On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 9:40 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote: > Rich Freeman posted on Thu, 29 Aug 2013 15:56:10 -0400 as excerpted: >> You did mention USB3, as did others in this thread. Hopefully this is >> obvious to all, but under no circumstances should you try to run an OS >> on USB2 or less. > > People did it for years before USB3 and SATA2/3 arrived...
Anybody with a motherboard supporting USB2 almost certainly had a motherboard supporting PATA at a faster transfer rate. I do agree that random access speed does lower the effective rate. My hard drives are running at 3GB/s transfer rates each on a dedicated channel, and yet they're probably not any faster than they would have been under PATA (assuming one drive per cable). Hopefully one of these days there will be a decent SSD cache option for Linux. Bcache is still fairly experimental, and I'm not sure how well it performs in practice with btrfs - plus it is a device layer and not filesystem layer implementation (ie if you have mirrored drives you end up with mirrored cache which seems a bit dumb, especially if the mirrors end up being on separate partitions on the same device). Rich
