new hardware | SSD | TRIM advice

Issues related to hardware problems
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cooch17
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new hardware | SSD | TRIM advice

Post by cooch17 » 2013/09/19 10:54:48

Greetings --

Still mulling over a new hardware configuration -- one that includes a decent (very recent) Intel SSD. haven't used SSD with Linux before. If I'm doing a fresh 6.4 install, with SSD as main (only, in fact) drive, anything I need to tweak, either during install, or shortly thereafter, to make CentOS play nice with said drive? I've read a fair number of threads on this forum about TRIM, but am not sure how much I need to do proactively to minimize problems.


Thanks very much in advance for any advice.

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TrevorH
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Re: new hardware | SSD | TRIM advice

Post by TrevorH » 2013/09/19 13:53:39

Align your partitions correctly. Use ext4. Add 'discard' to the mount options in /etc/fstab for each filesystem on the SSD. Probably also want noatime too

azjp
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Re: new hardware | SSD | TRIM advice

Post by azjp » 2013/09/19 23:48:17

I have been running a 128 GB SSD for nearly a year on a 16GB i5 system with mirrored hard drives. The SSD was added after the system was up and running. I can boot to the hard drives. My opinion, totally unsupported by facts, is that the SSD is some faster, but there is not a huge difference. The machine runs a number of development VMs and speeding up the boot drive does not help them very much. OTOH LibreOffice and Firefox starts a whole bunch faster.

I doubt I would install the SSD if I had it to do over again.

I did as Trevor suggests, but I did not set noatime. I did move /tmp and /var to an LVM partition on the hard drive. That is some simpler to do if you do it as part of the installation.

cooch17
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Re: new hardware | SSD | TRIM advice

Post by cooch17 » 2013/09/20 01:50:10

Thanks for both your reply and the previous one from Trevor. I'd started to reach much the same conclusion you hint at in your note -- SSD is fine and all, but perhaps either not worth the effort, or overkill to a give intent and purpose. In my case, probably the later. SSD boots faster -- but if your machine is one 24x7 (as mine are), who cares? I do have a fair number of R/W cycles for what the machine is being used for, but my own sense of fooling with other configs with and w/o SSD is that it doesn't make a huge difference. And, without much argument, spinning disc drives are definitely cheaper on a $/Gb basis, run almost as quiet, and pretty well work straight out of the box without any tweak-age (from the Latin).

I have a hunch I'll save some $$$ and just go with a regular old SATA spinning disc.


But, if I do go with SSD, thanks for the thoughts, and the fstabs tweak.

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TrevorH
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Re: new hardware | SSD | TRIM advice

Post by TrevorH » 2013/09/20 12:00:28

I'd disagree with [b]azjp[/b] and say that I no longer buy anything except SSDs for my systems unless I'm looking for bulk storage (i.e. > 1TB). In my experience they are massively faster and (touch wood!) much more reliable than spinning disks.

azjp
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Re: new hardware | SSD | TRIM advice

Post by azjp » 2013/11/10 00:15:05

This is an ironic follow up. I recently ran into a situation that offered me an "opportunity" to replace the 128 GB SSD in my machine with a larger one. Based on TrevorH's post, falling prices and a slightly fatter wallet, I went ahead and bought a Samsung 840 EVO 500GB. My most heavily used VMs now live there. It was money well spent.

I now need to change my "I doubt I would install the SSD if I had it to do over again" to "I installed a much larger SSD when I had it to do over again".

Thanks for the good advice Trevor.

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