Political Bloviation

I have seen the future and it’s SSD.

The more I see an hear about SSD devices, the more I like it. I know I’m going to upgrade to SSD for the OS and swap file partitions, perhaps with a few programs that would benefit from the extra speed. That would require a another drive for access to larger files, primarily audio and video content, most likely in the form of a pair of 500GB drive (in a RAID1 mirror array)  the old home server.  SATA disk drives are really cheap these days. I can remember buying a 20MB (yes that’s megabyte not gigabyte) drive as an upgrade for and IBM XT PC for $300 many years ago. Beat the crap out of running off dual 5.25″ floppy drives. These days with that much coin you could sport a 500GB RAID-5 3 drive array.

I run a Redhat derivative called SME Linux to act as web, file and e-mail server, as well as a firewall at home. It’s got a simplified web admin interface for basic tasks and no Gnome, KDE or other desktop software, but you can always open a terminal and get at the guts of it. It’s purpose in life is to be a LAMP server and it does fine in the role. The old SME box needs some new hardware at some point, particularly memory, as various web crawlers and spiders that index my blog can bring it too its knees. Memory usage seems to be the culprit, along with the bazillion MySQL queries that search engine indexing causes. Bumping up the available RAM and using SSD selectively sounds like a good way of bumping up performance without spending too much. The only reason I care is it causes WordPress to throw database errors, making the blog unavailable (probably no major loss there) and makes my e-mail bog down to a standstill as well.

Meanwhile, my netbook might just get a 64GB SSD upgrade, to check out how well this may or may not help performance prior to spending the coin on a larger model. I saw some at my favorite retailer newegg.com that sport a lifetime warranty. You gotta like that.