Archive for October 2009

Diving into Solid State Disk

Now that second generation disks are coming out and the prices are getting reasonable (or with that of the 10,000 RPM disks) I thought it was time to give them a try.

I’m impressed:

  • very fast – reads are frightening
  • small – but it’s hard to find 2.5″ to 3.5″ mounting brackets
  • cool – no heat this is great for cramped cases
  • clean – no exposed circuits, unlike a regular hard disk
  • quiet – obviously but very welcome
  • would fit the Mac Mini very nicely

The unit I have is an OCZ Vertex 120GB, which is sufficient space for my purposes. I dropped it into my Franken Mac and ran XBench so I could get some performance numbers with a common base, please note that these numbers were taken after a fresh install so the disk has not yet been heavily fragmented. I would also note that this isn’t the Mac version of this drive, and as such I found the drive was very unstable with mysterious hangs and failures, but it did run long enough to get some good numbers. I now have the drive installed in a Gateway GT5676 as the primary boot disk for Fedora Core 11 and it has been rock solid and running vmware like a champ, but time will tell.

I found this article very helpful: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=736

Now the numbers:
OCZ Vertex

Results	180.94
	System Info
		Xbench Version		1.3
		System Version		10.5.6 (9G2030)
		Physical RAM		4096 MB
		Model		Macmini3,1
		Drive Type		OCZ-VERTEX

	Disk Test	182.95
		Sequential	136.65
			Uncached Write	188.04	115.46 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	176.88	100.08 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	79.05	23.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	176.96	88.94 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	276.72
			Uncached Write	112.99	11.96 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	307.32	98.38 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	1544.06	10.94 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	587.24	108.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000 RPM

Results	161.56
	System Info
		Xbench Version		1.3
		System Version		10.5.6 (9G2030)
		Physical RAM		4096 MB
		Model		Macmini3,1
		Drive Type		WDC WD3000BLFS-01YBU0
	Disk Test	93.41
		Sequential	143.22
			Uncached Write	190.65	117.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	163.74	92.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	81.75	23.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	230.15	115.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	69.31
			Uncached Write	25.02	2.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	193.45	61.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	125.65	0.89 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	216.22	40.12 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Standard Mac 5400 RPM

Results	130.85
	System Info
		Xbench Version		1.3
		System Version		10.5.6 (9G2030)
		Physical RAM		4096 MB
		Model		Macmini3,1
		Drive Type		FUJITSU MHZ2120BH G1
	Disk Test	46.65
		Sequential	64.41
			Uncached Write	91.99	56.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	90.47	51.19 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	32.45	9.50 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	106.86	53.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	36.57
			Uncached Write	13.38	1.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	92.49	29.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	67.95	0.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	109.77	20.37 MB/sec [256K blocks]

VMware 2.x on Fedora Core 11

VMware 2.0.1 on Core 11 won’t compile, but fortunately there’s a fix.

With a little googling, I found this thread: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1261181#1261181 and to save you (and me) the time you can download the following source:  http://www.saarlinux.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/vmware-server-modules-2629tar.gz extract the the source into vmware-server-distrib/lib/modules/source/ and the run install.