Re: [gentoo-user] more tripleE SSD fs controversy
Maxim Wexler wrote: Hi group, More and more I'm coming across references to cheap ssds in the EEEs. http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters/eeepc/best-filesystem-choice-for-the-eeepc/ recommends ext2. Which I found surprising, but the guy seems knowlegeable. Here is Theodore T'so: # mke2fs -t ext4 -E stripe-width=32,resize=500G /dev/ssd/root In his discussion of formatting the pricy Intel product. He doesn't say if this would be worthwhile for the cheap type. hohndel doesn't specify any options, just says, use ext2. What does the group recommend? Maxim Theodore T'so is playing with Intel SSDs if I recall correctly, which are in a totally different class to what you get in EEEs, like they cost about the same as the EEE does. His recommendations are based on a SSD with good built in wear leveling, and fast read/write performance. ext2 is normally recommended for cheap SSDs such as are in the EEE because it is a non-journalled FS, which is kind of important when your disk has severely limited write life. At least, that is my understanding of the situation RobbieAB
Re: [gentoo-user] more tripleE SSD fs controversy
ext2 is normally recommended for cheap SSDs such as are in the EEE because it is a non-journalled FS, which is kind of important when your disk has severely limited write life. It's not just the write life I'm worried about; it's booting into a system whose partitions no longer line up, as recently happened following an attempt to emerge mozilla-firefox. mw
Re: [gentoo-user] more tripleE SSD fs controversy
On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 02:41:33PM -0600, Maxim Wexler wrote hohndel doesn't specify any options, just says, use ext2. What does the group recommend? This is in the context of cheap SSD diask drives. They behave differently from hard disks, so everything you know is wrong if you try stuff that applies to harddrives. You want to minimize the number of writes to disk as much as possible, for 2 reasons... 1) Cheap SSD disk drives are atrociously slow. The fewer unnecessary writes, the more responsive the machine will be. 2) Cheap SSD disk drives are liable to wear out after a lot of writes. Fewer writes means a longer lifetime for the drive. This brings us to the question of exactly how to minimize writes. I suggest ext2fs with the async and nodiratime and noatime options. * journalling file systems pound away continuously at the journal file. As Martha Stewart would say... that is not a good thing for cheap SSD drives * async is the default, but it doesn't hurt to list it. It says not to do a separate write for each request, but to do writes in bigger, and less frequent, batches. The mount (8) manpage has this to say about sync... In case of media with limited number of write cycles (e.g. some flash drives) sync may cause life-cycle shortening. * nodiratime says not to update directory inodes when accessed. You do need to specify it, because it is not the default * noatime says not to update file inodes when accessed. You do need to specify it, because it is not the default. I don't know if noatime implies nodiratime, but I'd play it safe and specify both. -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org
[gentoo-user] more tripleE SSD fs controversy
Hi group, More and more I'm coming across references to cheap ssds in the EEEs. http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters/eeepc/best-filesystem-choice-for-the-eeepc/ recommends ext2. Which I found surprising, but the guy seems knowlegeable. Here is Theodore T'so: # mke2fs -t ext4 -E stripe-width=32,resize=500G /dev/ssd/root In his discussion of formatting the pricy Intel product. He doesn't say if this would be worthwhile for the cheap type. hohndel doesn't specify any options, just says, use ext2. What does the group recommend? Maxim
