SSD for Dummies Quick Question

[semc]

So I just bought an SSD, and my co-workers asked me if I were out of my god damn mind. I was rather put off by this and their explanation was that its easy to install linux and windows on an SSD, but if you don't do all sorts of configuration changes and what not, I'll end up fragging my drive before the end of the year.

I started by reading everything I could find on SSD installations and it got really complicated real fast. Then there's http://forum.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.ph ... sd#p628177. And it all seems like a heck of a lot of work just to get a fresh install of Mint 13 Cinnamon, with a dual boot of Windows or something. Heaven help me, I haven't even looked up what I'd have to do to get my XP partition back online.

So what gives? How much of this pre/post configuration is really needed to help keep the drive alive past the one year mark? I bought this thing because I was tired of all my platter hd's dying left and right due to the large number of typhoon era hd's still in warehouses. Would I be better off just sending it back to Newegg, and going through RMA hell with Seagate/WD/etc?

Drive is the Samsung 830 256GB version. I have a laptop, so there's only one hd bay. This will be the only hard drive available, and I have 4gb of ram.

please help, it just came in the mail today and I'd rather not open it up until someone can set me straight on this.

[registereduser]

The theory behind this is that there are little switches inside the SSD which as they are switched on and off over time they become damaged and break, the drive usually will try to use error correcting and move the data from the damaged switch to a new switch, causing the drive to slowly get smaller in size over time. I've personally never experienced this using a USB flash drive as my OS drive, but I did disable journaling and did some other configurations like making the temporary files and some log files store in a ramdisk.

personally though, even though I've never experienced any problems with a USB drive, I don't think I'd risk it with SSD. Platters are more stable in my opinion.

keep in mind I'm no expert in this, It's just my opinion.

I wrote to several hard drive manufacturers a year ago, like seagate and western digital, asking why they don't make a hybrid drive. Basically it would access sectors of a non-moving magnetic platter by having the ability to read all sectors more like a flash drive (addressed read-heads) they would access data faster than a spinning platter, and last longer than a SSD. So far I don't think they have taken my idea seriously :S

[odo5435]

My first computer was a Commodore 128; back in the days when "640K of RAM was more than would ever be needed". Since then I've bought for myself and companies I've worked for many versions of new hardware and software as they came out.

I'm not a techie, just some poor idiot that used to rely on the advice of others. What I'm leading to is that, in all that time, and over all the hundreds of thousands of dollars I've spent or caused to be spent, there are two absolutes:

1. Cutting edge hardware is not only expensive, it is normally riddled with faults. I'd be very happy to be corrected on this point. Save yourself some pain (and a lot of money) and wait for real world testing.

2. If what you have works, leave it be. There is new hardware (and software) coming out every day that looks enticing but that, by the time you've actually got the damn things to work, there's something even better to spend (waste) your money on.

My point...

Just wait a while; and let other trend-obsessed idiots show you where your money is best spent.

[caerolle]

Really, you all may be going a bit overboard on SSD panic.

I have a Samsung 830 128 GB, have used it for a couple of months, and really have no complaints. On the other hand, I can't see that it is noticeably faster than my 1TB SATA III HDD. I mostly like it b/c it is easy to take in and out of my tower, uses less energy, and gives me a sense of security wrt catastrophic failure, which I have experienced multiple times with fairly new HDDs. Of course, it can happen with SSDs, too, but seems less likely.

As far as set-up goes, yes, it is good to do some things differently than for spinning drives. However, you unfortunately pulled up the most complicated how-to I have seen! Try the one below instead; you will be set up in just a few minutes.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 03#p461796

Hope this helps!

caerolle

[xenopeek]

Came here to post that link, but caerolle already had it above As for filesystems, just stick to Ext4 (which is also the default used by the Linux Mint installer).

[caerolle]

Vincent, when I was setting mine up I read a lot of how-to's, and this post by you was by far the best! Thanks so much for all the help you give us here!

caerolle

[semc]

odo5435: That really doesn't help, and isn't relevant to my problem. I'm on my fifth regular laptop hard drive and I'm tired of dealing with last year's factory problems. I got an SSD to get around the massive manufacturing defects still going around.

[semc]

Caerolle, thanks for the link, and I'll check it out. Do I keep the 0 1 after noatime in the one config? Also, someone posted that 4gb of ram had issues with mint 13 using firefox or something. I guess that might not be a problem anymore as Adobe dropped linux support so now youtube videos have started acting all weird as flash moved on and I'm still stuck with whatever the last version is.

Really, you all may be going a bit overboard on SSD panic.

I have a Samsung 830 128 GB, have used it for a couple of months, and really have no complaints. On the other hand, I can't see that it is noticeably faster than my 1TB SATA III HDD. I mostly like it b/c it is easy to take in and out of my tower, uses less energy, and gives me a sense of security wrt catastrophic failure, which I have experienced multiple times with fairly new HDDs. Of course, it can happen with SSDs, too, but seems less likely.

As far as set-up goes, yes, it is good to do some things differently than for spinning drives. However, you unfortunately pulled up the most complicated how-to I have seen! Try the one below instead; you will be set up in just a few minutes.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 03#p461796

Hope this helps!

caerolle

[semc]

xenopeek: Does Ext4 solve all these problems or do I still need to do all the things in Caerolle's post?

Came here to post that link, but caerolle already had it above As for filesystems, just stick to Ext4 (which is also the default used by the Linux Mint installer).

[caerolle]

Yes, use ext4. It doesn't take care of the other things, in fact some of them are needed partially b/c ext4 is a 'journaling' file system; earlier versions, such as ext2, weren't, but ext4 really is best to use.

The '0' and '1' are actually other fields in the fstab, it is not part of the field you are editing. So be sure you don't take out that field separation! (I think it is a tab, but am at work with my Windows XP, can't open a fstab to see). The 1 means to read the partition in certain situations. Notice that other partitions, esp swap, say 0 or 2. All you are doing is to add a comma at the end of 'ro', followed by 'noatime,discard'. Don't use spaces after the commas, either.

Hope this helps!

caerolle

[xenopeek]

As caerolle also writes, yes, in addition to Ext4 as filesystem I'd recommend to also follow the steps on the link caerolle shared (which is a post by me). Ext4 is a fast, stable, and proven filesystem. The steps on the link further optimize your computer, with Ext4 as filesystem, for increased speed and life expectancy of the SSD.

And yes, you should keep the 0 1 after noatime. Note that it should be 0 1 only for your root partition. If you have a separate /home partition, or other kind of data partition, it should be 0 2 for that. The first number is legacy and should always be 0. The second number determines the order in which the filesystems in /etc/fstab should be checked by the fsck program (it runs periodically on Linux Mint startup, and checks your Linux filesystems for errors and repairs them). 1 and 2 are explained; a value of 0 here would mean you don't want the partition checked (for example, you'd set it to 0 for Windows partitions that you want to mount on Linux). The fields on a line in the /etc/fstab file are separated by whitespace (either space or tab), so when listing the options that you separate with a comma (,) be sure to do so without adding whitespace after or before commas.

[semc]

As caerolle also writes, yes, in addition to Ext4 as filesystem I'd recommend to also follow the steps on the link caerolle shared (which is a post by me). Ext4 is a fast, stable, and proven filesystem. The steps on the link further optimize your computer, with Ext4 as filesystem, for increased speed and life expectancy of the SSD.

And yes, you should keep the 0 1 after noatime. Note that it should be 0 1 only for your root partition. If you have a separate /home partition, or other kind of data partition, it should be 0 2 for that. The first number is legacy and should always be 0. The second number determines the order in which the filesystems in /etc/fstab should be checked by the fsck program (it runs periodically on Linux Mint startup, and checks your Linux filesystems for errors and repairs them). 1 and 2 are explained; a value of 0 here would mean you don't want the partition checked (for example, you'd set it to 0 for Windows partitions that you want to mount on Linux). The fields on a line in the /etc/fstab file are separated by whitespace (either space or tab), so when listing the options that you separate with a comma (,) be sure to do so without adding whitespace after or before commas.

I want to thank ya'll for your help, but it seems a lost cause. It would seem that my laptop does not support SSD drives at all. Not sure why regular hard drives fit just fine, but the Samsung 830 does not work in my Dell Inspiron 1545. I suspect the drive is just a tad bit shaped wrong, as it does not seat properly in the drive bay. Sigh. Now what the heck do I do with this drive? Probably use it as external storage or something.

Any recommendations for a normal SATA 2 drive?

[catweazel]

How much of this pre/post configuration is really needed to help keep the drive alive past the one year mark?

Only this: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... rd#p643586

Nothing more.

[catweazel]

Just wait a while; and let other trend-obsessed idiots show you where your money is best spent.

Logical fallacy of argumentum ad antiquitatem