Four cores and seven, Windows
Published: 2011-12-12
Since Christmas is coming, I've "started to buy" myself a new computer. To spread the expenditures out a bit, I bought the cabinet, the power supply and the DVD-burner in November. This month, I've gotten the mainboard, the RAM and the processor. I'm writing this on it, using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 11.10.
Come January, I'm planning to get Windows 7, an SSD, and one or two hard-drives (unless they are too expensive). At the moment I'm running the operating system from a USB flash drive. I may have been a bit "hasty" when buying it, though.
While running a live-CD from a USB flash drive is quicker than running it from a CD, I've found that installing the operating system on one has its problems. It seems that IO-operations are a bottleneck, causing programs to hang while data is being read or (especially) written. Apart from that it's working nicely.
When I bought the USB flash drive, I looked for one with a reasonable amount of space, that utilized USB 3. However, while the USB 3 standard has theoretical transmission speeds of up to 5 Gbit/s (according to Wikipedia), the flash drive in question only reads 70 MB/s and writes 30 MB/s. Which I should have thought of in the first place…
Fortunately, I have an external HDD using USB 2, which is quite a bit faster. I'm running some programs from it, and since I use it as a backup disk, I've got all my documents at hand. Unfortunately, since I'm using it as a backup disk, using it as an OS disk is out of the question.
To lessen the IO problems, I've currently moved /tmp to RAM, which I've got 8GB of. The Firefox cache has then been moved to /tmp. While it is not a perfect solution, it does work smoothly when I'm not accessing the "disk", so it's usable as a temporary measure.