initialize Corsair Force series 3 SSD

jancici · Last edited by jancici on Mon Sep 26, 2011 12:34 pm; edited 1 time in total

hi, I did buy this SSD : Corsair Force series 3 60GB
I did read few articles abut align partition and trying to setup my new drive ...

but I am not able to find what is :
- what is erase block size? is it 512KiB?
- what is block size? is it 4KiB?

I think that block size is 4kiB but I am not sure about erase block size.
thanks for your tips for size of erase block.

I am reading this article
http://www.nuclex.org/blog/personal/80-aligning-an-ssd-on-linux%22
and trying to follow Markus steps.

I want to crate boot partition with 32MiB size and root one with rest of size.
Well, let;s assume that 512KB is size of erase block.

here is output from fdisk with cylinder units

jancici · Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 12:33 pm Post subject:

next step is creating FS

I decided for EXT4. I am not sure about parameters stride=32,stripe-width=32.

And my question is, how those parameters are connected with single HDD / SDD?
I am not using any kind of raid. What is chunk size in my case? and how to calculate stride and stripe-width?

thanks

I did run this for BOOT partition

HeissFuss · Guru Joined: 11 Jan 2005 Posts: 414

You've got the main thing right. Fdisk set your block alignment to 1MB offset, so your partitions are aligned.

As far as EXT4 stride/stripe settings, I really doubt they'll make much difference. Assuming you have a 512K erase block size though, you'd want stride=1024, and then don't bother with stripe-width (if you had to set it to something, you'd set it to 1.)

You can test you partition with dd (assuming the main thing you're concerned with is write speed.)

Since you have a sandforce, you'll need to test with something random (zero would be way too fast.)

This creates a random 1GB file called /testfile.dd

jancici · Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2011 10:14 am Post subject:

thanks

I did that test with 1GB file of random content

HeissFuss · Guru Joined: 11 Jan 2005 Posts: 414

Sequential write is about the only metric magnetic drives still come close to SSDs on.

I couldn't find stats on sequential incompressible write speed for your 60GB drive, but it looks like the 120 can do ~138MB/s. The 60 is probably a bit slower than that, depending on how they designed it.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/400

Are you using SATA 6, and if so, what type of controller? Are you using AHCI or legacy mode?

Can you repeat the test with the initial file created from /dev/zero instead of /dev/urandom?

jancici · Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2011 1:54 pm Post subject:

thanks for answers and infos

creating ZERO file

PM17E5 · Apprentice Joined: 10 Feb 2009 Posts: 241

Thank you, I found this thread to be very informative because I have a drive with the same exact specifications and I was implementing the same exact partition scheme and file system on my system. What are your preferred fstab options for root and boot? I'm assuming you have noatime and discard set in it? I was trying to make sense of the various alignment methods online but there are so many different ways to go about it, it looked like one could read for a good day or two and still find a differing opinion on how to do it right.

jancici · Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2012 8:32 am Post subject:

meanwhile I did change ext4 to btrfs
here is fstab

PM17E5 · Apprentice Joined: 10 Feb 2009 Posts: 241

How is btrfs working out for you? I heard it doesn't have any recovery or repair software and that it's unstable? Is there a noticeable difference in performance?