Archive for September, 2013

SSD benchmarks

I’ve recently purchased an SSD upgrade for my Asus Eee PC 900 (XP). It will be a size upgrade (from 16 GB to 32 GB) and it should be a speed upgrade as well. I decided to do a benchmark of every SSD I currently own in order to compare their performance.

TL;DR: Jump to the results

The contenders

I have four SSDs. They vary in size, and as we’ll find out, speed.

Short name Size Disk ID Comments
Samsung internal 8 GB SanDisk iSSD P4
64BG external 64 GB M4-CT064 M4SSD2 Crucial M4, connected by USB 3.0
Eee PC internal 16 GB ASUS-PHISON SSD
New Eee PC internal 32 GB STT_RPM32GLSE Super Talent, purchased here

Getting the benchmarks

First, I had to choose a benchmark tool that would benchmark both the internal SSDs (Actually the Samsung internal is soldered onto the motherboard) and the external SSDs. I chose a familiar tool, the Disk Utility in Ubuntu 12.04.3. I used the old version after running into this bug on Disk Utility in newer versions of Ubuntu.

This benchmark tool works well for read benchmarks, but for write benchmarks it has a quirk of wanting the disk to have no partition table. Yep, you’ll have to delete all your partitions as well as the partition table. When I benchmarked the Samsung internal, I had to first backup the disk with Clonezilla, then restore the disk after the benchmark completed.

I benchmarked the first three drives listed above, then upgraded the Eee PC’s drive in order to benchmark it.

Upgrading the Eee PC 900

I upgraded the SSD following the recommendation of this article. So before installing the new SSD, I updated the BIOS. This was fairly straightforward. I went to the ASUS support page for the Eee PC 900 XP and downloaded BIOS version 1006. I unzipped the file, and in order to get it to install, I had to rename the file to 900.ROM. I copied 900.ROM to a 256 MB USB stick, and inserted it in the left USB port. Then, when the POST screen showed, I pressed Alt+F2 and got the BIOS update screen. Pretty cool.

Results and conclusion

Read and write benchmarks for solid state disks
Device Average Read Rate (Mb/s) Average Write Rate (Mb/s) Average Access Time (ms)
Samsung internal 137.0 21.2 0.4
64GB external 200.1 51.7 0.2
Eee PC internal 31.3 9.9 0.7
New Eee PC internal 135.8 23.7 0.5

In conclusion, the Eee PC has enjoyed a decent upgrade. Twice the storage space, and a SSD fast enough to compete with the Samsung internal SSD soldered onto the motherboard!

Moving a WordPress blog to Nearly Free Speech

Up till recently, this blog has lived on WordPress.com. Now I’ve moved it to http://www.rratliff.com/, where I have control over more of the configuration. I’ve had some experience with WordPress before, but I wanted to update my knowledge. Also, with all this recent talk about privacy on the web, I wanted to set up my own server and see how I could eavesdrop on my visitors learn about it.

For my non-tech friends, here is some quick background. WordPress is two things. It is a blogging software, which anyone can install on a web server that they control. It is also a company who has installed this blogging software on WordPress.com. They control it, but they give it away as a free service (and also have a paid service for those who want more advanced features.) I’ve chosen to move from the free service to the service that I can control. Now I pay NearlyFreeSpeech.net some money to host my blog on their site, but again, it gives me more control over the configuration, and more opportunities to learn.

Things I learned

  • How to list all the tags in Subversion. (I used this to make sure I was downloading the most recent version of WordPress.)
  • An SQL process can have multiple databases in it.
  • WordPress can use a single database to host multiple sites by using a table prefix.
  • In the world of web servers, file permissions matter. For most of my life up till now, I’ve been working on single user systems. Therefore I have not needed to worry about the group and other sections of the unix permission modes.
  • The ability to export and import a blog from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress is pretty cool.
  • How to install a WordPress plugin manually. The fastest way is to SSH into the host and wget the zip file. Then unzip it there.
  • My hosted site does not utilize HTTPS right now. Therefore several passwords that I use to administer WordPress are transmitted in the clear. Say hello to my government surveillance friends, and hackers too? Hopefully not.
  • Piwik is a really cool way to do web analytics. There’s two pieces.
    • One is the Piwik tracking Javascript, which is added to all pages on my website. This can be done by the WP-Piwik plugin.
    • The other is the Piwik web server, which handles the requests from the tracking Javascript and then stores the information in the database. It also provides a Dashboard for admins who log in to view the analytics data.
    • Also, Piwik can anonymize part of visitors’ IP addresses to reduce the amount of personal information that is collected.
    • Google Analytics provides a free (as in price) service, but my analytics data is being aggregated with the analytics of a lot of other website, thus contributing to Google’s database. They use this for marketing, which I view as a form of corporate surveillance.
  • WordPress by default does not generate valid HTML. I fixed it on my site by modifying functions.php. See WordPress category tag validation error fix for more information.
  • I installed the Use Google Libraries plugin to change the jQuery to use Google hosting. This has a small speed benefit for users.

Still to learn

  • How to get Apache to do what I want. I really want a good rating in Google Page Speed. Two sticking points right now are leveraging browser caching and enabling gzip compression. There are WordPress plugins that will manage my .htaccess for me, but I think it would serve me well (pun intended) to learn how to configure it myself. Another tool for testing blogs is ismyblogworking.com
  • It would be cool to set up a staging environment, where I can work on plugins and WordPress tweaks without worrying about disabling my production website.
  • It would be nice to have blog posts and pages stored as files instead of in a database. That way I could put them under version control.
  • Either WordPress or my web host has poor performance, because I’m getting the “Reduce server response time” suggestion pretty consistently from Google Page Speed. I know a static site would help immensely in this area, but at the cost of some convenience of administration.
  • Even cooler would be to tie the version control and the staging environment together. When I am happy with the way my blog looks in the staging environment, I can commit the changes, then push (deploy) them to the production blog.
  • My host supports some sort of HTTPS/SSL. I’d like to learn more about this and then consider asking them to enable it.
  • Another suggestion from Google Page Speed is “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content.” To fix this will require diving into WordPress themes, which I am not looking forward to.
  • There are more recently popular blogging frameworks, such as Jekyll or Octopress.