[Discuss] SSD caching

[John Blomfield]

I guess there is not a lot of interest in this topic on this list; maybe 
because with the cost of SSD's dropping there is a trend for laptops to 
be built solely with an SSD and no Hard Drive and therefore no need for 
an SSD cache? This trend tends perhaps to make SSD caching to speed up 
HD performance redundant?

For those interested my research has led me to the following:

a) The 6GB ntfs SSD partition is used by Intel's Rapid Start technology, 
basically providing fast boot (that's still a joke for Windows). Booting 
OpenSuse OS and launching Linux applications from an SSD on my desktop 
is like lighting.

b) The 16GB hfs SSD partition is used by ExpressCache (not sure why it 
uses Apple's hfs file system) and its function is to cache HD transfers 
and speed up HD access including fast restore from sleep and hibernation.

It seems laptop owners have disabled these partitions and used the SSD 
for other purposes so I might give it a go. If worst comes to worst and 
Windows 8 is broken so be it! If I need Windows I have a VirtualBox 
Windows Vista vdi, which I use on my desktop that I can copy. I have 
kept Windows 8 on my laptop mainly to check its features if my daughter 
needs help doing something on Windows 8. I have not convinced her to 
change to Linux yet!

John





On 03/26/2015 02:49 PM, 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. However, I noticed that the laptop had an 
> 24GB SSD drive which is presumably used by Windows. The SSD is 
> partitioned according to GParted like this:
>
> sdb1    16GB, file system "unrecognized", label "HFS"
> sdb2    6GB, file system "ntfs", label "IntelRST"
>
> Now it would seem IntelRST refers to Intel's caching software and HFS 
> may refer to Apple's Mac file system? Perhaps GParted is not able to 
> read an HFS file system? However, I don't know why a Mac file system 
> would be on this computer?
>
> I would like to make use of this 24GB of SSD in some way with the 
> OpenSuse installation. My options seem to be:
>
> a) If the 16GB HFS partition is not used by Windows I could format it 
> ext4 and figure out how to use Linux's Bcache software.
> b) Same as above, use BCache but format the whole of the 24GB ext4 and 
> hope that this does not break Windows.
> c) Install OpenSuse 13.1 on the whole 24GB of SSD, which is more than 
> enough for my OS with a separate Home directory on the Hard Drive. 
> Again assuming this will not break Windows.
>
> My questions are if I format the SSD, will this break Windows or will 
> it just run slower without a cache?
> Is there any benefit from running BCache on an SSD compared to putting 
> the whole OS all on an SSD?
> What do you think the HFS partition is for?
>
> Thanks John
>


-- 
John Blomfield
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