SSD with Linux mint 17.1 MATE. Do i need to do anything?

[DXM1]

Hi everyone!

Just wondering if i should do anything or change any settings since I run an SSD. Fresh install of mint 17.1 with MATE.

Its the samsung EVO 1 TB one.

[Pierre]

" The Evo is also offered in a full range of capacities, from 120GB all the way up to 1TB,
- making it the first Samsung SSD available at that size "

wow - SSDs are that big now !!

but yeah - you don't need to do anything special,
just partition it, - as to how you wish to use it.

[DXM1]

" The Evo is also offered in a full range of capacities, from 120GB all the way up to 1TB,
- making it the first Samsung SSD available at that size "

wow - SSDs are that big now !!

but yeah - you don't need to do anything special,
just partition it, - as to how you wish to use it.

thanks for letting me know I wasnt sure! Yes it was an Xmas gift as it was cheap on black friday sale. Good to know that I do not need to enable any settings.

Super happy with the latest MATE release!

[nomko]

but yeah - you don't need to do anything special,
just partition it, - as to how you wish to use it.

Are you sure??
What about :
https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/293
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/optimize-linux-ssds/

I think you need to add noatime in fstab?
set fstrim -v in the rc.local file?
disable the weekly cron job for discard?
If swap is installed on SSD, reduce swappines?

There's a lot to do to configure a SSD for good performance.
Read also this:
https://sites.google.com/site/easytipsf ... tes-drives

[DXM1]

sooo whats the consesus ? do i need to tinker with these things or not?

[BlackVeils]

this is a very good and reasonable guide:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd

it looks overwhelming but its actualy easy to do if you read through.

my notes from it are:

• partition alignment:
  
  you can check after by using the terminal:
  
  sudo parted /dev/sda
  
  p
  
  align-check opt
  
  type the number of your partition
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  Avoid exaggerated measures
  1. First a word of caution: don't exaggerate! There's a lot of exaggeration to be found on the web on this issue.
  
  On the one hand you have people who don't take any special measures for SSD's at all, and on the other hand you see people who take all kinds of extreme and complicated precautions. Neither side is behaving sensibly.
  
  This how-to will show you how to achieve a very good result by applying just a few rather simple measures.
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  3. check device manufacturer for firmware update, create the required bootable media, apply.
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  5. Reserve 7% for overprovisioning (unallocated space)
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  7. noatime in fstab
  
  Code: Select all
  gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
  
  
  Now add "noatime" to the line for your root partition and your other Linux partitions. Not to the line for the swap partition!
  
  An adapted line may look like this:
  UUID=f0ae2c59-83d2-42e7-81c4-2e870b6b255d / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
  Note: this is one line!
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  8. trim
  You can add the TRIM command to /etc/rc.local. Then this command will be executed automatically on system boot.
  
  Code: Select all
  gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local
  
  
  Above the line "exit 0" in that file, you now add the TRIM command
  "fstrim -v" for every automatically mounted EXT4 partition.
  Note: not for partitions that aren't mounted by default! And also not for the swap partition, as that's already being trimmed automatically by the system by default, during the boot process.
  
  An example is most clarifying. When your Ubuntu is on one single partition, so you have only the root partition / , then your rc.local should look like this:
  
  #!/bin/sh -e
  #
  # rc.local
  #
  # This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
  # Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
  # value on error.
  #
  # In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
  # bits.
  #
  # By default this script does nothing.
  fstrim -v /
  exit 0
  
  If you have a separate home partition (although that's not very useful), then you add the following line as well, above exit 0:
  fstrim -v /home
  Note: if you have a separate partition for /boot/efi, don't add a trim command line for that in rc.local. It's useless, as that partition is seldom being written to. And it may even cause malfunctions.
  
  reboot
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  8.1.1. Disable the superfluous weekly cron job for TRIM
  
  Code: Select all
  sudo mv -v /etc/cron.weekly/fstrim /fstrim
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  10. Limit swap wear
  
  Code: Select all
  gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf
  
  
  Add the following lines, at the very end of the existing text in that file:
  
  # Sharply reduce swap inclination
  vm.swappiness=1
  
  reboot
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  12. Limit the write actions of Firefox
  - in the address bar, go to about:config to search for the folowing settings.
  
  browser.cache.disk.enable - value: false
  
  browser.cache.memory.capacity - value: -1
  
  browser.cache.memory.enable - value: true
  
  - set disk cache to 0
  - If you have installed Oracle Java, limit the write actions of the Java plugin:
  launch the Java Control Panel - Tab General:
  Temporary Internet Files - Settings...
  Remove the tick for: Keep temporary files on my computer.
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  13. limut wrtie actions of Chrome web browser
  find a real way.. ram disk?
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  15. Do NOT enable hibernation
  
  Code: Select all
  sudo touch /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/90-mandatory.d/disable-hibernate.pkla
  gksudo gedit /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/90-mandatory.d/disable-hibernate.pkla
  
  
  Copy and paste the following text into that empty text file:
  
  [Disable hibernate (upower)]
  Identity=unix-user:*
  Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
  ResultActive=no
  ResultInactive=no
  ResultAny=no
  
  [Disable hibernate (logind)]
  Identity=unix-user:*
  Action=org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate
  ResultActive=no
  
  [Disable hibernate for all sessions (logind)]
  Identity=unix-user:*
  Action=org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate-multiple-sessions
  ResultActive=no
  
  reboot
  
  --------------------------------------------------------
  
  16. Also for an SSD: prevent fragmentation, and DO NOT defrag
  You can achieve that by preserving a minimum of 20 % free space on each partition.

[niowluka]

sooo whats the consesus ? do i need to tinker with these things or not?

The answer to this depends largely on your personal circumstances: what the SSD will be used for, e.g. is it just for system, data, both; will your system run as a 24/7 server, or do you just switch it on for a couple of hours a day; etc.

I'd say in general, especially with Samsung 1TB, you don't need to do anything special.

N.B. Some of the things nomko mentioned are a good idea, regardless of whether you use SSD or HDD, namely noatime. Also reducing swappiness may help with performance if you have a decent amount of RAM.

[nascar64]

listen i have 1 -128 samsung and 1-128 crucial ssd i use samsung for linux about 1 yrs or so ago and did not do any thing and it work great very fast to boot only i suggest if you got a lot of ram you don't need a swap partition that my 1cent of ssd .Ray(but is a lot of stuff about it to make it go faster or better susposesly just take what you want out of it)

[ClutchDisc]

All I do for the SSD drive (and I do this with any regular HDD too) is reduce the swappiness.

Enjoy the SSD!

[Wild Penguin]

I do recommend doing somtething - the atime mount option being the most important thing to do I believe

The trim in cron is quite usefull, but your SSD will only get slightly slower without it over time (and may wear slightly faster if it is written nearly full, but there are more efficient ways to reduce wear).

More about TRIM: Optionally you may put discard in mount options for all your FSes on the SSD, instead of using the cron job. But, see this bug report. At least when I installed 17.1, the current script was outdated and used whitelisting - which means it will only run on few SSDs; for example Not on my Kingston, don't know about yours (but that can be fixed by adding the option --no-model-check in the crontab job). However, if your SSDs firmware is buggy (unlikely but possible), you may get data loss with TRIM / discard mount option while the disk is under heavy I/O.

After that - depending on your use case and paranoia level about wearing down your SSD - I'd step by step reduce repeated (and possibly unnecessary) writes to the SSD - but I wouldn't worry too much in normal use. Mainly because I like tinkering, I installed ramlog and profile-sync-daemon . Installing them wont hurt (but you can say goodbye to log files in case of ramlog and changes to your browser profiles in case of profile-sync-daemon, in case the system crashes and cannot be shut down cleanly).

If you are doing something that causes a lot of small writes to the disk, you might do something similar to the folders the writing is happening in. I've hard that people who compile a lot and repeatedly, like to do that in RAMfs instead of their SSDs. There was sync-anything-daemon or similar somewhere (not packaged for Ubuntu / Mint) which might come in handy in those situations.

EDIT: Things I would not worry about: 1) I wouldn't worry about overprovisioning, just make sure you're FS never get's 100% full (overprovisioning is just a nuisance, if for whatever reason, you are going to need that 100% at any later time - but redundant if your FS never get's 100% full). 2) DO use hibernate. But prefer StandBy. Hibernate only does a single consecutive write to the disk <= the total number of RAM on the system. Unless you are constantly hibernating, I doubt it is the main cause of wear! (But yeah, don't hibernate several time a day, for example).

[nomko]

I installed ramlog and profile-sync-daemon . Installing them wont hurt (but you can say goodbye to log files in case of ramlog and changes to your browser profiles in case of profile-sync-daemon, in case the system crashes and cannot be shut down cleanly).

It seems thatRAMLog is a 4-year old application, never updated since??

Ramlog changelog

* Mon Mar 08 2010 Jan Andrejkovic

I won't trust that application since it is very outdated! Better to create a RAMDisk in your main system memory which is created/loaded during boot by putting it into fstab:
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Persisten ... RD_storage

[Pierre]

All I do for the SSD drive (and I do this with any regular HDD too) is reduce the swappiness.

the main worry is that an ssd doesn't like a high r/w use-age.
- with regular / normal use-age an ssd should not wear out prematurely.

if you have a lower amount of ram & are worried about failure, then either:
- reduce the swappiness factor
OR
- place the /swap partition onto a regular hdd
OR
- increase the amount of memory, that is available to the PC.

[nomko]

All I do for the SSD drive (and I do this with any regular HDD too) is reduce the swappiness.

the main worry is that an ssd doesn't like a high r/w use-age.
- with regular / normal use-age an ssd should not wear out prematurely.

if you have a lower amount of ram & are worried about failure, then either:
- reduce the swappiness factor
OR
- place the /swap partition onto a regular hdd
OR
- increase the amount of memory, that is available to the PC.

Pierre, take a look at my earlier response here:
My response here shows you what you should think of when using a SSD...

[Wild Penguin]

I installed ramlog and profile-sync-daemon . Installing them wont hurt (but you can say goodbye to log files in case of ramlog and changes to your browser profiles in case of profile-sync-daemon, in case the system crashes and cannot be shut down cleanly).

It seems thatRAMLog is a 4-year old application, never updated since??

True, but...

Ramlog changelog

* Mon Mar 08 2010 Jan Andrejkovic

I won't trust that application since it is very outdated! Better to create a RAMDisk in your main system memory which is created/loaded during boot by putting it into fstab:
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Persisten ... RD_storage

You are jumping into conclusions!

Generally it is not a good idea to use outdated software - i.e. and older version of something that already has a newer version and / or does not play well with current software.

Ramlog however is very simple and uses core features of a Linux system / distribution that don't change (and if they do, are configurable) - hence there is no need to update the software. Basically it just does exactly the same thing that is done in your link, but in a ready-made package.

EDIT: If you have doubts, it is easy to check; there's just the init script, a few config files and cron jobs in the package + documentation.

[nomko]

won't trust that application since it is very outdated! Better to create a RAMDisk in your main system memory which is created/loaded during boot by putting it into fstab:
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Persisten ... RD_storage

You are jumping into conclusions!

i am jumping into 1 conclusion!

The software package is over 4 years old, never been updated. Who tells me it can deal with the latest developments?? Lots have changed over the past 4 years. Linux evolves. Old/outdated packages are mostly looking for dependencies which are way too new for them so you can have version conflicts when such outdated application tries toe install missing dependencies or it won't even not get installed due to missing/outdated dependencies.

If you don't recognise this, you're blind for the facts.

[Wild Penguin]

The software package is over 4 years old, never been updated. Who tells me it can deal with the latest developments?? Lots have changed over the past 4 years. Linux evolves. Old/outdated packages are mostly looking for dependencies which are way too new for them so you can have version conflicts when such outdated application tries toe install missing dependencies or it won't even not get installed due to missing/outdated dependencies.

You are right in general. However, let me re-iterate: this package contains a shell script (and very little more) that uses tmpfs, ramfs or old kernel ramdisk (you can choose, by default the first one); also it will depend on rsync and bash. All of these components are quite static, i.e. they do not change in function over time. Should they update the package just for upgradings sake?

However, everyone is free to use whatever they like If you think it is outdated, don't use it. If you find an incompatibility because of changes to the above components, bug the author ans ask him to mention it on the page (and/or remove it altogether).

Cheers!

(p.s. I've been using Linux for the last 10 years, mostly Gentoo, and I'm a very beginner in programming, so in general I do know how software is developed on the Open Source world in these regards).

[RCAFBrat]

Samsung EVO

Note that there was a relatively recent firmware upgrade to resolve a nasty issue that I believe caused older data to be read at very low rate. For Mac OS and Linux users it is necessary to burn a new DOS boot disk from ISO in order to update the firmware; SSD must be connected via SATA (cannot be accomplished with SSD in a USB enclosure).

Links explaining the bug and firmware itself as follows:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/sams ... rmance-bug

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/ ... loads.html

Cheers

[tone303]

Old thread - but I want to tell everyone something, as an SSD user

If you have an SSD, make your browser use RAM Memory only.

1) In firefox, go to the URL about:config

2) In the filter, type: browser.cache.

(including the second dot/period)

3) change browser.cache.disk.enabled to: false

4) change browser.cache.disk.capacity to: 0

5) make sure browser.cache.memory.enabled is true and if it isn't, double click it to make it true.

6) right click any one of the results and click Create New integer.

7) name it precisely this: browser.cache.memory.capacity

8 ) set the value to Seven 7's. So make the value this: 7777777

9) Go in firefox preferences/option & go to Privacy. Then pull the History Dropdown Bar to Use Custom Settings

10) make every box in the Privacy Section be checked, except for the box called "Always use private browsing mode"

11) press the settings button and have all boxes checked here except for "saved Passwords" and "Site Preferences", keep those two unchecked.

DONE HERE DONE HERE DONE HERE

Firefox will now use RAM Memory only in its caching, so that when you use the web it does not do constant junk writes to SSD

Optional Bonus Steps

12) Install the Firefox Extensions called "Better Privacy", & "Hide Tab bar with one tab", adblock plus", and "video download helper"

13) disable http referer. back in about:config, change network.http.sendRefererHeader to the number 0. remember if by RARE chance a site does not work properly when you press submit buttons or do something on it, to re-enable referer and restart

14) go back to Firefox Options & press "Advanced"

15) go to the Data Choices tab & uncheck all boxes

16) Go to the Network Tab & press all clear

17) Go to the General Tab & change the downloads folder to where ever your new RAM Drive is, after you research how to make a RAM Drive in Linuxmint. Download all videos and things you only use once to this RAM Drive-Acting Folder so that you arent making writes to your SSD for things you download for only one use then delete.

Not sure why no one knows about setting browsers to use RAM Memory only in caching when 99% of all writes for many people are browsing the web, playing embedded videos, and cache being written. People just let all kinds of writes occur on the SSD Drive for no reason. The writes are for no reason whatsoever. You do not need cache to write on an SSD. Believe me.