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Quoting Terry Hill <telbonic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Despite my time here, I am only very recently the proud owner of a 'buntu laptop. My understanding was that whatever you did, swap was essential to the successful running of a nix machine. So I was thinking of a RAM disk, eg: a physical device recognised as a hard drive, and using it to speed up access to what is (to my limited understanding) essentially a "throwaway" area.
There are such devices available but they are a bit pricey at the moment which is a shame.
It does make sense though if possible to throw a few extra sticks of ram in and get rid of it altogether if possible.
I was under the impression that it's a good idea to have some swap even if it's a minimal amount.
My laptop has 4GB of RAM but I still have something like 256MB swap on my hard drive, I gather the kernel is inteligent enough to swap out some things even if there is bags of memory available.
The SSD's on amazon look pretty good, plenty of people seem to be writing favorable reviews, and the capacities dont look bad either - depends what you need really. I guess perhaps the way to go is using a magnetic/high capacity drive for medium term storage (with regular backup) to supplement the SSD and enjoy booting your programs/system a hell of a lot quicker. Eg: Enough Ram to make a swap file redundant - how much do you need? SSD for the system areas - prices/capacity doesn't look prohibitive. HDD for medium term storage - already got plenty!
Yep, I was thinking that when the time comes and I build a media PC, I'll probably go for an SSD (30 or 40GB) for the OS and then store any media on my server (I'm thinking this way it can be accessable by the other PCs in the house as well as the media PC).
This is going to be further down the line though, I'm hanging fire at the moment to see what the prices of the Atom/ION boards do when the new chips are released.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html