Everything I should know about SSD

HisDudeness · 2017-06-14 10:42:05

I've just bought my first solid state drive, and I plan to make a single boot Arch system on it, with a second partition for big data storage. This technology is new to me, and reading everything I could find left me with tons of doubts.

1. Is partition and filesystem alignment to drive's erase block size (EBS) something to do? I've found informations about it on the italian page about SSD on the ArchWiki and the Debian Wiki, but I've found it difficult to understand what should I do.

2. The same ArchWiki italian page talks about making a 1 MiB BIOS boot partition (code ef02) at the beginning of the drive in order to be able to use GRUB2. What is this all about?

3. Usually, the first thing I do after buying a drive is checking whether or not it is fake and/or has corrupted blocks by running F3 by Digirati. Is this a good idea on an SSD?

4. I usually create very large non-system partitions I plan on writing very large files on this way:

# mkfs.ext4 -L [i]label[/i] -T largefile -m 0 /dev/sdXY

Is this a bad idea on an SSD, and why?

5. Should I periodically run fstrim / and forget about anything else, or should I also mount with relatime, send browser cache to tmpfs, or something else I'm forgetting about?

6. Any other setup I should do with, e.g., hdparm?

Last edited by HisDudeness (2017-06-14 10:43:20)

Trilby · 2017-06-14 11:01:21

I look forward to input from those with relevant experience here too, but I can say I use SSDs exclusively on all my systems, and I do virtually nothing special for them. My (admittedly limited) understanding is that when SSDs were new there were a lot of things to worry about. But the kernel and most filesystems have come a long way to handle SSDs well by default, and SSDs have come a long way to be not so fragile.

V1del · 2017-06-14 11:26:16

1. That reads like outdated information. But I only base that on the fact that I haven't seen this mentioned nearly anywhere else so there might still be some merit
2. Nothing to do with the SSD per se, that's a GPT/BIOS partition table requirement in conjuction with GRUB2 (not relevant if you are using UEFI). Would be just as relevant if you use a HDD with a GPT table.
3. Don't know the tool so -- maybe?
4. Nothing to do with the SSD, that's an ext4ism to know how much space should be reserved for inodes, the underlying block device shouldn't make any difference here, the relevant benefits (and drawbacks) will be the same
5. Periodic fstrim's should be fine, most of the other concerns where with the older SSD's, most modern ones will likely work just the same (there are many reviews on the internet, where they couldn't kill an SSD doing terabytes of writes every day for months/years)

Also something that might be relevant, because a few factors change is this intended to be a normal SATA attached SSD or are you going for a PCI-E NVME disk?

phw · 2017-06-14 11:37:58

Nothing to add to the above, but I think relatime is still a general good advice on every hard drive. It avoids unnecessary writes and in practice I have not experienced any drawbacks. I also have noatime set on my SSD, but that's probably just over optimization without noticeable effect (and more likely to actually cause issue with some software).

HisDudeness · 2017-06-14 11:53:18

Thanks for the answers! Yes, I should have probably elaborated on F3 (which stands for Fight Flash Fraud). It is a program which, similarly to h2testw, fills a partition with data trying to retrieve it afterwards. This because many fake flash drives have a real capacity much smaller than the one detected by the system, and continue to write data over the old one. F3 tries to read the data it has written, and if it fails it reports this. My concern was about adding to the wear of the drive, but I suppose that, completely filling it, it will be an already leveled wear of just one write, right?

Sorry, It's been a long time since I've bought my last PC so I'm still new to UEFI. I've just bought a driveless computer too, as I had to send my old one to retirement, and it should arrive today. When I'll have it I'll know if it runs BIOS or UEFI, even if it is almost obvious it'll be the latter one if I'm not wrong. Should I then wait until I know this before partitioning my drive?

I've heard for newer SSDs wear leveling is almost no concern. My preoccupation is about my -m 0 choice though, as I've heard it can cause fragmentation (and is hence unadvisable on a partition which will experience a lot of rewrites like the system one). I tend to associate this with unleveled wear, probably erroneously. Thanks to fstrim, -m 0 is no problem at all, right? Or is it no problem on its own?

R00KIE · 2017-06-14 11:58:11

1- Proper alignment is not exclusive of SSDs, the tools and filesystems should do the right thing.

2- That has nothing to do with SSDs, it is connected with uefi.

3- Buy known brands from reputable places. For my SSDs I always run only the supported smart self-tests in the following order: conveyance, short, long, offline.

4- Filesystems and filesystem options are something the SSD doesn't care about, however if access is 4k aligned (or whatever the SSD reports as physical sector size) it is better.

5- Mount options don't stop behaving differently just because you are using an SSD, read about them and decide for yourself. Personally I've been using strictatime,lazytime if the filesystem supports it. Either enable discard or do a periodic fstrim, read on the advantages and drawbacks and decide for yourself. Don't waste your time putting browser caches on tmpfs or other "optimization" tricks, with modern SSDs you'll probably want to buy a larger/faster one long before it reaches end-of-life.

6- You might want to make use of self encryption but you are not obliged to do it. The same goes for some system tweaks such as enabling sata alpm to achieve better power savings and potentially not have a reduction in cpu reliability but this is not SSD specific.

Mr.Elendig · 2017-06-15 10:20:43

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03 … han-rated/

Arch Linux

#1 2017-06-14 10:42:05

Everything I should know about SSD

#2 2017-06-14 11:01:21

Re: Everything I should know about SSD

#3 2017-06-14 11:26:16

Re: Everything I should know about SSD

#4 2017-06-14 11:37:58

Re: Everything I should know about SSD

#5 2017-06-14 11:53:18

Re: Everything I should know about SSD

#6 2017-06-14 11:58:11

Re: Everything I should know about SSD

#7 2017-06-15 10:20:43

Re: Everything I should know about SSD

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