On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 19:06:28 +0100
The Natural Philosopher  wrote:

> On 05/10/18 18:04, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> > On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 23:44:58 -0700 (PDT)
> > jack4747@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> >> Mmhh, I'm not sure that having a SSD is better than a normal mechanical
> >> HD, since the bottleneck is the (slow) USB2 connection.
> >
> >  Random IO is *way* faster because of zero seek time. It's not
> > the bulk rate that matters for most purposes so much as the random IO.
> >
>
> Well I dint think so.

 It does depend on what you do.

> Program loading is my bugaboo. Thats pretty sequential

 Sequential is going to be maxed out by USB2 - random is where an
SSD can still max out USB2 but spinning rust can't. SSD always wins
noticably on performance.

 That being said you may well be surprised - there can be a lot of
pulling in of shared library pages when a program loads. I swapped out a
hard disc for an SSD recently

> And linux caches reads pretty well

 Do enough work and you're down to physical read speeds.

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