Today I was testing e2fsprogs as part of an LFS build. The tests are said to take a certain time (which would be about 36 minutes on my machine) when using a magnetic drive and about a quarter of that with an SSD drive. It seems that I have the latter. I didn't know that! How can I find out more about this?

PS /dev/disk/by-id calls it ata-WDC_WD5000AAKX-08U6AA0_WD-WCC2ECK7NNDE, which is Greek to me.

Western Digital 500GB hard drive. https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit.../dp/B000O78HRC
Ed

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That a Western Digital 500GB (Blue) hard drive.
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit.../dp/B00Y3DSLD8

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1 means yes so HDD, 0 means no so SSD.

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Platters do make a sound every time they read/write, ssd never does.
WD page on wikipedia notes the color codes also, I did some research on that long time ago when I was looking for high performance drive.
I do a lot of archiving it's I/O intensive so I went to get WD Black, thought about raptor but it was too expensive at the time.

Another thing they do these days is they integrate a SSD into the drive to serve as some sort of cache.
So it's probably worth to check the specs before getting a new one, it's a trade-off between longetivity and performance I guess.

So it is a normal hard drive after all.
I can hear the noise quite clearly when it starts up. But I wonder why my tests ran so fast. They all passed too.

The OS caches the most recently-used disk blocks in memory. Caching reduces the number of disk reads and makes the computer less sensitive to disk performance (after the first run).
Ed

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