[SOLVED] Linux and SSD

deleted08 · 08-03-2010, 04:14 AM

Hey

Long time no see

Anyway, I'm upgrading one of my laptops to a 64GBSSD within the next few days (waiting for it to arrive) and suddenly thought, about the estimated life of the SSD, how badly will ext3 affect that?

I've heard ext2 doesn't journel as much as ext3 but what file system should I use? I will be using kernel 2.6.34

Thanks

Retrievil_Knievil · 08-03-2010, 04:28 AM

I've just set up a net book with SSD, and read a bit about it. Journaling is in general not a good idea performance-wise on a SSD, but it can be disabled. I used ext4 with disabled journaling, like this guy:

http://fenidik.blogspot.com/2010/03/...e-journal.html

I also used a SD-card slot and installed a fast card which I used for a swap partition, and disabled the cache in Firefox.

TobiasH · 08-03-2010, 04:33 AM

You can use ext3 if you like. But don't use a swap partition on your SSD disk, add more RAM instead to your machine.

ext2 doesn't journal at all, and therefore it's better for a SSD disk. But this comes at the cost of a less secure file system.

So if you are more concerned about wearing your SSD down with ext4/ext4 you should use ext2, but if you want journaling you should use ext3. I'd recommend using ext4 because it has checksummed journaling which is safer.

/Tobias

deleted08 · 08-03-2010, 04:52 AM

Thanks

When you say ext2 is a less secure FS, what do you mean by that? Data can be lost?

DavidMcCann · 08-03-2010, 07:00 PM

SSD is pretty reliable these days, or so I've read, so I doubt if journaling would be a problem. One thing you can do to reduce access is to edit the mount parameters in /etc/fstab by adding noatime,nodiratime

jefro · 08-03-2010, 09:07 PM

http://www.sagecertification.org/eve...h/shin_SSD.pdf for some tests.

krasl · 08-03-2010, 09:22 PM

Sector alignment may be important too, to achieve the best performance. See here: http://old.nabble.com/ATA-4K-sector-...929909i20.html
Or search Google for "linux ssd 4k sector" may yield some more results.

TobiasH · 08-04-2010, 05:09 AM

With lower security in ext2 i meant that it's bigger risk of loosing data due to corruption on the disk because of the missing journaling in ext2.

/Tobias

deleted08 · 08-05-2010, 06:14 AM

Thanks for the help everyone

I'm going to go with ext4 with disabled journeling

I'm fitting my SSD in a couple of hours from now so bit nervous

TobiasH · 08-06-2010, 01:50 AM

Hehe! Good luck with you new SSD disk!

I think the best with my SSD disk is the lack of noise! Completely silent! The performance is also a big plus though

deleted08 · 08-07-2010, 03:26 PM

In the end, I went for ext2, as ext4 wasn't availble during the install

But thanks for you help