On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Curtis Shimamoto < sugar.and.scruffy@gmail.com> wrote:
On 01/07/13 at 04:24pm, Mike Cloaked wrote:
As part of my planning for setting up a home build computer which will use two ssd drives - one a Crucial M4 mSATA drive (for root and boot partitions) and a second larger Crucial M4 SATA III drive for the rest, I have been reading up about partitioning and optimising such drives -
It seems that it is important to partition with proper alignment to MiB boundaries for partitions but I am unclear if this happens automatically or not when setting up GPT partitions with gparted? ( I usually partition using a liveusb running PartedMagic and then run gparted before installing arch)
I am not user about gparted, but I know that gptfdisk handles this automatically as does fdisk these days. I am not so familiar with parted in general, so maybe someone else can step in here.
Also I have been seeing various bits of advice about ensuring that excessive writes are avoided by using a non-default IO scheduler - with "deadline" being the better option for SSDs than the default CFQ scheduler - and it would seem that adding the parameter to the kernel line for boot once a system is set up is perhaps a good way forward? How does that work if UEFI booting?
I use a udev rule to determine what scheduler should be used for what. At one point I had both rotational disks and a solid state drive. So I continued to use CFQ for the rotational and I use NOOP for the flash based media. This is what I use:
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0", \ ATTR{queue/scheduler}="noop"
Yet, according to https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/22605, CFQ should be able to handle SSD just fine. So does it really make a big difference? Sander