What a change a few hours makes.
I’ve been thinking about ways to improve my computer’s performance, bearing in mind that hard disk fragmentation and speed appears to be the main issue. I was originally going to buy two fast 500GiB HDDs and put them together into a RAID, but this might be costly in CPU time and might not even fix the problem. It would also cost me a couple of hundred dollars.
So I had another idea: Loading the entire operating system and programs into a Ramdisk at bootup time, and having /home just mounted from the hard drive. Then I did a calculation and discovered that the Ramdisk would have to be just over 6 GiB. I’d really need 8GiB of RAM to accomplish this. Expensive.
Also, booting up would be incredibly slow as it would involve reading 6 gigabytes from hard disk.
Somewhere along the line I considered using virtualisation to add flexibility and solve some of the problems, but I don’t think virtualisation actually provides the answers.
I might instead buy a smallish-but-very-fast hard disk (WD Velociraptor or a Seagate Barracuda) to act as /, and use my existing 500GiB hard disk as /home.
If anyone can work out a different way of bypassing hard disk seek speed as a performance factor that doesn’t involve SSDs (I don’t think it’s easy for me to get my hands on an SSD), I’ll be glad to hear it.
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