Installing an SSD

Recently I made another fine addition to my Ubuntu powered desktop system: an SSD drive (more specific the 60GB version of this). Installing it took some tweaking and I'm not gonna take all the credit for this. This post describes exactly what I did, the posts above that one show the help I got.

I have to add that I changed the swap space back to the HDD. For some reason mounting the swap space on the SSD takes about 10s. I don't know why, so if someone has a bright idea: tell me, I'm all ears.

But now for the results (I used bootchart to visualize):
This is the bootchart with the HDD.

And this is the bootchart with the SSD.

Installing the SSD shaved about 10s off the boottime. Looking a bit closer reveals that this is almost completely realized by a much faster completion of ureadahead. The much higher throughput of the SSD is clearly taken advantage of.

Some stopwatch results:
With the HDD:

• 25s from grub to login
• 20s from login to Firefox ready to use

With the SSD:

• 10s from grub to login
• 12s from login to Firefox ready to use.

So again it makes quite a difference, although it's kind of a bummer that getting to grub also takes 10-15s. But this is the BIOS booting, so there's little I can do about that.

Besides a reduced boottime the overall user experience is better: every program starts faster, I have no way of measuring this though...