Re: [school-discuss] Replacement Hard Drive or Computer

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 07:20:07PM +0700, j. Tim Denny wrote:
> how about buying a 16gb USB flash drive to run your OS...

Noes, usbflash is pretty inferior in terms of performance.
Part of the problem is USB, just compare an external HDD
being plugged via (e)SATA/IEEE1394 to the same one but
plugged via USB2 (didn't look at USB3 cages yet).

> of course an SSD would be more fun... but they remain expensive
> for the time being.

My two 128Gb SSDs are worth every penny of ~$540 I paid for them
but that's probably another case...

> I am thinking of going that way for 5-10 older model computers
> at a university in Laos...  the current hard drives are in the
> 20-40gb range I think nearly 10 years old...  PIII cpus and
> 128mb ram.

Nice thin clients, just in case.  A single dualcore or quadcore
system with 2..4Gb RAM (and ideally, two SATA drives in RAID1)
would make them all feel much more modern.  Did you consider
some LTSP based distros? (there was a Thinstation 5.0 release
announcement recently but I didn't mess with it yet)

USB flash isn't going help those really much but an extra stick
of 64..256M SDRAM would go much further (given some lightweight
distro and a desire to run things locally).

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/
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