On May 23, 2012, at 4:00 PM, Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> I decided to explore using an ssd drive. I purchased a 40G Intel SSD
> and so far it works well with SVN-20120514.
>
> I created a GPT partition table with a 10G partition using parted and
> formatted as ext4.
>
> The performance seems to be good. htparm gives me about 230 GB/s which
> is more than twice as fast as my usual drives that give about 105 GB/s.
>
> My question is how to best use the new drive in BLFS. I thought of /opt
> and /usr. I don't think /home would be very good and of course I could
> try to mount it as /mnt/lfs and use it as /.
>
> What would you try first?
I would definitely avoid using it to build; that's probably what you
meant when you said to avoid /home. It's faster (esp. for testing)
to use an in-memory filesystem if you find that your FS is a
bottleneck (which I haven't found).
Booting is awesome with SSDs. So is having /bin and /usr on them.
Any setting where you spend oodles of time seeking is where you'll
see the most benefit with SSDs. Yes, sustained reads are faster,
(though hdparm is pretty bad at measuring that; try using something
more purpose-built like iozone or bonnie++), but it's all about the
IOPS with SSDs.
I've used an SSD to store images of my host OS and the LFS downloads.
My host OS install blazes when I configure it to install from a
"hard drive partition" (which sits on the SSD) rather than from the CD.
I would also make sure to use noatime and make sure that I don't put
/var on it. Maybe relatime is okay, but I'd rather have data on the
SSD, and avoid atime writes at all. Obviously, don't put swap on it.
Q
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