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Moving to SSD

26 Feb 2012

This weekend project was migrate laptop HD to SSD. As SSDs prices are a bit high yet, I'm moving from a 500Gb HD to this 120Gb SSD: http://www.amazon.es/OCZ-Technology-VTX3-25SAT3-120G-Vertex-pulgadas/dp/B004Q81CKY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330250512&sr=8-1. (It's the first time I buy something as expensive as this in amazon, but I wasn't able to find it cheaper anywhere else, and that's a sign of how Amazon is changing game). This implies that I'm going to use external storage for temporal storage, and also as backup, ...

So, I've read a lot of info from Internet about these devices, how to install them and treat them properly. Two ideas here: you have to format it paying attention to alignment, you have to avoid unnecessary read/write operations.

Basic instalation sequence is following:

  1. SSD Partition
  2. Partition(s) Formatting
  3. OS Installation (Kubuntu in my case)
  4. Management of swapping operations, temporary files (such apt-get cache, for instance)...
  5. Journaling scheduler configuration
  6. Browser cache configuration
  7. Install of usual software
  8. Enjoy!!

\ In order to no repeating what you could find with a quick search, I'm sharing two links with a lot of information and ideas (one of them in english, the other one in spanish):

Install process, apart from partition and formatting step, went without any problem.

It's a bit early to say there's a huge difference, but I've already noticed that startup is faster, and the system is bit more responsive. We'll see...