I bought an Eee PC 1000, the Linux SSD model, a couple years ago. I ended up putting Easy Peasy (then called Ubuntu Eee) onto it, only to be dissatisfied with the speed. Then I put Windows XP on it, and with a LOT of tweaking it ran sort of okay. Now I pulled it out and dusted it off but I want it to run Linux.
It has the Intel Atom 1.6ghz processor and 2gb of RAM (I upgraded it) so there's no lack of power there, but the SSD is extremely slow; it has a small write buffer, but when you do anything slightly significant you can feel the system stutter every second or two as the SSD halts everything while it dumps its full cache to disk. I'm talking serious stutters, and the cache isn't very big; to get Firefox to not stutter I had to move all caching into RAM and disable history (even just writing the history log to disk froze the system with every webpage).
Anyway, I hope I've given you a decent idea of just how slow this SSD is. With that said, is there a Linux distro that is optimized for an extremely slow hard drive but decent powered system? I'm not looking for something underpowered because the processor and RAM are plenty powerful, I just want something that perhaps is optimized for not writing to disk often.
Best Answer
With a similar machine, I run Ubuntu with few tweaks.
No swap, though I'm not sure this actually gains anything. (No swap means applications don't freeze because their data pages are being loaded from swap, but it also means applications freeze as their code or read-only data is being reloaded from files.)
Filesystems are mounted with the
relatimeoption (already the default with Ubuntu)./tmpistmpfs, i.e., the line in/etc/fstablooks likeI use Chromium instead of Firefox as the graphical web browser.
~/.cacheis a symbolic link to a directory under/tmp, which radically improves Chromium's responsiveness with a slow SSD.