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Tweaking Solid State Drive Performance On Linux

Posted by timothy on from the like-a-movie-with-no-moving-parts dept.

perlow writes "While Solid State Drives are expensive and shouldn't be used exclusively for primary storage, they perform exceedingly well for things like MySQL databases, provided you tweak your kernel, BIOS, and filesystems accordingly. Here's a few tips to get excellent performance out of your new $500-$900 investment on a Linux system."

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Wait, what? by Briareos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He recommends disabling journalling and using RAID instead?

    So exactly how will a RAID make sure the filesystem metadata is still intact when I yank out the power cable for fun and no profit, as opposed to using a filesystem with a journal?

    Sheesh... that's just begging for an accident to happen.

    np: Yello - You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess (Orb Goes The Weasel Mix) (Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty (Disc 2))

    --

    "I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole

    1. Re:Wait, what? by schon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He also says that the 'noatime' mount option tells the kernel not to read the atime... noatime tells the kernel not to write atimes to the fs.

      sweet jebus, is there *anything* technically correct in that article?

  2. Partitioning by mickwd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm surprised I've heard very little about using Unix/Linux partitioning to get the best out of SSDs.

    Seems to me that the best use of an SSD on a normal system is to buy a smallish one (say 16GB) and use it for the read-mainly partitions: say /usr, /opt, maybe /lib.

    It would be good to get users' "dot" files in there too. Maybe create a /homedot on the SSD and symlink /home/myname/.example to /homedot/myname/.example.

    Even if this doesn't make your applications run much faster, the faster read and seek times are going to make the machine boot faster, load applications faster (especially including the desktop environments, if user directories like .kde and .gnome are on SSD) and compile code faster (with /usr/include, etc on SSD).