February
SSD or HDD? (and good KDE distros)
Posted by Stu at 4:46 PM
Dear lazyweb…
My operating system hard disk has failed (again – kinda, poking it from a live CD shows that the filesystem isn’t recognised, though I can mount it if I explicitly state it is ext4 and a fair bit of the data is still there). It’s a vintage 70GB Seagate, the SMART diagnostics are not good, it has got corrupted before and I didn’t really trust it anyway – data is on another disk.
So, it’s time for a new disk.
Broken PC, by Sarah Baker (cc-by)
The question is whether to buy another spinning disk or go for solid state? Does anyone have experience of an SSD and have a view on advantages/disadvantages (I’ve Googled a bit already). I’d be going for a cheap MLC SSD at probably 30-60GB (Intel or OCZ) which is plenty for the OS and .kde etc – i.e. stuff with little files and lots of seeks, most of my data would stay on the other magnetic disk. Alternatively I’ll get the smallest magnetic disk I can find. The SSD option is likely 50-100% more expensive.
I also need to decide what distro to put on the new disk. The old system was Fedora 12 and I’m pretty happy with that, but I always have a bit of a look around when I’m doing a new install. I have a laptop on F12 too and my work PC runs F11, while a geriatric Shuttle PC acting as a media centre runs Arch.
I’m looking for a distro that:
- Packages the latest KDE SC (and does it well)
- Installs only free software by default, including drivers
- Has good repos for multimedia stuff, if not included – 3rd party is fine
- Isn’t obsessed with re-inventing the wheel (use NM, one of the major package managers/PackageKit – or have a good reason for not doing so)
Bonus points for working well with upstreams and contributing to KDE. Good (free) Radeon drivers are also a plus. I’ve recently played with Kubuntu and Mandriva in VirtualBox and not been convinced they’d be better, but maybe I missed something?
Any thoughts?
Tags: help needed, offtopic