. offlineimap's trawling through my maildir directories is significantly quicker.

> Video cards, I am not interested in lots of graphics, but on motherboard
> graphics uses system RAM - which will presumably slow the system down. So paying
> #25-30 ish for a modest card might seem worth it.

I've used on-board Intel graphics wherever possible, purely because they are active in keeping their hardware working with Linux. There are notable exceptions, of course, but for the HD[234]000 family I've had no significant problems. NVidia has always been a nuisance, as the binary only drivers are necessary for many configurations. I've no recent experience with ATI, so can't comment.