On 03/11/12 13:15, Terry Duell wrote:
Hello All, To expand on the subject line, I have inherited an Acer laptop on which I intend to install Linux. I think the machine spec should be OK for most linux distros...Core 2 duo T5600, 4GB, 120GB, Nvidia graphics. I am considering replacing the 120GB drive with an SSD, as it should smarten up the performance a tad and probably improve battery life a bit as well. Are there issues with running Linux from an SSD, that one needs to take into account when first installing/partitioning/whatever?
If you use a modern distro, it'll probably set everything up correctly, but things to watch out for: * set the 'discard' mount flag if you're using ext4, or 'ssd' on btrfs. (This tells the SSD when you've deleted stuff to free up space, and allows it to work a lot more efficiently) * set 'relatime' mount flag as well; it helps performance on everything, and in ssd cases, avoids a bunch of unnecessary writes. * Align partitions and filesystems on multiples of the ssd erase block.. or if you don't know what that is, just make sure it's a multiple of a number like 16k or something.. just not the default of 512. There are some tools around that'll benchmark different block sizes to work out the appropriate value, too. However note that this issue only seemed to be a *big* issue for earlier generation SSDs.. the current ones seem to cope pretty well regardless.