Regular disk drive vs. Solid-state

[briandc]

Hi everyone,
I wanted to hear from you all about this subject, and in particular, regarding distros and audio production. (hence this subforum)
Now, if I understand correctly, solid state hard drives are faster than traditional hard drives, as there are no physical moving parts that do the data writing and retrieving.
From that perspective, I suppose it's correct to deduce that having a distro on a USB stick (or media card or similar) is faster and perhaps better-performing for those of us who use linux for making music, etc. Correct? If so, could this be a useful set-up? Advantages or disadvantages?

(sorry if this is common knowledge by now, I just thought it would be a good subject to re-hash and clarify any doubts..)

Love to hear your thoughts!

brian

[folderol]

I don't think USB sticks have the same level of protection as SSDs. Also, as well as being slower, you also have the USB bottleneck to contend with. Might be OK for loading apps or saving complete files, but I wouldn't want to trust active data read/writes to them.

Incidentally, I read recently, that although for most purposes SSDs are faster than spinning rust, for purely serial writes they can be slower.

[glowrak guy]

I have a mini-ssd adaptor with a tiny 1" x 2" 64 gig ssd.
It's ancient, by now, but E19 boots/reboots really fast,
and file transfers also seem modern. I left 10% of the ssd
as unallocated, supposedly used as a wipe-board for the drive
to keep itself from an early grave, not that I've checked up on it.
And added noatime to fstab, because smart people said to...
Current drives are supposed to last as long or longer, than the movers and shakers,
like the renowned IBM Deathstar series

List of SSD articles ...coffee, gallons of it! http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=SSD

and charts in case you are from Colorado http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives,3.html

[asbak]

From that perspective, I suppose it's correct to deduce that having a distro on a USB stick (or media card or similar) is faster and perhaps better-performing for those of us who use linux for making music, etc. Correct? If so, could this be a useful set-up? Advantages or disadvantages?

Only if it's a "live distro" that is booted from a USB stick, an 'installed system' running from USB would be way slow.

[briandc]

I found this page about USB speed, kind of interesting:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Insta ... omUSBStick




brian