[Discuss] SSD caching

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2015-03-26 14:49-0700 John Blomfield wrote:

> I have an ASUS s56c laptop with a 750GB Hard Drive and a 24GB SSD cache that 
> dual boots Windows and OpenSuse 12.3. Its used mainly by my wife and I 
> haven't paid much attention to until recently when I upgraded OpenSuse to 
> 13.1. We need to keep Windows for very very occasionally used programs.

Hi John:

Wine is still seriously incomplete, but that free software is very
actively developed so each month sees more Windows apps running with
improved quality on Wine. Therefore, I suggest it is a good idea to
evaluate every 6 months or so whether those Windows apps that you need
run well enough for your purposes under the latest Wine version, and
when that occurs you will never have to worry about dual-booting
again.

> However, I noticed that the laptop had an 24GB SSD drive which is presumably 
> used by Windows.

I agree with Murray you should not re-use this special partition at
all for Linux purposes as long as you need to boot Windows.

But even if you get rid of Windows it may not be safe to remove/reuse
this special partition. For example, my EeeBox PC B202 from ASUS had
an "expressgate" OS for browsing, etc., while booting up which used a
dedicated special partition to store that mini-OS. For that case, I
found a BIOS menu item that would allow me to disable expressgate, and
I also asked if I could safely remove that partition _for that
specific B202 hardware_ for the pure Linux case from a number of
sources.  The advice I got was yes, and it worked out, but I was also
aware that the advice could have been wrong, and I could have turned
my B202 into a brick in case the BIOS needed that special partition
for some reason in order to boot Linux.

So once you get rid of Windows, I would ask very specific questions on
the web about the possibility of reusing that special partition for
your particular hardware.  However, even if you get encouragement out
there to try that experiment, I would also be mentally prepared for
the possibility of the brick result!

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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