Community Matters

Here’s an interesting little fact that I just ran across. It seems that the two flash drives (or SSDs) in my EeePC 1000 don’t have the same performance characteristics. I was trying to track down some surprising performance (and boot time) discrepancies on my EeePC 1000 and ran bonnie++ on different partitions in my system. Here are the results:

The smaller first sdd (/dev/sda under Linux) gets around 12MB/s write performance, whereas the larger second sdd (/dev/sdb) gets only around 3.5-4MB/s write performance. The read performance between both devices seems to be very similar.

Certainly something to be aware of.

More interestingly, while looking for further information on this issue I ran across the MyDigitalSSD’s 32GB SLC SSD for the EeePC which promises to significantly speed up both read and write performance on the second SSD. Using these benchmarks (unfortunately done under Windows, so not really comparable with the Linux results posted here) this SSD is 50% faster for reads and twice as fast for writes compared to the faster results that I got for the first SSD in my EeePC. Which should give me 6-8x the write performance for my larger SSD.

I’ll order one and report about the results.