Desktop SSD…

 

I wrote a couple of days ago about replacing my MacBook Pro hard drive with SSD. At the same time I bought a little SSD to use as the system drive for my desktop. I fitted that this morning, installed a fresh copy of Fedora 18 and mounted the original 1TB hard drive as a data drive.

Like the MacBook Pro, my desktop is a few years old, but still has plenty of grunt (Quad Core and 8G RAM) for what I need it for. I do run the odd VM on it, but any heavy stuff is run on my server, so there is no incentive to go out an buy the latest kit for what is essentially just a client PC.

The addition of the SSD means the start up time is a much better and it just feels a lot more responsive. Most apps start up almost instantly. Even GIMP, which used to take an age to start, is mega quick. I’ve put a couple of VMs on it and not surprisingly, they are fast to start up too. Overall I’m really pleased with the outcome.

The funny thing is, I never noticed how noisy spinning rust was until I switched to these SSDs. The Mac is silent and runs for a lot longer before the fan kicks in. The desktop is also silent, until I pull something from the data disk, at which point I hear that slight grinding noise. 🙂

I don’t think I would invest in large capacity SSDs for home until the prices drop considerably, but having witnessed the before and after results on these two old machines, I can’t imagine ever running without an SSD system disk again.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. While I was reconfiguring my desktop I tried out Dnsmasq. Much simpler than BIND.

Update: I worked through some of the suggestions here to enable TRIM support and reduce wear.

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

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