[ILUG] tips for using SSD for /

[Brendan Minish]

On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 23:24 +0000, Darragh Bailey wrote:

> Reading on some blogs covering use of SSD's I see no reason not to use
> ext4 on it. Suggestions to use noatime seem to be limited to the SD
> disks used in netbooks and don't appear to be suggested for newer SSD's.

use realatime instead, it my save some wear, in any case there is not
many applications that depend on atime these days.
  

> There are also suggestions about keeping the partitions created aligned 
> to "erase write boundaries" to help performance.

I think that the wear levelling will make this triker than it seems with
the newer generation drives 
> 
> Any suggestions, thoughts or pointers?

yes, use LVM, add the SSD to the volume group then you can play around
with things until you get the best use out of your SSD space 
in my desktop I have / on there (but not /usr/src or /pub ) 
/home (but not /home/photos or home/Documents ) 

there's nothing to be gained by putting /boot on there.

LVM also lets you migrate the data off the SSD to another drive, if the
performance starts to deteriorate you will want to migrate data, issue a
secure erase and move the data back.
LVM also lets you change around how you allocate the partitions later
on, important if you want to maximise the use of the SSD  	  

What SSD did you get ? 
Properly organised an SSD is fantastic for a linux desktop as part of a
larger storage system 

regards
Brendan