SSD filesystem recommendations?
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From: Carlie Coats on 20 Jan 2010 12:21 I'll shortly be getting a new office machine with a SSD for usr and home (with a big data RAID). The SSD's onboard ontroller will be Samsung. What recommendations do you have for filesystem: XFS? EXT3? 4? JFS? Why? (I'm not succeeding in googling comparative benchmarks...) -- Carlie Coats
From: Cat22 on 23 Jan 2010 12:09 Carlie Coats wrote: > > I'll shortly be getting a new office machine with a SSD for usr and > home (with a big data RAID). The SSD's onboard ontroller will be > Samsung. > > What recommendations do you have for filesystem: XFS? EXT3? 4? JFS? > Why? (I'm not succeeding in googling comparative benchmarks...) > > -- Carlie Coats > I dont know your partitioning scheme but i would also have /boot on the SSD. /boot only needs to be 100 meg or so, you'll never get above that unless you are a kernel hound. How much ram do you have? If you are an ordinary user, eg web, email, watch some video, couple of games - and you have 4 gig or so i'd forgo the swap - you can always add a swapfile later - I havnt had a swap partition in ages. And even doing kernel compiles i dont see a lot of awp usage - I got it up to 100 meg or so once but i was really messing with it, running everything i could at one time. I dont run a swap at all on my i7 system(6 Gig ram), it runs 8 copies of set(a)home 24-7 + 1 cuda app, does kernel compiles, various other tasks, never has a problem. Not that swap is going to hurt an SSD - it wont - its just a waste of space. Anyway --- For a FS I would use ext3, i tried ext4 awhile back on a regular HD and when I ran into a problem the tools to fix it were not available on the rescue DVD. That aside - i too am running an SSD - i use a std ext3 and just treated it like an ordinary HDD, it is fast and works fine. You can get into things like aligning the partitions and using various io schedulers but I didnt bother with those, i want to see how this works out in the long run - will i have a short SSD life? reduced performance after awhile? Well, I'll find out. One thing i would recommend tho, is before you start installing or using the drive, do a secure erase to completely Zero it out. Here's how: (I assume the SSD is /dev/sdb) Boot to runlevel 3 (or 1) from another disk (sda) with the SSD as the 2nd drive (SDB). log in as root. run this: NOTE: This permanently erases all data on the drive, no recovery is possible at all - EVER Be 110% sure you have the right drive and you want to erase it! hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass admin /dev/sdb hdparm --user-master u --security-erase admin /dev/sdb after about 1 or 2 minutes the prompt will re-appear thats it! shutdown (run halt cmd) and remove sda (I always install with only the target drive hooked up - prevents stupid mistakes) [In that light, you might be able to do the secure erase from an install DVD, not sure if hdparm is in there or not, but that would let you do the procedure with just the SSD hooked up.] power back up and install 2010 on your SSD One thing i want to mention - no matter how fast the disk system is, there is a point of diminishing returns. I'm real happy with my SSD's performance, its fast enough to "keep up". The system is snappy and a pleasure to use, if i doubled the disk throughput now, i doubt i would see any difference in the feel of things. More cores, faster memory/cpu, more cpu -> memory bandwidth - that would help, but i think the real bottleneck right now is software - the industry needs to work on the algorithms and increase parallelism where possible, we spend a lot of "wait time" because of dumb algorithms or poor approaches to the particular task. Cat22
From: David W. Hodgins on 23 Jan 2010 13:38 On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:09:30 -0500, Cat22 <cat22(a)invalid.org> wrote: > For a FS I would use ext3, i tried ext4 awhile back on a regular HD and when > I ran into a problem the tools to fix it were not available on the rescue DVD. For the Mandriva install dvd, get to a command line (as root) and run "modprobe ext4". Regards, Dave Hodgins -- Change nomail.afraid.org to ody.ca to reply by email. (nomail.afraid.org has been set up specifically for use in usenet. Feel free to use it yourself.)
From: Musaul Karim on 23 Jan 2010 18:33 If you're worried about picking a file system for best wear levelling, then I think most file systems should be fine as the controller abstracts the write operations to the actual flash memory. If you're wondering about the speed, then most perform pretty well. Here's a benchmark where they're all neck and neck except a few cases where XFS comes top by a small margin, and a smaller number of cases where EXT4 pulls ahead by a bit... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_x25e_filesystems On Jan 20, 5:21 pm, Carlie Coats <car...(a)jyarborough.com> wrote: > I'll shortly be getting a new office machine with a SSD for usr and > home (with a big data RAID). The SSD's onboard ontroller will be > Samsung. > > What recommendations do you have for filesystem: XFS? EXT3? 4? JFS? > Why? (I'm not succeeding in googling comparative benchmarks...) > > -- Carlie Coats
From: J G Miller on 24 Jan 2010 09:21
On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 15:33:34 -0800, Musaul Karim wrote: > Here's a benchmark where they're all neck and neck except a few cases > where XFS comes top by a small margin, and a smaller number of cases > where EXT4 pulls ahead by a bit... It is interesting to note that it has taken so long for the ext file system development to finally match the speeds of the long established XFS file system. |