On Thursday, March 26th, the 1.5Tb hard drive in my primary development box bit the dust. Based on the diagnostics and sounds emanating from the drive, I believe I had a head crash. My first thought was “Oh no, when was the last time I backed up the data”. After a mad scramble I realized I could recover everything up to a point 2 weeks prior to the crash. Not bad. Could have been much worse.
My second thought was “Ok now what do I do with the machine?”. The machine is a few years old, but still has a lot of life left in it. It has an AMD 6-way processor with 16Gb of ram. I have been toying with the idea of using a SSD drive to speed up the machine. Just could never bring myself to take the plunge and rebuild the box from scratch.
I decided to purchase a 256Gb Sandisk SSD drive and a traditional 3Tb Seagate Hard Drive.
On my dev box I like to run Linux. Usually its one of the Fedora versions. Rebuilding the box, I decided to go with Centos 7.0 distro. The production websites that I have running are all on Centos 6.5 and it was time to start solifying on a common distro.
After researching the best partitioning method for SSD drives, I ended up putting the “/” and “/boot” partitions on the SSD. The “/swap” and “/home” partitions went on the Seagate drive.
Obviously I don’t have a way to benchmark the performance improvements with this set-up, however anecdotally, I do notice applications are very quick to start up and respond. Interestingly when I retrieve data from the network, there is very noticeable delay in getting the data. That is with a 1gb nic. With the old setup I couldn’t really differentiate between the application start up delays and the network delays.
Overall I very happy with the end result. If you have a box that is “mid-life”, installing a SSD drive can definitely improve the performance. Also this has reinforced the requirement to backup regularly.