Luckily there are a lot of resources about optimizing your SSD in Linux.
Very helpful resources were:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives
http://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2012/01/11/linux-ssd-partition-alignment-tips/
I ended up doing the following:
- Partitioning the hard disk with gdisk, which helps me align the partitions
- Use Logical Volume Management (lvm)
- Using the --dataalignment option (see also void.gr link) for the physical volume
- Creating an ext4 partition on the logical volume with adjusted block size and stripe/stride-parameters
- Mounting the ext4 partition with noatime and discard options
- Using noop scheduler for the ssd's only (see script below)
- Mounting /var/tmp and /var/log in ramdisk
- Enable writeback (see script below)
- Make the "swappiness" as low as possible
- Use ionice to give XBMC priority over netatalk/crashplan when watching movies
This is not because of the SSD, but I moved one of my RAID-0 harddisks from S-ATA600 to S-ATA300 because I expect the SSD will use the higher throughput better but apparently this caused problems (stuttering in movies) when a computer was backing up and watching a movie at the same time..
To set the scheduler and writeback to the right disks I modified the rc.local-script I found on the ArchLinux wiki:
declare -ar SSDS=(
'ata-OCZ-AGILITY4_OCZ-xxxxx',
'ata-SAMSUNG_SSD_830_Series_xxxxx'
)
for SSD in "${SSDS[@]}" ; do
BY_ID=/dev/disk/by-id/$SSD
if [[ -e $BY_ID ]] ; then
DEV_NAME=`ls -l $BY_ID | awk '{ print $NF }' | sed -e 's/[/\.]//g'`
SCHED=/sys/block/$DEV_NAME/queue/scheduler
#scheduler
if [[ -w $SCHED ]] ; then
echo noop > $SCHED
fi
#writeback
hdparm -W1 /dev/$DEV_NAME
fi
done
I also used this opportunity to switch to UEFI and LVM. Especially the UEFI took a whole lot more than I expected. I will write an article about that later.
