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The living room media/gaming machine at home is an 8 terabyte spinning rust. I didn't bother with a separate SSD boot partition. It's currently been running fo

The living room media/gaming machine at home is an 8 terabyte spinning rust. I didn't bother with a separate SSD boot partition. It's currently been running for 23 days. Booting takes ~15 seconds even on spinning rust for a reasonable linux distro, so I'm not going to stress about those 15 seconds every couple of months. total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31Gi 4.6Gi 21Gi 158Mi 5.1Gi 25Gi Swap: 37Gi 617Mi 36Gi 5.1 gigabytes mostly just file cache. As a result, everything opens essentially instantly. For a bit better experience, I did a: find ~/minecraft/world -type f -exec cat {} > /dev/null \; to forcibly cache that, but that was all I did.

horsawlarway 5y ago
Hah, if you can fit the whole OS plus running applications easily in RAM, and you don't boot often - fine. But you're basically doing the same thing but with extra steps :P
- capitainenemo 5y ago
  Well, RAM is significantly faster than even SSD, and now I don't have to muck about w/ a 2nd drive :) Not to mention the spinning rust is cheaper.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    Sure, but that RAM isn't :) I can get a 60gb ssd for under 20 bucks (I just checked 18.99 on amazon - even I'm a little surprised at how cheap that is) That 32gb of ram is at least a crisp hundred (which also - fucking mind blowing. First time I ever added a part to a PC, it was to add 256mb of ram, and that was huge deal)
    - capitainenemo 5y ago
      Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever random game is out there. So. A lot more useful than an SSD ;) Also I'd be concerned about any SSD you can get for that price. And, frankly, you don't need that much RAM to have a pleasant desktop experience. Most of that is just for the gaming. Just a gig or two of file cache for the hot stuff. Which is what your OS usually does anyway. The tower my workplace bought me is also spinning rust, and they for some reason put an enormous amount of RAM in it too. Only 5 gigs are actually being used for caching. The OS can't figure out what to do with the rest after having, I suppose loaded browser (few hundred megs), VMWare, OpenOffice etc. Even if I was running something more bloaty than Mate I doubt I could find a way to burn more than another gigabyte :)
      - horsawlarway 5y ago
        I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw it on a spinning 2tb drive or something. I'm not saying don't use cheap storage, I'm just saying... try the SSD. It costs about the same as coffee for the week.
        capitainenemo 5y ago
        Yep. All the laptops in the house are SSD. I really haven't noticed much of a difference, sorry. Everything is linux too, but I find it hard to believe that would matter. I mean, NTFS is a notoriously slow file system (Hedgewars, Firefox and Minecraft all had to rearchitect to handle its horrendous handling of many small files), but the reasons for it I think would not change that much with SSD. The thing is. How would you really notice a difference after first load of an app? SSD, spinning rust, linux, everything is mem caching these days... It's really hard to tell unless you're actually memory constrained. It's quite likely that if I had to work on an enormous number of new files, I might notice something? But my software projects aren't like that - the games and videos are, but they wouldn't fit on an SSD anyway. That's why I have an 8 terabyte hard drive.
    - jsjohnst 5y ago
      > First time I ever added a part to a PC, it was to add 256mb of ram, and that was huge deal I remember the first memory stick I bought (a measly 4mb of RAM) and even wholesale via a friend who worked for a large PC repair shop, it was still $450 give or take. Now 30 years later, my most recent memory purchase was eight 32gb ECC RDIMMs for about the same price. So not only did the amount of ram per dollar increase 64,000x, it’s also WAY faster and more resilient.
andai 5y ago
Linux still works OK on spinny disk (though exponentially worse every year as applications trend towards bloated Electron), but Win10 is nigh unusable on a spinny disk (technically works but very unpleasant). It works quite comfortably on ancient hardware though given a SSD and sufficient RAM.
- wistlo 5y ago

horsawlarway 5y ago

Hah, if you can fit the whole OS plus running applications easily in RAM, and you don't boot often - fine. But you're basically doing the same thing but with extra steps :P

capitainenemo 5y ago
Well, RAM is significantly faster than even SSD, and now I don't have to muck about w/ a 2nd drive :) Not to mention the spinning rust is cheaper.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  Sure, but that RAM isn't :) I can get a 60gb ssd for under 20 bucks (I just checked 18.99 on amazon - even I'm a little surprised at how cheap that is) That 32gb of ram is at least a crisp hundred (which also - fucking mind blowing. First time I ever added a part to a PC, it was to add 256mb of ram, and that was huge deal)
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever random game is out there. So. A lot more useful than an SSD ;) Also I'd be concerned about any SSD you can get for that price. And, frankly, you don't need that much RAM to have a pleasant desktop experience. Most of that is just for the gaming. Just a gig or two of file cache for the hot stuff. Which is what your OS usually does anyway. The tower my workplace bought me is also spinning rust, and they for some reason put an enormous amount of RAM in it too. Only 5 gigs are actually being used for caching. The OS can't figure out what to do with the rest after having, I suppose loaded browser (few hundred megs), VMWare, OpenOffice etc. Even if I was running something more bloaty than Mate I doubt I could find a way to burn more than another gigabyte :)
    - horsawlarway 5y ago
      I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw it on a spinning 2tb drive or something. I'm not saying don't use cheap storage, I'm just saying... try the SSD. It costs about the same as coffee for the week.
      - capitainenemo 5y ago
        Yep. All the laptops in the house are SSD. I really haven't noticed much of a difference, sorry. Everything is linux too, but I find it hard to believe that would matter. I mean, NTFS is a notoriously slow file system (Hedgewars, Firefox and Minecraft all had to rearchitect to handle its horrendous handling of many small files), but the reasons for it I think would not change that much with SSD. The thing is. How would you really notice a difference after first load of an app? SSD, spinning rust, linux, everything is mem caching these days... It's really hard to tell unless you're actually memory constrained. It's quite likely that if I had to work on an enormous number of new files, I might notice something? But my software projects aren't like that - the games and videos are, but they wouldn't fit on an SSD anyway. That's why I have an 8 terabyte hard drive.
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    > First time I ever added a part to a PC, it was to add 256mb of ram, and that was huge deal I remember the first memory stick I bought (a measly 4mb of RAM) and even wholesale via a friend who worked for a large PC repair shop, it was still $450 give or take. Now 30 years later, my most recent memory purchase was eight 32gb ECC RDIMMs for about the same price. So not only did the amount of ram per dollar increase 64,000x, it’s also WAY faster and more resilient.

andai 5y ago

Linux still works OK on spinny disk (though exponentially worse every year as applications trend towards bloated Electron), but Win10 is nigh unusable on a spinny disk (technically works but very unpleasant). It works quite comfortably on ancient hardware though given a SSD and sufficient RAM.

wistlo 5y ago