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Optimize SSD

Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 2:11 am
by rance
Yo,

So I'm just curious about which things I need to do to complete my SSD optimization. I've already done everything in this tutorial:
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/293

I'm just wondering if the things mentioned by Vincent here are needed:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 03#p461796

They are more or less the same, with a few exceptions.

I decided not to make a swap file partition altogether, considering I have excess amounts of RAM.

So is there anything I'm missing? I appreciate any help.

Re: Optimize SSD

Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 2:57 am
by catweazel
rance wrote: I'm just wondering if the things mentioned by Vincent here are needed:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 03#p461796
The fstab discard option is required.

Ext4 is capable of issuing TRIM commands but it's turned off by default. The discard parameter turns it on. Without it your drive won't automatically erase blocks (prefill them in the background with binary 1s) when the blocks are no longer needed by the file system. There may be an initial performance hit by turning it on *if* your system is running disk intensive apps such as databases, but the payback is faster write speeds in the long run. If you don't use the discard option then when the file system writes to a non-empty, unused block the SSD must read the whole block and erase it before it can be written to; it's this bottleneck that the TRIM command is intended to overcome.

I also recommend shrinking the first partition on a SSD by about 10% of the total drive capacity (120GB SSD = 12GB free) and leaving the space completely unused and unpartitioned. The SSD's logic board should see that empty space and use it for spare blocks in case of damage and also as additional cache when it's been given a massive file to choke on.

HTH