[Nottingham] SSD and Linux

[Martin]

On 11/09/15 08:50, Jason Irwin wrote:
[...]
> I would avoid no-brand black boxes though; no matter how much of a
> bargain they appear to be.
> 
> You /might/ need to buy a caddy to hold the SSD in the slot if the
> inside of an HD2. I needed one for my laptop.
> 
> When you get your shiny new SSD, *DO NOT* rely on the Mint installer to
> do the partitioning.
> Grab a copy of GParted and do it yourself so you can be sure it's got
> things all aligned - GParted is SSD aware-ish.
> 
> You want all partition sizes to be divisible by 4096, and you want to
> have the first one begin away from the start of the disc (I'm not at my
> lappy just now, so can't recall the figure. 4MB or something. Should all
> be on-line).
> 
> FileSystem? Pick whatever you want. I use BTRFS, but Ext4 will be fine.
> Swap space? Sure, bang that on as well if you need it.
> Both of the above /used to be/ verbotten but not any mor.
> You can, maybe, squeeze more out of the disc by setting "NOATIME" etc in
> FSTAB, but I never bothered.
> You can still murder an SSD by doing silly things (e.g. intensive video
> editing with low RAM). So don't do silly things.
> 
> I've had my Samsung for over 1.5 years now and it's still going strong.

Very good comment there that I can endorse.


For a Geekie lunch, you could enjoy reading through my geekie following
of the SSD story:

Howto HDD and SSD Alignment
http://nottinham.lug.org.uk/2011/09/howto-hdd-and-ssd-alignment/608

That is from 2011 and times have quickly moved on since then. (Must
finish an update to that! :-) )


All current Linux kernels default to sensible alignment for the SSD
structure. And best is to use GPT partitioning now in any case.

Hence simply use GParted, or for commandline lovers such as myself, use
any of:

gdisk
cgdisk
sgdisk (good for use in scripts)

as to taste.

And my paranoia has the first partition always as a boot partition
(which is infrequently written to) and so there is no care about whether
that first partition is aligned or not!



In summary:

Using current software and current SSDs for normal everyday use, there
is literally "no worry". Just simply use it. It simply works.


Have fun,
Martin



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