Gentoo on 8GB SSD
 

A friend recently gave me a SimpleTech Zeus 8GB SSD. I'd like to replace
my hard drive with this SSD for the lower latency and faster access
times it will provide.


Currently my / partition is 24GB, 20GB of which is in use. Using
xdiskusage I see that /usr/portage and /var/tmp are using approximately
10GB, which is well over the 7.5GB I have on the SSD.


So, I'm wondering what suggestions the list has for squeezing Gentoo
onto an SSD. I have another Gentoo box I could put /usr/portage on to
save myself some room on the SSD.


Aside from NFS mounting the package source and build directories, is
there anything else I can do to minimize the space needed? I'm not
running anything terribly fancy. I have DR17/enlightenment and XFCE
installed as window managers; along with some productivity applications.


Thanks for your feedback,
Hal Martin

Gentoo on 8GB SSD
 

2010/8/17 Hal Martin <hal.martin@gmail.com>:
> A friend recently gave me a SimpleTech Zeus 8GB SSD. I'd like to replace my
> hard drive with this SSD for the lower latency and faster access times it
> will provide.
>
> Currently my / partition is 24GB, 20GB of which is in use. Using xdiskusage
> I see that /usr/portage and /var/tmp are using approximately 10GB, which is
> well over the 7.5GB I have on the SSD.

I am new in Gentoo. I installed Gnome.

Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 5,5 GB = 7,1 GB

Maybe you just need to do some cleanup of your outdated sources?

Regards

Al

Gentoo on 8GB SSD
 

>
> I am new in Gentoo. I installed Gnome.
>
> Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 5,5 GB = *7,1 GB

Sorry:

Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 3,5 GB = 5,1 GB

Gentoo on 8GB SSD
 

On 08/17/2010 03:57 AM, Elmar Hinz wrote:
>>
>> I am new in Gentoo. I installed Gnome.
>>
>> Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 5,5 GB = 7,1 GB
>
> Sorry:
>
> Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 3,5 GB = 5,1 GB

I guess to best answer this question you need to ask what you want to
do. What are you trying to speed up? Booting? Emerging? Just general
speedup? With only 8GB, I'm not sure there's much you can do to simply
put it in and, presto, you're 186% ricing. You'll have to look at where
the heaviest I/O is taking place and at what times. Just off the top of
my head, I'd say you'd want to put /var/tmp and maybe /tmp if yours
isn't a tmpfs.

If you have plenty of RAM, the OS will cache most of the /bin, /lib and
/usr/bin stuff for you, so what will you gain if you put those there,
for the fraction of them that you actually use? If you are *low* on RAM,
you would want to put /usr/lib on the SSD. It's 1.7G on my desktop
system (KDE, XFCE).

My two cents.

Gentoo on 8GB SSD
 

Le Tuesday 17 August 2010 18:31:16, Bill Longman a écrit :
> On 08/17/2010 03:57 AM, Elmar Hinz wrote:
> >> I am new in Gentoo. I installed Gnome.
> >>
> >> Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 5,5 GB = 7,1 GB
> >
> > Sorry:
> >
> > Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 3,5 GB = 5,1 GB
>
> I guess to best answer this question you need to ask what you want to
> do. What are you trying to speed up? Booting? Emerging? Just general
> speedup? With only 8GB, I'm not sure there's much you can do to simply
> put it in and, presto, you're 186% ricing. You'll have to look at where
> the heaviest I/O is taking place and at what times. Just off the top of
> my head, I'd say you'd want to put /var/tmp and maybe /tmp if yours
> isn't a tmpfs.
>
> If you have plenty of RAM, the OS will cache most of the /bin, /lib and
> /usr/bin stuff for you, so what will you gain if you put those there,
> for the fraction of them that you actually use? If you are *low* on RAM,
> you would want to put /usr/lib on the SSD. It's 1.7G on my desktop
> system (KDE, XFCE).
>
> My two cents.

Is a SSD capable of supporting gentoo ? That's a good idea !
You may be a pionneer ! Let's try...
--
Stéphane Guedon
page web : http://www.22decembre.eu/
carte de visite : http://www.22decembre.eu/downloads/Stephane-Guedon.vcf
clé publique gpg : http://www.22decembre.eu/downloads/Stephane-Guedon.asc

Gentoo on 8GB SSD
 

On 08/17/2010 12:31 PM, Bill Longman wrote:

On 08/17/2010 03:57 AM, Elmar Hinz wrote:


I am new in Gentoo. I installed Gnome.

Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 5,5 GB = 7,1 GB


Sorry:

Portage: 1,6 GB + Rest: 3,5 GB = 5,1 GB


I guess to best answer this question you need to ask what you want to
do. What are you trying to speed up? Booting? Emerging? Just general
speedup? With only 8GB, I'm not sure there's much you can do to simply
put it in and, presto, you're 186% ricing. You'll have to look at where
the heaviest I/O is taking place and at what times. Just off the top of
my head, I'd say you'd want to put /var/tmp and maybe /tmp if yours
isn't a tmpfs.

If you have plenty of RAM, the OS will cache most of the /bin, /lib and
/usr/bin stuff for you, so what will you gain if you put those there,
for the fraction of them that you actually use? If you are *low* on RAM,
you would want to put /usr/lib on the SSD. It's 1.7G on my desktop
system (KDE, XFCE).

My Gentoo box is an i7 2.8Ghz with 4GB of memory. I just find that when
I'm launching an application (eg. Firefox, xchat, pidgin) the length of
time I am waiting for the application to spawn is much longer than I
would expect given the power of the machine. I'm left thinking that my
Western Digital 1TB Black hard drive is the bottleneck. I think I will
take your advice and put /usr/lib on the SSD and leave the heavier stuff
(dist files, ccache) on the hard drive.


Thanks,
Hal

My two cents.

Gentoo on 8GB SSD
 

On 08/17/10 18:59, Stéphane Guedon wrote:
>
> Is a SSD capable of supporting gentoo ? That's a good idea !
> You may be a pionneer ! Let's try...

Not really. Gentoo is running fine on SSD and why wouldn't it. A data
storage device does not care what data it stores.
Gentoo is even running fine on CF.
This is my first hand experience.

Regards
Norman