Hello everyone,

I am developing an application which involves several writes per second to a NTFS SSD disk, formatted in a Linux OS. The data is received by the application through several socket connections and it is written to disk after some seconds.

In order to mount the disk and proceed with I/O operations I am using ntfs-3g. Several months have passed since I started writing continuously to the disk and the Linux system has sometimes a strange behavior.

From time to time, I hace detected that if I execute "df", the hard disk partition takes some seconds to appear. I'm afraid this is because the Linux OS is completely blocked due to a high accumulation of pages in disk cache. In my oppinion, ntfs-3g takes so much time because it tries to write into a "corrupted" or "damaged" part of the disk, doesn't it?


I would appreciate advice regarding:

- Disk cache configuration for this case (e.g. vm.dirty_ratio, vm.dirty_background_ratio).

- Good practices to extend the life of the hard disk. For instance, is it good to format it each month/each three months, etc.

- Any other setting in Linux OS regarding the disk subsystem.

Thanks in advance.

I remember there used to be issues with SSDs that the amount of writes/reads you could do are limited.
Does anyone know if this is still the case? If so, a normal hard disk would be better.
Do you need the speed advantage of your SSD?

In this case, the disk must be an SSD. In order to access it from a Windows OS, I formatted it as NTFS. However, after some time writing intensively I have detected some little issues... :S

Maybe, it should be better to use another file system, which one would you recommend in this case?
Maybe ext4? I would need a little support (at least read) from a Windows OS.

Thanks again.

I'm not plugging anyone's particular software and have no opinion of the vendor, but Paragon makes a Windows utility that they say can give Windows read/write capabilities on an EXT file system. Here is a link:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-windows/

"involves several writes per second to a NTFS SSD disk" This is not uncommon.

Might consider telling us about swap or memory amounts and results from top and maybe even power saving issues.

Hello,

I have tested Paragon software (requires register to download) and Ext2Fsd (http://www.ext2fsd.com/) and both support read and write operations over EXT4 on Windows OS (tested in Windows 7). In case of using one of these applications I would be able to work with a SSD formatted with EXT4.

Regarding top statistics, the application which records data from the sockets to the disk consumes usually between 20 to 30% CPU in a two-core Intel CPU. Furthermore, swapping is not enabled and I configured systctl.conf with:

• vm.min_free_kbytes=65536

Please, let me know if you need any other information.
Best regards.

Sure, but it depends on your definition of the word "limited". If you mean "is there a limit?", the answer is yes. If you mean "is there a limit you could realistically hit within the lifetime of the rest of the machine?", the answer is likely no. The limit depends on the drive, but it's generally somewhere around 1000x the drive's capacity. It takes a lot of work to write/delete the entire contents of a drive 1000x.