[ILUG] tips for using SSD for /

[Darragh Bailey]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 12:06:51AM +0000, Brendan Minish wrote:
> 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.

relatime? Certainly looks like a good compromise between the full wear
of atime and no access time tracking of noatime which is fine of
external flash drives were you generally don't care about it.

> > 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 )

Placing /usr/src and /usr/portage (I like gentoo) on the SSD would probably 
not be the best idea :-). I also have a separate 1TB disk that will be
dedicated to /home as I have lots of games running under wine as well.
 
> there's nothing to be gained by putting /boot on there.

Is there anything lost by doing this, don't see much benefit in sticking
/boot on one of the 2 1TB drives that will be in the new machine.

> 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.

Drive has TRIM support, so that should be less of an issue, but still
nice to be able to do should the need arise.

> LVM also lets you change around how you allocate the partitions later
> on, important if you want to maximise the use of the SSD  	  

Little unsure of how to make the best use of LVM though. Along with the
SSD I have a second 1TB disk for general storage, i.e. temp backup,
movies, music, various system folders that are best not located on the
SSD, etc.

> What SSD did you get ? 

Corsair Force 60

> Properly organised an SSD is fantastic for a linux desktop as part of a
> larger storage system 

That's what I'm hoping for...

> regards
> Brendan

Thanks,
-- 
Darragh

"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."