Steve on Security

Man, this thing is sweet.  It took a bit of tinkering and resizing to get the migration from my old Maxtor 160G SATA-RAID setup to the new 128G SSDNow, but it was well worth it, and I added a lot to my toolkit along the way:

• built a USB MultiPass (I call it my U3-SwissBlade) with gParted, CloneZilla and several other nifty tools
• broke the RAID on my Maxtors
• Resized my partitions to fit on the 128G SSDNow using gParted
• Installed my SSDNow as my primary SATA drive
• used CloneZilla to do a disk-to-disk partition copy from the Maxtor to the SSDNow (this took a few tries since I had failed to move all partitions to the right after resizing and free up slack space — you really CAN’T get 160G onto a 128G drive!)
• Went through a few boot sequences until I discovered that my fstab was referencing root by UUID and thus GRUBbooting from the SSDNow and immediately mounting the old Maxtor for the rest of the OS Load.  Grrrrrgggggggggggh.  (Note, get confortable with the vol_id utility so you can find the unique UUIDs for all your drives and update your fstab to use UUIDs instead of device sequence numbers like sda, sdb, etc).
• uuidgen
  tune2fs /dev/sdb1 -U <numbergeneratedbyuuidgen>
  verify with vol_id /dev/sdb1
  vol_id /dev/hdaX

Performance is excellent.  My VMs load near instantly and no more disk thrashing.

I put one of the SSDNows in my old Dell D630 and it has made significant improvements in performance as well.  I may get another year or two out of this laptop after all.  Well worth the $230 I spent.

I’m interested in getting a SSDNow V+ to see if the write performance justifies the increased cost, but not until I do some benchmarking of my system to see if I am write-bound or not.

~ by stevegoldsby on December 22, 2009.

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