[arch-general] ssd

[André Prata]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 10:52 PM, Gaetan Bisson <bisson at archlinux.org>wrote:

> [2012-10-29 21:58:01 -0500] Juan Diego Tascón:
> > I just got a new laptop with a 25Gb ssd and I was wondering which would
> be
> > best if putting my home directory (minus music and videos) there or and
> > arch install (minus pacman pkg cache). I read the ssd related article in
> > the wiki and even though it mentions some optimizations and
> considerations
> > it doesn't mention anything regarding this issue.
>
> With a high-quality SSD you do not really need to do anything.
>
> With a generic SSD, you should reduce the number of writes or spread
> them out evenly on all sectors. The latter can be achieved by using file
> systems such as nilfs2. The former can be achieved by disabling system
> logging or making /var/log a tmpfs, and more generally by controlling
> write-hogs (think of XDG_CACHE_HOME, ~/.mozilla, etc.).
>
> But of course I cannot tell you as much as all the information many
> people have put on the Internet over time on that topic.
>
> --
> Gaetan
>

I think the question is not as how to prolong the life of the disk, but
rather how to take advantage of such a small space with high throughput.

Well, I guess that it's really hard to tell if you would benefit more from
having your system or your user files in the SSD, if there is no space for
both. In case of lodging the system there, you would benefit from faster
boot times, and some program calls. However, if you have a large memory
system, it will account less and less towards greater uptimes. If that is
the case, your personal files would be a better fit.

One third option, although I'm not sure of the reliability or of the raw
efficiency increase, would be to use the 25GB as a cache for everything
else, with gimmicks such as flashcache [1] or bcache [2].

Or just google something like "SSD as a cache".

[1] https://github.com/facebook/flashcache
[2] http://lwn.net/Articles/458417/


André Prata
http://about.me/andreprata