Re: What to put on SSD
On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 12:02:30PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: Grumpy Old Man says: sell the SSD and buy more RAM. Already did. Get more RAM that is. I went from 4 to 8 GB. 16 is max and I can go to 12 without swapping out existing memory. It's a work machine, so I can't just sell extra parts away, even if I don't necessarily need them :-) Regarding boot time. It may have gone down a bit, but since I have some kind of realtek network chip issue which causes a 30-60 s delay at boot time, it doesn't really make a difference. And since the machine is on 24/7 and get rebooted maybe 3-4 times a year for upgrades, it's a non-issue to me anyway. Pasi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100815122613.ga10...@localhost
Re: What to put on SSD
Jörg-Volker Peetz: Did you enable the 'discard' mount option on your ext4 file system (see kernel-/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt) in order to make usage of the TRIM-ability of the SSD? Me? -No, because my (1st gen) X25m model doesn't support TRIM. J. -- I think the environment will be okay. [Agree] [Disagree] http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: What to put on SSD
Did you enable the 'discard' mount option on your ext4 file system (see kernel-/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt) in order to make usage of the TRIM-ability of the SSD? -- Best regards, Jörg-Volker. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/i43ofd$ag...@dough.gmane.org
Re: What to put on SSD
On 08/05/2010 03:15 AM, Pasi Oja-Nisula wrote: I have this: FilesystemSize Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda1 37G 14G 22G 39% / tmpfs 3.9G 8.0K 3.9G 1% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 640K 9.4M 7% /dev tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm /dev/hda2 328G 204G 107G 66% /home tmpfs 3.9G 49M 3.8G 2% /tmp tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /var/lock tmpfs 3.9G 296K 3.9G 1% /var/run tmpfs 3.9G 32K 3.9G 1% /var/tmp /dev/sdb1 917G 289G 582G 34% /root/backup So basically I have root and home partitions and another disk for backups of the whole thing. Now I got a SSD disk, about which I don't really know much. It's a 160 GB Intel, so it should be quite ok. The question now is how to best utilize it in my configuration? Or if I should just find other use for that? Grumpy Old Man says: sell the SSD and buy more RAM. -- Seek truth from facts. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4c657aa6.3030...@cox.net
Re: What to put on SSD
On Vi, 06 aug 10, 21:14:21, Jochen Schulz wrote: What about boot time? My laptop (Thinkpad X200) boots up in less than ten senconds (boot manager to GDM). Are you using anything special besides the (now default) parallel boot? I'm thinking about readahead or similar stuff. Regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: What to put on SSD
[Re-posted to the list] Andrei Popescu: On Vi, 06 aug 10, 21:14:21, Jochen Schulz wrote: What about boot time? My laptop (Thinkpad X200) boots up in less than ten senconds (boot manager to GDM). Are you using anything special besides the (now default) parallel boot? I'm thinking about readahead or similar stuff. No, just the current defaults in sid. What services are started can be seen here (vertical lines drawn each second): http://well-adjusted.de/~jrschulz/gfx/bootchart-2010-03-26.png Total boot time is about 30-35 seconds, depending on how fast I enter my disk encryption + login passwords. For chart rendering, I have temporarily disabled my encrypted /home. I don't use any of the big desktop environments, just plain awesome (the window manager). But that isn't included in the chart anyway. BTW, I tried slim instead of gdm, but I found it to be a little bit on the buggy side and IIRC it lacks a few features I like (don't remember which). J. -- I feel yawning hollowness whilst talking to people at parties. [Agree] [Disagree] http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: What to put on SSD
On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:47:02 +0200 Jochen Schulz m...@well-adjusted.de wrote: ... Total boot time is about 30-35 seconds, depending on how fast I enter my disk encryption + login passwords. For chart rendering, I have temporarily disabled my encrypted /home. When I switched over to full-disk encryption, I decided that I didn't really need two passwords, and I ditched the login password by using rungetty with the --autologin option. Celejar -- foffl.sourceforge.net - Feeds OFFLine, an offline RSS/Atom aggregator mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100809220433.d8180f9a.cele...@gmail.com
Re: What to put on SSD
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 11:27 PM, Jochen Schulz wrote: What you might want to find out is whether you have a G1 or G2 device. G2 supports the TRIM command which helps the SSD to keep up performance. Otherwise, performance degrades over time, especially when you keep the SSD nearly full. I have read Intel recommends keeping some of the space (5-10%) unpartitioned in order to avoid that effect. Thanks Jochen. Lots of good information and pointers there. My SSD was actually a G2 device. There was also newer firmware for the disk available which I installed. Maybe set noatime option, Good idea, but I do that even on traditional hard disks anyway. I am using 'nodelalloc' on my ext4, too.=20 Yes, I also found that I had noatime already on. but do I really need to deal with other filesystems than ext3? Not really. I converted my /home to ext4, just to try it out, but I don't really know what I gain from that. ;-) I haven't switched home yet, so I have only programs on SSD. But I might also use ext4 for home. You might want to read Ted T'so's blog entries regarding SSDs: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/category/computers/ssd/ This is where the pain starts. I started looking at this and suddenly I was up to my neck in partition boundary alignment calculations. But I guess I finally managed to get them right. Probably wouldn't have made a difference even if I had skipped that part. So far so good. Bigger programs like OpenOffice and the like start noticeably quicker, but the difference is not as big as I thought. I'll see how the system feels once I get home transferred also. Pasi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/aanlkti=qiv01mccjvxhxdd4jyqbuzstzo-uond9nn...@mail.gmail.com
Re: What to put on SSD
Quoting Jochen Schulz on 2010-08-05 04:27:26: BTW, you can monitor lifetime writes with recent kernels for each filesystem separately: $ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/manowar-home-crypt | grep ^Lifet Lifetime writes: 785 GB This filesystem is almost exactly 13 months old and I think more than half of the writes on my system go there. The rest is mostly package upgrades (I am running sid). Do you know what kernel exactly is required? My kernel isn't new enough, or doesn't have the right options enabled, in order to show this: Linux esterhazy 2.6.26-2-686 #1 SMP Mon Jun 21 05:58:44 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux This is an up-to-date Lenny system. -- _ Brian Ryans 8B2A 54C4 E275 8CFD 8A7D 5D0B 0AD0 B014 C112 13D0 . ( ) ICQ UIN: 43190205 | Mail/MSN/Jabber: brianlry...@gmail.com ..: X ASCII Ribbon Campaign Against HTML mail and v-cards: asciiribbon.org / \ Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: What to put on SSD
Pasi Oja-Nisula: On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 11:27 PM, Jochen Schulz wrote: You might want to read Ted T'so's blog entries regarding SSDs: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/category/computers/ssd/ This is where the pain starts. I started looking at this and suddenly I was up to my neck in partition boundary alignment calculations. But I guess I finally managed to get them right. Probably wouldn't have made a difference even if I had skipped that part. I skipped the alignment part completely and just went with the defaults (from July 2009). I don't have the feeling that this imposes a performance penalty like what is reported with the new 4k hard disks. But I didn't test that. So far so good. Bigger programs like OpenOffice and the like start noticeably quicker, but the difference is not as big as I thought. I'll see how the system feels once I get home transferred also. What about boot time? My laptop (Thinkpad X200) boots up in less than ten senconds (boot manager to GDM). J. -- I am on the payroll of a company to whom I owe my undying gratitude. [Agree] [Disagree] http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: What to put on SSD
Brian Ryans: Quoting Jochen Schulz on 2010-08-05 04:27:26: BTW, you can monitor lifetime writes with recent kernels for each filesystem separately: $ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/manowar-home-crypt | grep ^Lifet Lifetime writes: 785 GB This filesystem is almost exactly 13 months old and I think more than half of the writes on my system go there. The rest is mostly package upgrades (I am running sid). Do you know what kernel exactly is required? Sorry, no. I usually run current sid and compile vanilla kernels from Linus' git. This is supported by upstream since at least July 2009, so I guess 2.6.30 or 2.6.31 should be enough. But I cannot find any references regarding that. What I just found out, though, is that the X25m apparently reports host writes as S.M.A.R.T. attribute 225: $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep ^225 225 Host_Writes_Count 0x 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 53426 http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ext4/msg19641.html The raw value multiplied by 32MB is supposed to be the total amount of data written to the device during its total lifetime. That's about 1,700GB for me which appears to be plausible (and only 4% of the writes Intel reports as minimum lifetime writes). J. -- If politics is the blind leading the blind, entertainment is the fucked- up leading the hypnotised. [Agree] [Disagree] http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: What to put on SSD
Pasi Oja-Nisula: So basically I have root and home partitions and another disk for backups of the whole thing. Now I got a SSD disk, about which I don't really know much. It's a 160 GB Intel, so it should be quite ok. Quite ok is quite an understatement. :) Intel SSDs are still one of the best choices in the market, as far as I know. I'm thinking for copying the whole root to SSD. Maybe have 40 GB partition for root and the rest for home. I have more stuff on my home partition, but the active stuff is much less. So daily used files would be on SSD and archive stuff on hard disk. Sounds reasonable. You definitely should boot from the SSD and have all your applications there. /home is not that important, but as there are some applications that like writing to your $HOME a lot (Firefox, for example), having it on your SSD helps performance, too. If you are working with version control systems (svn, git, hg etc.) then you should definitely put your repositories / working copies on the SSD. Should I worry about the longetivity of SSD? Generally: no. Intel guarantees five years of 20GB writes per day: http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/mainstream-sata-ssd-datasheet.pdf As long as you don't push HD movie files back and forth several times a day, you don't need to worry. BTW, you can monitor lifetime writes with recent kernels for each filesystem separately: $ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/manowar-home-crypt | grep ^Lifet Lifetime writes: 785 GB This filesystem is almost exactly 13 months old and I think more than half of the writes on my system go there. The rest is mostly package upgrades (I am running sid). What you might want to find out is whether you have a G1 or G2 device. G2 supports the TRIM command which helps the SSD to keep up performance. Otherwise, performance degrades over time, especially when you keep the SSD nearly full. I have read Intel recommends keeping some of the space (5-10%) unpartitioned in order to avoid that effect. Maybe set noatime option, Good idea, but I do that even on traditional hard disks anyway. I am using 'nodelalloc' on my ext4, too. but do I really need to deal with other filesystems than ext3? Not really. I converted my /home to ext4, just to try it out, but I don't really know what I gain from that. ;-) What about /var/log and other places where there are lots of writing going on? Just don't care. A regular desktop system should only write a few megabytes of logs per day. You might want to read Ted T'so's blog entries regarding SSDs: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/category/computers/ssd/ J. -- My clothes aren't just fashion. They're a lifestyle. [Agree] [Disagree] http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
