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I can't seem to find a whole lot of concise information on Linux with an SSD best practices.

  1. What is the recommended layout for the file system? What to mount on the SSD and what to mount on a separate HDD?
  2. What mount options are recommended?
  3. Any kernel parameters recommended?

Anything else?

Emma
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2 Answers2

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  • Layout

For the layout, I'd avoid having /tmp, /var and /home on the SSD.

With or without SSD, my preferences go out to a tmpfs /tmp and a HDD RAID1 /home (coz' it's cheap)

As for /var, my /var/log tends to get very big, so /var is usually a RAID1 dedicated to system files. Your mileage will vary.

  • Mount options

I'd definitly use "noatime" and "discard" (cf. point 3)

Some people said/like to remove the ext3 journal too. I haven't tried that, nor have tried ext4.

  • Kernel

The kernel should at least support the TRIM option: that is mounting the disk with the "discard" mount option.

There's also some "hdparm" tuning and BIOS tuning possible, but I didn't toy around with that.

Flimzy
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BlakBat
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    Why put /home on the HDD? Would application responsiveness benefit from local config files being stored on the SSD? If I put /home on the SSD, I could always mount/symlink write heavy local dirs (~/Downloads, etc). – Emma Jan 10 '12 at 19:29
  • The major reason I still use HDD is because of the price of SSD. M my /home and /srv are on the same disk, and RAID1 is not an option (nor daily remote backups), and there's about 2 terabytes of data on /home. – BlakBat Jan 10 '12 at 19:37
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    put everything you can on the SSD, it is simple as that. HDD/SSD is the main bottleneck of everything. – inf Jan 10 '12 at 19:38
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The only thing you probably have to do, is to manually turn TRIM on. It is supported since Kernel 2.6.33.

There are always some micro optimizations which you probably never need, so basically turning TRIM on is all you have to do.

See this link for TRIM: link.

Community
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inf
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