Advice - Moving existing system to a SSD.

pcninja · 11-02-2015, 06:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darth Vader

No one need beyond of one standard/cheappo 128GB SSD for his personal Slackware root filesystem, with a WD Blue about 1TB for /home and swap; and some RAID5 or even RAID6 made from 4 to 6 x3TB Enterprise grade WD, for the personal collection of Pron, if case. For developers, an aditional 500GB WD Black Edition will be useful.

Offtopic: For gamers, should the WD blue drive be sued for games or should a gamer take the additional 500GB WD Black drive you recommended for developers, and substitute it for a 1TB WD black drive? I'm not in the market for new hard drives, but I am just wondering.

bassmadrigal · 11-02-2015, 07:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dalgrim

Thanks for all the responses. I'll have my new SSD on wednesday. I'll probably just put /tmp and maybe /var on the old HDD and discard,noatime the rest of / on the SSD.

Most SlackBuild are designed to compile and package the files in /tmp, which could obviously benefit from the high speed of an SSD. For modern SSDs, there really shouldn't be a worry that you'll exceed the drives ability to write the cells. TechReport did a test where they subjected drives to a bombardment of writes and erases. A quick report shows:

Quote:

The first lesson came quickly. All of the drives surpassed their official endurance specifications by writing hundreds of terabytes without issue.

If we take that a drive is able to write 100TB before it starts having issues (they all greatly surpassed that amount considering the first (receoverable) errors started around 200TB and the first drive to die was at just over 700TB), and we throw some huge writing number, like 50GB/day, that drive would last for over 5 years. But who is going to write 50GB a day, every day, for 5 years straight? One drive lasted to 2.4PB of data written, which would take 131 years for someone to do with 50GB/day.

I write this to say, use the drive to best help your computing. /tmp will benefit, as will a swap (if you ever use a swap). The nand cells will likely outlast the rest of the hardware on the drive, so it's best to use it to speed up as much as you can.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pcninja

Offtopic: For gamers, should the WD blue drive be sued for games or should a gamer take the additional 500GB WD Black drive you recommended for developers, and substitute it for a 1TB WD black drive? I'm not in the market for new hard drives, but I am just wondering.

You'll see better load times with a black drive, since it is able to perform reads faster than a blue drive. It is up to the user to determine whether that is worth the extra money. I'd certainly recommend using black over blue for gaming (if not already using an SSD). As for the space, it depends on what the user intends on installing. Games are taking up more and more space, especially if you have a lot of steam games, so it could be worth spending the extra for a larger drive.

atelszewski · 11-07-2015, 11:34 AM

Hi,

I also just got new SSD and yesterday I replaced my HDD with it. It's Samsung 850 PRO 256GB.
I ran 3 basic tests with bonnie++ to test the 3 different schedulers and there is almost no difference.
Filesystem is ext4.
I choose to go with noop, just because it does nothing

[Less complex algorithm, less troubles].

The results are:

Code:

$ bonnie++ -d /home/test -s 16G -n 0 -f -b -u test
noop:     olab,16G,,,493435,45,251189,30,,,598691,43,1673.2,10,,,,,,,,,,,,,
deadline: olab,16G,,,494219,42,251666,29,,,594158,42,1626.2,10,,,,,,,,,,,,,
cfq:      olab,16G,,,485003,42,247597,29,,,597754,43,1631.3,11,,,,,,,,,,,,,

All this being said, I must ADMIT that replacing HDD with SSD has brought new level of experience into my life

I have ThinkPad T520i and I said to myself that putting the SSD is the last upgrade I'm going to make to this puppy.
I must say I'm impressed how much faster it runs. Not that all important to me, but the boot time went down from 60s to 20s.
In general, everything runs faster, particularly when it comes to application load time. I haven't tested the performance too much, but the impression I have is very good.

--
Best regards,
Andrzej Telszewski

TobiSGD · 11-08-2015, 12:00 PM

Just for completeness, Phoronix just released benchmark numbers for different schedulers on a SSD: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...HA-SCHEDULER12

atelszewski · 11-08-2015, 12:09 PM

Hi,

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD

Just for completeness, Phoronix just released benchmark numbers for different schedulers on a SSD: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...HA-SCHEDULER12

This clearly shows that noop (as all the others) is a good choice for SSD.
Stock Slackware doesn't have support for BFQ, so I'm not gonna comment on that.

--
Best regards,
Andrzej Telszewski

bassmadrigal · 11-09-2015, 06:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by atelszewski

Stock Slackware doesn't have support for BFQ, so I'm not gonna comment on that.

This is because it currently is only available as patches to kernels. It hasn't been officially added to the kernel, although, they are working towards inclusion (although, it's anybody's guess on how long that will take).