SSD: which filesystem ?

xavier10 · Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2008 9:03 am Post subject: SSD: which filesystem ?

Hello,

I am considering an SSD based laptop, which I would install Gentoo on. I am wondering about support issues with SSD drives and Linux, and what decisions should be made.
In particular, what about the filesystems ? Are all filesystems ok for SSDs or are some preferable to others ?
How do they impact on wear of the SSD ?

Another thing I feel bad about is the swap: is it ok to swap on an SSD ? It seems to me this is a very bad decision due to the wear it may incur on the drive ?
For that reason, I am considering having no swap at all (and taking a decent amount of RAM to begin with, of course!).

massimo · Veteran Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 1226

[1] is a list of filesystems which you might want to consider. Since the EEE (small ASUS notebooks (not all) with SSD) community deals with similar questions you might want to browse their wikis and forums for opinions when running an OS (e.g. Linux) on a SSD.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#Flash_memory_.2F_solid_state_media_file_systems
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jesnow · l33t Joined: 26 Apr 2006 Posts: 895

The idea of the SSD is that it mimics, and can mimic a normal drive. I used ext3 and it worked fine, I get 123MB/sec throughput on my OCX ssd, as opposed to 80MB/sec on my samsung spinpoint 500GB sata drive. Some things are *much* faster though, and watching a silent emerge --sync is cool.

BUT I'd be curious too what the *optimum* fs would be.

drescherjm · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 3:44 pm Post subject:

Dagger · Retired Dev Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 765 Location: UK

I'm using 4xSSD (OCZ 128GB) in raid (1+0) array for postgresql database.

SSD aren't super fast in constant reads (only around ~250MB/sec) comparing to SAS array (~320MB/sec), but random access time is awesome (~2ns comparing to ~12ns)
I've got over 500m records in my database and very complicated queries take around ~10 min on SAS array and ~4 min on SSD.

I've been testing these drivers before I put them into the array, and they behave very similar to traditional drives. So generally speaking FS choice should depend on your needs.
I needed very fast random access, so I've chosen reiserfs. For general use ext or xfs should be good.

As drescherjm mentioned I wouldn't really care about lifetime because current generation of drives have longer lifetime than average laptop.
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pdw_hu · Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2009 5:25 pm Post subject:

I'll be getting an OCZ SSD for my laptop soon.

1. What do you think about Ext4 w/o journal? As it's a laptop the only data loss it might endure is near lock-ups, but sysrq can usually at least do a sync before rebooting it.

2. Move /usr/portage to the now freed HDD connected through USB (or FireWire).

3. Mount /var/tmp/portage into tmpfs.

4. Using noatime.

Any other tips?

OneOfOne · Guru Joined: 28 May 2003 Posts: 368

I'd recommend btrfs and mount with compress,ssd.

s4e8 · Guru Joined: 29 Jul 2006 Posts: 311

HeissFuss · Guru Joined: 11 Jan 2005 Posts: 414

btrfs will also eat your children. It's not very stable atm.

poly_poly-man · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:46 am Post subject:

ext2 or minix.
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d2_racing · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:53 am Post subject:

Ext2, in fact, you don't need to log the change.

ial · Posted: Sat Jul 18, 2009 12:44 am Post subject:

and what about Reiser4?
especially with its compression set on -- will the transparent compression move the burden away slightly from stressing the actual physical medium rather into operations located more within buffer/RAM ? I mean, files before a write are compressed significantly in fs buffer so afterall much less resulting data is physically engraved on SSD medium, and much fewer NAND cells are being worn, is that correct?

Need4Speed · Guru Joined: 06 Jun 2004 Posts: 497

ial · Posted: Sat Jul 18, 2009 2:39 pm Post subject:

Need4Speed · Guru Joined: 06 Jun 2004 Posts: 497

I just switched over to NILFS2 for my rootfs and fixed the partition alignment to 512k. It has a made HUGE difference in write speeds!

Random writes used to be glacial and would sometimes cause my system to hang for 10-30 seconds if a fsync were forced.

I am using a "Gen 1" Ridata SSD, so NILFS2 is probably helping me more than if you owned something like Intel's X25-m, which has "better" firmware that tries to hide the some of the SSD's characteristics from the filesystem. But I would still give NILFS2 a try if you want faster writes.

SSD Alignment Info:
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=373226&postcount=98
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energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

reiser4 is always the right answer - because of moving journal, compression, it is fast...
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Grubshka · Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 9:24 pm Post subject:

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

http://blogs.gentoo.org/nightmorph/2009/08/09/ssds-and-filesystems-part-2

ext4 is crap.
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wildhorse · Posted: Thu Aug 13, 2009 5:29 am Post subject:

Patriot Memory is backing its new Torqx M28 Series SSDs with a 10-year warranty. Is there any IDE (PATA/SATA) HDD available with anything close to a 10-year warranty?

About the pagefile, I say no pagefile is the best pagefile. Go for RAM.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

you need a 'pagefile' to be able to overcommit. Which you need if you really want to make use of your ram. It doesn't have to be big. Just be there.
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bassai · Posted: Thu Aug 13, 2009 2:37 pm Post subject:

I'm running ext4 on a SSD. This works fine for 3 months now.
I mounted /var/tmp/portage on tmpfs to compile in RAM.
Furthermore I increased my sync interval.

pdw_hu · Posted: Thu Aug 13, 2009 4:51 pm Post subject:

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