SSD Geometry [solved]

[Lanser]

Interested in current Mint thinking / prefs for SSD's. Seems to be two popular options. 224 Heads / 56 Sectors and 32 Heads / 32 Sectors.
Both make sense..... but I am leaning towards 32/32 with the (significantly) higher number of cylinders.
Also. Anybody know if there has been any changes in geometry prefs for kernel 3.x ?

thanks

Lanser

[Jay514]

As for SSD's I think it depends on the MFG's of the SSD that you select, The differ vastly.
I have had a Corsair Force2 Sereis 120GB SSD ,in my 3yr old HP Laptop, That is SATA2 & I have done nothing but run Linux on it from day 1. As of right now it is speeding away at the maximum SATA 2 Speed (maximum read speed of 285MB/s and write speed of 275MB/s.) I have had no issue thus far, Although I do not have a Swap Partition Installed on this drive, But I do run a secondary "conventional" HDD in the laptop as well which does contain a small swap partition ( you do not have to do this ) , I just need the other drive ( a Seagate Momentous XT 500GB Hybrid Drive ) for storage space so most all of it is 1 large NTFS Partition that I share among my other distros.
I plan soon to get a SATA 3 SSD for my other New HP Laptop & do the same. Corsair does not recommend any weird configs, other than eliminating your swap, & catches if you run win. Otherwise treat it as any other conventional HDD.
I am aware that other MFG's of SSD's do have lengthy configuration options & have read many of them. I have not had to do this, as per Corsair & as far as I know the SSD's from Crucial = I read on their support site, They recommend that you treat their SSD's as conventional HDD's with no special configuration whatsoever.
I read a lot of configuration options for the OCZ SSD's @ their site, so you may find some helpful info there,
Have a good Day

[Lanser]

Hi Jay514. Thanks for the quick reply. Agreed there are some large differences between MFG's at the moment particularly around the controller, mem type and physical architecture of the dies.
There is also quite a bit of chaos with many of the MFG's jumping early into a new gen Sandforce controller with some very ugly results.
If I had a choice at the moment, think I would take synchronous from Crucial, over asynchronous with Sandforce.

As far as I can figure out ( with the help of my HP32s and a glass of red wine :- ) if you are going to partition the SSD, it makes sense to align to 4k, even if the performance differences are minimal.
This is an interesting blog from Ted Tso on the subject. http://tytso.livejournal.com/2009/02/20/ I never knew that MS Vista had jumped to 240 heads and 63 sectors/tracks, to deal with SSDs.

Luckily A Corsair Force 3 60Gb drive has landed on my desk. Think I will try both standard DOS 255/63 and 224/56 with LMDE and see if I can see a difference.

thanks again

Lanser

[Jay514]

Luckily A Corsair Force 3 60Gb drive has landed on my desk. Think I will try both standard DOS 255/63 and 224/56 with LMDE and see if I can see a difference.
Lanser

Lucky You, Corsair is among the fastest ,& well made drives around. I would think that if you have an actual SATA3/6GBps controller on your motherboard, It would be hard too tell a difference, ( unless you only have SATA2, & are bottlenecking ).
I have used Crystal Disk Info & Crystal Drive Info in win7 too get my exact test results from my corsair force2 as they reported on their test results online,The results were quite impressive & slightly faster on my test. So I would be curious as to your results, Please keep us updated, Cheers & Good Luck

[Lanser]

Hi Jay514. Thought you might be interested. I spent a couple of hours doing some subjective testing on the Corsair Force 3 60Gb drive.

Well no surprise, there was no discernible difference in performance between geometries.
I am guessing though, that there will be a long term difference, as the SSD takes on more data and accumulates reads/writes.
So I will be sticking with the 224 Heads and 56 sectors per cylinder format, in the expectation that this will reduce wear and tear.

Something that did surprise me though, was the small difference in boot and app loading times between the SSD and the existing WD Black 1Tb SATA III drives.
The SSD is about 6 sec quicker to boot than the black drives, but the apps seem to load in about the same time.
This is probably more due to performance of SATA III and the speed of these HDDs, than comment on the SSD. It could also have something to do with the AMD controller on the MB.
Either way in this machine build, both are more than quick enough to give a very responsive desktop. (Let me know if you are interested in the test config & method )
The Corsair SSD has now been installed into my Lenovo S10-3 Netbook (running LMDE) giving a huge performance boost. ( and a huge Grin ! )

Lanser

[Jay514]

Thats Cool ,
I have my specs & test results,from my old SATA 2 Corsair SSD, but I haven't purchased a new SATA3 as of yet. I have to get another HDD Bay( one that replaces the Disk Drive ) for the new HP DV6, as I did for my DV4 a while back,
That way I can run a second conventional HDD & Have plenty of storage.
Or I could save up & get a 256GB Corsair, but I think if I wait, the price will drop some
I will probably do the latter, who knows they may have reasonable 500GB SSD's in a year or so, hardware changes soo fast