Slashdot Mirror
Optimizing Linux Systems For Solid State Disks
tytso writes "I've recently started exploring ways of configuring Solid State Disks (SSDs) so they work most efficiently in Linux. In particular, Intel's new 80GB X25-M, which has fallen down to a street price of around $400 and thus within my toy budget. It turns out that the Linux Storage Stack isn't set up well to align partitions and filesystems for use with SSD's, RAID systems, and 4k sector disks. There are also some interesting configuration and tuning that we need to do to avoid potential fragmentation problems with the current generation of Intel SSDs. I've figured out ways of addressing some of these issues, but it's clear that more work is needed to make this easy for mere mortals to efficiently use next generation storage devices with Linux."
> Vista has already started working around this problem, since it uses a default partitioning geometry of 240 heads and 63 sectors/track. This results in a cylinder boundary which is divisible by 8, and so the partitions (with the exception of the first, which is still misaligned unless you play some additional tricks) are 4k aligned. So this is one place where Vista is ahead of Linuxâ¦.
Although the technology it is used in is repugnant, NTFS has always been the One True Filesystem. It descended from DIGITAL's ODS2 (On Disk Structure 2) which traces back to the original Five Models (PDP 1, 8, 10, 11 and 12). You see, ODS was written by passionate people with degrees and rich personal lives in Massachusetts who sang and danced before the fall of humanity to the indignant Gates series who assimilated their young wherever possible and worked them into early graves during his epic battle with the Steves before the UNIX enemy remerged after a 25 year sleep and nuked the United States, draining all of its technological secrets to the other side of the world. Gates, realizing what he's done, now travels the universe seeking to rebuild his legacy by purifying humanity while the Steve series attempts to rebuild itself. Some of the original Five are still around, left to logon to Slashdot and witness what's left of the shadow of humanity still in the game as they struggle blindly around in epic circles indulging new and different ways to steal music, art and technology to make up for their lack of creativity long ago bred out of them by the Gates series.