I am lazy so...SSD users, please reply

[tek_heretik]

Lazy as in hours of 'googling', lol.

I want to migrate (to an SSD drive) and stay with 12.04 LTS, so far I know the drive should support TRIM and kernel 3.9.x supports SSD caching. So the caching is not a big deal. Any thoughts? Does an SSD install have an MBR for a boot loader?

[oshunluvr]

AFAIK, any SSD will behave just exactly like any ole' hard drive. If you need MBR or GPT just format it that way.

I believe "SSD caching" refers to hybrid drives which are basically an SSD with a hard drive working as one to increase performance. If you are buying an SSD to boot to and run from, this is not what you'll be doing.

As far as "trim" goes, most modern (if not all made in the last couple years) support trim. However, IMO you don't want to mount the filesystem with trim enabled because it lowers performance and increases wear. Rather, run trim manually once in awhile or set it up in a cron job. Some of the SSD makers recommend running trim only once every six months. I usually run trim just before and after a new install or some other major change to the state of the files on my drive. I guess if you have a real small SSD and it's near full, you might need to run trim more often.

[oshunluvr]

Another note on trim: Some drives have "garbage collection" auto-enabled by default at the factory. This function, while not as efficient as trim, does the same thing as the trim function. Point being, if the drive you buy has this feature, you need not run trim at all.

I use a Samsung Pro 840 on my desktop as my primary drive. It's not the cheapest, but rates as the fastest one currently available in the 2.5" sata III format.

Besides, we're buying SSDs for the speed aren't we?

[tek_heretik]

Hmm, thanks for your input, sounds like a lot more headaches than it's worth. I have a fast working system now, the migration would mean backups galore, etc, etc. SSDs appear to have wear issues, which I actually suspected they might even before they became cheaper and popular, I've had very little wear issues with mechanical drives.

[Snowhog]

Even though the read/write life of SSDs has improved greatly, the principle benefit over traditional mechanical HDDs is 'speed', followed by size and weight. But, as you pointed out, mechanical HDDs have also come a long way, and are (now) extremely reliable, have long lives, and are also fast.

[oshunluvr]

Hmm, thanks for your input, sounds like a lot more headaches than it's worth. I have a fast working system now, the migration would mean backups galore, etc, etc. SSDs appear to have wear issues, which I actually suspected they might even before they became cheaper and popular, I've had very little wear issues with mechanical drives.

I'm sorry to say I cannot agree with anything you've stated here. I suppose how much an SSD is worth to you depends on your personal desires. For me, it's all about speed. I have a multiboot system with nested GRUB menus and I can go from power off to desktop in less than 30 seconds. Basic hdparm testing shows a disk read speed twice my best hard drive (WD 2TB Black Enterprise model).

According to some independent testing I've read, the life expectancy of my Samsung 840 PRO 256GB drive at a use level of 10GB writes per day is 70+ years. I don't write that much data daily, so I think the idea that it's going to wear out before it's no longer useful is false. This idea is based on the earliest models of SSDs and simply doesn't apply to modern drives. On a test bench at XtremeSystems sits a Samsung 840 PRO 256GB model currently still working after 6000+ TB (that's TERA-bytes) and it's expected life according to Samsung was 828TB. I think we can safely put the "it will wear out too fast" idea to bed.

It is similar to the early plasma TVs. People were convinced that you would only get 3 years out of one. The trouble was those ideas came from 24/7 usage, not real-world usage. My 10 year old plasma still has a better picture than any LED TV I've seen excepting the very highest end models.

Some other benefits to SSDs: Less power consumption, less heat, less noise, less likely to be physically damaged due to a strike or being dropped, 2 can be installed in the space of a single 3.5 hard drive, etc. The only downsides are size and price per MB.

As far as being a headache, I can't see how that applies either. They work the same as a regular hard drive. I guess you were referring to the migration phase of adopting an SSD? In that case, yes. Still, I can be done easily enough. In my case, I just waited for the new Kubuntu release. Since I usually do a fresh install, I started with 12.10 on the new SSD and left 12.04 on the hard drive as a backup OS.

[tek_heretik]

It turns out I am a major LIAR, lol, I went in to the computer store for a new case and ONE mechanical storage drive (the old one is flaking out) and came out with 2 extra drives, a pair of 120GB Intel 520 series SSDs, now I will be installing 12.04 from scratch on the pair SSDs in a RAID 0 configmurrrration, lol. I'll come back here to post the results, either way, I don't forsee any problems, just a lot of work.

@oshunluvr...headache = copy saved files from old storage drive to new, move ALL the parts to the new case, install 12.04, update, etc etc etc, basically lots of work = headache, I might sound whiney about all this but deep down, I am salivating, heh.

[oshunluvr]

I know what you mean. For me it's usually dragging the case out and pulling the panels off, unwinding all the cables and water lines, snipping all the zip-ties, and so on...

BUT when you're done - NEW TOYS!

[tek_heretik]

Hmmm, I have interesting news, the installer would crash (the old 12.04 disk) unless I put the 'storage drive' on port 0, giving the installer the 'sda' it wants, the two SSDs are RAIDed on port 1 and 2 but NOT the storage drive, this is a similar setup when I had the 4x320GB HDDs as the RAID 0, I am suspecting fstab or grub are written to sda but the SSDs are working as the RAID, I will install the disk utility and run the read benchmark, see what gives, mind you, the controller is SATA 2.0 (3.0 in the next upgrade), theoretically I should get read speeds of 600GB/s at least, stay tuned.

[tek_heretik]

See bench screenshot...

[SteveRiley]

As far as "trim" goes, most modern (if not all made in the last couple years) support trim. However, IMO you don't want to mount the filesystem with trim enabled because it lowers performance and increases wear.

Maybe on deletes, but the evidence is, as a commenter wrote, gathered "phoronixishly": https://patrick-nagel.net/blog/archives/337

Then again, some pretty convincing arguments against using TRIM with modern SSDs: http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40866.html

I am gonna disable it on my laptop now and see how she goes.

[dmeyer]

I'm sorry to say I cannot agree with anything you've stated here. I suppose how much an SSD is worth to you depends on your personal desires. For me, it's all about speed. I have a multiboot system with nested GRUB menus and I can go from power off to desktop in less than 30 seconds. Basic hdparm testing shows a disk read speed twice my best hard drive (WD 2TB Black Enterprise model).

According to some independent testing I've read, the life expectancy of my Samsung 840 PRO 256GB drive at a use level of 10GB writes per day is 70+ years. I don't write that much data daily, so I think the idea that it's going to wear out before it's no longer useful is false. This idea is based on the earliest models of SSDs and simply doesn't apply to modern drives. On a test bench at XtremeSystems sits a Samsung 840 PRO 256GB model currently still working after 6000+ TB (that's TERA-bytes) and it's expected life according to Samsung was 828TB. I think we can safely put the "it will wear out too fast" idea to bed.

It is similar to the early plasma TVs. People were convinced that you would only get 3 years out of one. The trouble was those ideas came from 24/7 usage, not real-world usage. My 10 year old plasma still has a better picture than any LED TV I've seen excepting the very highest end models.

Some other benefits to SSDs: Less power consumption, less heat, less noise, less likely to be physically damaged due to a strike or being dropped, 2 can be installed in the space of a single 3.5 hard drive, etc. The only downsides are size and price per MB.

As far as being a headache, I can't see how that applies either. They work the same as a regular hard drive. I guess you were referring to the migration phase of adopting an SSD? In that case, yes. Still, I can be done easily enough. In my case, I just waited for the new Kubuntu release. Since I usually do a fresh install, I started with 12.10 on the new SSD and left 12.04 on the hard drive as a backup OS.

To affirm this viewpoint and somewhat disarm those who believe wear is a serious issue on SSDs I'll provide some fairly anecdotal evidence. Friend had a used Corsair Force GT (I have the same one) and after a year he replaced it with newer Intel ones (Intel make the best SSDs on the market by a large margin) and wanted to clear it before selling it. Now the Corsair Force GT runs on Sandforce controllers which are notoriously bad on the drives. He was a little paranoid about wiping the drive and because securely deleting files off a SSD and flash memory generally isn't well studied we cam eup with a simple solution: write 1's the 0's and repeat a few times. Boot a live disc, set up some scripts and we wrote 1's followed by 0's for a few days straight on his 180GB drive. Considering these were raw operations, we were getting 450+ MB/s comfortably. Realistically we must have written at least a couple hundred TBs to that drive.

Cleaning done and doing some benchmarks and we found performance to have remained nearly the same. It was degraded but it was still 400MB/s + fast read and write. Now note, the one time where you might actually run into issues is with those puny 10GB or 20GB SSDs. Wear levelling on them is terrible and many SSD manufactures actually over provision flash storage and use it for wear leveling. So honestly, with anything over 120GB, you will never run into wear issues and the SSD will probably last a decade plus with daily, heavy usage.

Now if we were talking server side stuff, using anything other than SLC would be dumb.

[oshunluvr]

I am gonna disable it on my laptop now and see how she goes.

Depends a lot on the model and manufacturer, but most all do garbage collection independently. Samsung drives automatically invoke trim when idle for a long period. Corsair has something they're marketing as "advanced garbage collection" whatever that is.

[oshunluvr]

...Intel make the best SSDs on the market by a large margin...

While I appreciate your real-world experience with SSD longevity, could you please explain the logic underlying the above conclusion? By any measure I can come up with (or anyone else on the 'net I've seen so far) Intel drives are middle-of-the-road. Again, considering real-world uses: Which areas does Intel excel in? Speed? Cost per megabyte? Reliability?

I've yet to read any review or comparison where Intel came out on top in any category. The 4 year-old X-25 is slower than a platter drive at Sequential Write Performance, which is probably why they switched to Sandforce controllers. Both Samsung and Plextor have lower return rates than Intel on the order of a decimal place. Most of the "short lists" for performance or cost don't include any Intel models because they're too slow and too expensive.

I submit the above opinion is in the same league as the SSD life expectancy opinion: Based wholly on out-dated information and Internet FUD.

[tek_heretik]

While I appreciate your real-world experience with SSD longevity, could you please explain the logic underlying the above conclusion? By any measure I can come up with (or anyone else on the 'net I've seen so far) Intel drives are middle-of-the-road. Again, considering real-world uses: Which areas does Intel excel in? Speed? Cost per megabyte? Reliability?

I've yet to read any review or comparison where Intel came out on top in any category. The 4 year-old X-25 is slower than a platter drive at Sequential Write Performance, which is probably why they switched to Sandforce controllers. Both Samsung and Plextor have lower return rates than Intel on the order of a decimal place. Most of the "short lists" for performance or cost don't include any Intel models because they're too slow and too expensive.

I submit the above opinion is in the same league as the SSD life expectancy opinion: Based wholly on out-dated information and Internet FUD.

They were out of KIngston Hyper X drives so I settled for a pair of Intels, which coincidentally have the Sandforce controllers. Trust me, if they 'kahck' before their touted 5 year warranty, I will be showing up at their door, lol.

http://ark.intel.com/products/66248