Been a while since I posted in this forum...

Anyways, since I'm slowly (and finally) getting on my way in getting a new computer, I have been researching SSDs to supplement my new system. I was considering installing Slackware on an SSD and leave a conventional hard drive just for general storage.

So I am wondering what is everyone's opinions/experiences with Slackware on an SSD, and most importantly what type of filesystems are appropriate for an SSD?

See the benchmark:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...38_large&num=1
To me it seems JFS is the best for SSD.

One thing to keep in mind is that SSDs may need firmware updates, and not all companies provide Linux utils (OCZ does).

2 members found this post helpful.

Hello:

I have a new Lenovo ThinkPad T520 with a 160GB SSD.

I did a complete install of Slackware 13.37 64-bit directly from the DVD on a ext4 partition.

I find it faster but I do not know if there is anything special that should be done when using a SSD.

To be honest, at this moment, Windows 7 Professional is still installed and the SSD makes it extremely quick when compared to XP on a regular hard disk.

Bottom line: Slackware is slightly faster but the big difference in speed is really evident in Windows.

I use ext4 with a 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. Plenty fast.

A few things that I've read about optimizing SSD's with Linux:

- Use the 'noop' io scheduler as opposed to cfq.
- The 'discard' (i.e. TRIM) mount option may hurt performance. Idle garbage collection is pretty good on the Vertex 3. You can also use fstrim about once a month to TRIM the drive.

If you're leaning towards OCZ Vertex 3, make sure that you download the 2.15 firmware. Any other version and you'll probably experience random lockups or erratic behavior from your system. I've read that Intel and Samsung SSDs are the most stable, out of the box.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/gee...and-linux/9190
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_disca...rim%29_support

Why would you use the noop I/O scheduler ? (I would never use it)

I would use deadline instead. Either way, you can benchmark them easily. You can switch them on a running system:
http://blog.nexcess.net/2010/11/07/c...-io-scheduler/

Interesting so far, results seem promising. I do like JFS as my default FS, however the problem with most of the FS in Linux is that these particular FS' are of course coming from the days of conventional drives. The biggest concern that I have about SSDs is their number of write cycles, and using a journaled FS like ext3, JFS, XFS, Reiser, or even BTRFS(though still not considered stable), would seem to add to the number of write cycles. Sure NAND flash is getting up there, but I would venture to guess that a conventional HD would still have a much longer lifespan.

Now if I am just using a conventional HD for general storage then that obviously would offset that issue, but again not sure about what to use as an FS, even though chances are I may just stick with JFS since I've never seen Slackware Linux offer JFFS (only actual flash based FS in kernel) as an option to install on.

If you are concerted about limited writes, why not set it up so everything that is mostly read-only is on the SSD, and stuff you write often is stored on the HDD. For example, I would put /home and /tmp on the HDD for sure, as well as swap if you use that (I recommend zcache or zram instead).

I am not using any SSD. But am looking closely since willing to upgrade my notebook. I have found this link about various optimization and etc for linux on SSD. Take a look it is very interesting reading:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ighlight=linux

Many suggestions from this reading (like using RAM for /tmp and moving firefox cache to /tmp, for example) can be used without SSD and give you some performance benefits (of course if you have enough RAM, but it's cheap today anyway)

If I would buy one for desktop, I would definitely install /root to SSD (with ext4 optimized as suggested in the above link), while leaving /home on regular disk, and /tmp on RAM - with tmpfs.

Biggest disadvantage of SSD is that it has limited number of overwrites. So less writing - longer life.

Yea definitely I would put /home and /tmp on the conventional drive. Not sure if I would be able to read-only the entire SSD though, since that would be tricky. I would still need to write when there are security updates, or if I just want to install a program or two and will need to actually write to the SSD, unless I can somehow manually place the appropriate directories to the conventional drive. Sounds like an interesting project too .

Hi,

I just purchased another refurbished Dell Laptop and purchased from another vendor a Patriot PYRO SE SSD: MLC arch, SATAIII: Patriot PPSE60GS25SSDR Pyro SE Solid State Drive Data Sheet.pdf;
Patriot PPSE60GS25SSDR Pyro SE Solid State Drive Data Sheet.pdf;
I spent a lot of time researching and comparing 'SSD' and found this 'SSD' the better bang for the buck.

I installed 'Slackware64-current' last night and will finish tweaking the install sometime this evening. Nothing really big jumped out for the 'SSD', just setting partitioning scheme, filesystem of choice, setup 'fstab'.

One noted problem was the sound & wireless setup but that too was fixed. This is not my first 'SSD' drive. I have another Dell Laptop with a Intel X25-V SATA 40GB 'SSD' with Slackware64 13.1 on it. Works great! If it ain't broke don't fix it!

Love those 'SSD' and good portable external USB 500GB drives for data storage with quality enclosures.

Not really read-only, more like write-rarely. It doesn't wear out that easily, it takes millions of writes.

For optimizations, I use firefox cache on /dev/shm, but I don't recommend doing this with /tmp, because you can easily run out of RAM.

I recommend zcache and I have found that these commands also help throughput:

Mostly the setra / read ahead provides the benefit, but for me the second command also increases performance. From what I read, these are safe to use.

Thats really cool! So far then I guess almost any FS with little or no tweaks should then be OK with SSDs. You know what would be an interesting project now, setting up a RAID array with SSDs, can't even imagine (or maybe even notice) any further performance gain .

The impact of writes on the lifespan isn't so hard as most people think. I use a Intel SSD (X25-V, 40GB, ext4 mounted with discard option) in my notebook and besides putting /tmp to RAM I have not done any optimizations for having fewer writes. And I am not concerned about that. c't, a popular German computer magazine is currently making the test. They write , for several weeks now, non-compressible data (to make it hard for the Sandforce controllers to compress the data) to several SSDs and no failures til now. Most modern SSDs have a wearout or lifetime indicator, that can be read out over SMART. Here a little bit to think about if you really should be so concerned:

• OCZ Onyx 32GB, down to 65% lifetime after writing 48TB to it
• Intel SSD320 40GB, 85% after 35TB. Intel is proclaiming 5 years lifetime if you write 20GB a day.
• Gskill FM-25S2S-100GBP1, throttled its speed to 7MB/s after 152TB
• OCZ Solid 3, the bad one in the test, throttling down to 10MB/s after "only" 25TB
• No general failures, no write errors

If you take the worst result from that OCZ drive: If a typical Slackware install is about 6GB you can do 4166 complete installs before something like that happens. If you look at the Gskill drive that would be more than 25K complete installs.
So if you use the SSD for the OS and a mechanical disk for your data there should be nothing to worry about.
By the way, keep in mind to get a motherboard that is capable of SATA 3 (aka SATA 6G) to get the most out of the SSD.

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I have had slackware on my asus 901 eeepc on the 20 gig ssd for over 2 years with never a problem. It is very easy to install and every thing works well. I do not remember exactly but I think all drivers were included with the distro.

One more thing, /var should also be on the HDD.