Pasi Oja-Nisula:
>
> So basically I have root and home partitions and another disk
> for backups of the whole thing.
>
> Now I got a SSD disk, about which I don't really know much.
> It's a 160 GB Intel, so it should be quite ok.
"Quite ok" is "quite an understatement". :) Intel SSDs are still one of
the best choices in the market, as far as I know.
> I'm thinking for copying the whole root to SSD. Maybe have
> 40 GB partition for root and the rest for home. I have more stuff on
> my home partition, but the active stuff is much less. So daily
> used files would be on SSD and archive stuff on hard disk.
Sounds reasonable. You definitely should boot from the SSD and have all
your applications there. /home is not that important, but as there are
some applications that like writing to your $HOME a lot (Firefox, for
example), having it on your SSD helps performance, too. If you are
working with version control systems (svn, git, hg etc.) then you should
definitely put your repositories / working copies on the SSD.
> Should I worry about the longetivity of SSD?
Generally: no. Intel guarantees five years of 20GB writes per day:
http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/mainstream-sata-ssd-datasheet.pdf
As long as you don't push HD movie files back and forth several times a
day, you don't need to worry. BTW, you can monitor lifetime writes with
recent kernels for each filesystem separately:
$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/manowar-home-crypt | grep ^Lifet
Lifetime writes: 785 GB
This filesystem is almost exactly 13 months old and I think more than
half of the writes on my system go there. The rest is mostly package
upgrades (I am running sid).
What you might want to find out is whether you have a G1 or G2 device.
G2 supports the TRIM command which helps the SSD to keep up performance.
Otherwise, performance degrades over time, especially when you keep the
SSD nearly full. I have read Intel recommends keeping some of the space
(5-10%) unpartitioned in order to avoid that effect.
> Maybe set noatime option,
Good idea, but I do that even on traditional hard disks anyway. I am
using 'nodelalloc' on my ext4, too.
> but do I really need to deal with other filesystems than ext3?
Not really. I converted my /home to ext4, just to try it out, but I
don't really know what I gain from that. ;-)
> What about /var/log and other places where there are lots of writing
> going on?
Just don't care. A regular desktop system should only write a few
megabytes of logs per day. You might want to read Ted T'so's blog
entries regarding SSDs:
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/category/computers/ssd/
J.
--
My clothes aren't just fashion. They're a lifestyle.
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