Well, dedup has fairly low overhead so that would be fine on a SSD too, but because SSD's tend to be smaller than HDDs there also tends to be not so much data to dedup so you might not get much out of enabling it.
-- The SSD's biggest benefit is as a cache, though I don't discount the wonderfully fast boots I get with SSD-based roots on my laptops. Random access read I/O on a SSD is several orders of magnitude faster than on a HDD (e.g. 20,000+ iops vs 250-400 iops)... that's a 50x factor and a 15K rpm HDD won't help much. Random write I/O is a bit more problematic and depends on many factors, mainly related to how well the SSD is able to write-combine the I/O requests and the size of the blocks being written. I haven't run any tests in this regard, but something like the OCZ's with their massive ram caches (and higher power requirements) will likely do better with random writes than, e.g. the Intel SSDs which have very little ram. Linear read and write I/O between a SSD and a HDD are closer. The SSD will be 2x-4x faster on the linear read I/O (instead of 50x faster), and maybe 1.5-2x faster for linear write I/O. NOTE! This is for a reasonably-sized SSD, 200GB or larger. SSD performance is DIRECTLY related to the actual number of flash chips in the SSD, so there is a huge difference in the performance of, say, a 200GB SSD verses the performance of a 40GB SSD. A 40GB SSD can be limited to e.g. 40 MBytes/sec writing. A 200GB SSD with a 6GBit/sec SATA phy can do 400 MBytes/sec writing and exceed 500 MBytes/sec reading. Big difference. -Matt Matthew Dillon <dil...@backplane.com>