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Re: Installing Debian on an SSD



Grześ Andruszkiewicz,  8.01.2013:
> 
> Does the Debian installer work out of the box for SSDs? I.e. I heard
> that you need to align the partitions to 32bit virtual clusters (is it
> actually true?). Are there any other things I need to take into
> account while installing Debian on SSD?
> 
> I bought the Samsung 840 250GB drive, if it makes any difference.

I think you should be okay installing without needing to do anything 
special, but if your computer is somewhat old and doesn't support 
SATA-2 speeds properly, then the wheezy installer doesn't let you 
force SATA-1 speed.  (Actually, this is probably not necessarily an SSD 
problem but I had it when I replaced a dead hard drive with an SSD.)

A few months ago I tried to install wheezy on a new 128GB Kingston SSD 
(bought Fall 2012) placed in a Sony Vaio VGN-NS140, bought Fall 2008.
The laptop theoretically supports SATA-2 but in practice it either 
had problems completing the install or, when it installed okay, quickly 
produced errors.  A guaranteed way to produce the errors right away was 
to measure speed using "hdparm -t /dev/sda" and this would also lead to
messages saying the link speed got dropped to 1.5Gbps (from 3Gbps).  
I think there was a problem with the motherboard trying to do the 
negotiation to determined what speed to use.  (I also read online about 
various laptops being crippled in their BIOS, limiting speed to 1.5G 
with there being an unofficial new BIOS for old Thinkpads to fix this.)
I also noticed later that the old hard drive had a jumper limiting 
operation to 1.5Gbps --- further evidence that the laptop manufacturers 
knew it might have a problem with higher speeds.

Unfortunately, the new SSD had no such jumper, as far as I could find 
out.  Fortunately, there's a kernel module parameter to force this: 
"libata.force=1.5G"  Alas, the new module loading system in Debian, 
kmod, which replaced module-init-tools, had a bug where you couldn't add 
this as a boot parameter.  (It gets parsed incorrectly so it doesn't 
work.)  I filed a bug report with a patch and it's been fixed upstream I 
think, but the fix has not made it back into Debian yet, so the wheezy 
installer won't recognize this boot parameter, AFAIK.  (I was able to 
complete my installation by modifying the initrd.gz of the installer to 
add the module parameter into a file.)

I doubt that many people will run into this issue but I wanted to put it 
out there for the unlucky souls that do. :)


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