I'm considering SSD upgrades to my desktop and/or laptop, likely starting with my desktop.
I generally need a decent capacity on my desktop so that will be traditional storage, but I want the boot device to be SSD.
I know almost nothing about SSD so I'd like some advice.
I'm looking at (eg) Crucial MX100 SATA 512GB (~£140), but I could go up to Samsung Evo 850 for an extra £40. (Or maybe 256GB would be enough and I'd benefit more from spending my money upgrading multiple machines?)
What I want to achieve is (a) O/S boots and runs from SSH, so loading apps etc is faster, (b) any swap space is on SSD, (c) and temp space (including browser caches etc) is on SSD, and (d) (it would be nice if) anything else on slower storage could be cached on SSD.[1]
Getting fast storage is great if my hardware can make good use of it. So how do I find out whether my Linux boxen will support transfer rates that make SSD worthwhile? If my motherboard can only give me 3Gbps, is it fair to assume that I will still see major improvements over traditional hard disks even if not the full benefit of the SSD?
What other things should I know? Any tips?
[1] My typical usage seems to be Firefox or Chrome open with 100+ tabs, maybe a couple of VirtualBox VMs open, maybe a few LibreOffice docs open.
On 4 March 2015 at 12:53, Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk wrote:
So how do I find out whether my Linux boxen will support transfer rates that make SSD worthwhile?
I have indirectly answered this. According to "sudo dmidecode -t 2" I have an "A55M-P33" motherboadr which Google tells me has 6 SATAII ports, which means I have 3Gbps only.
However I can presumably add a 6Gbps SATA card; if so, what do I need to look out for?
It makes the following question more pertinent:
If my motherboard can only give me 3Gbps, is it fair to assume that I will still see major improvements over traditional hard disks even if not the full benefit of the SSD?
... especially when it comes to laptops where I can't upgrade the SATA capability.
On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 12:53:23PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
I'm considering SSD upgrades to my desktop and/or laptop, likely starting with my desktop.
I generally need a decent capacity on my desktop so that will be traditional storage, but I want the boot device to be SSD.
I know almost nothing about SSD so I'd like some advice.
I'm looking at (eg) Crucial MX100 SATA 512GB (~£140), but I could go up to Samsung Evo 850 for an extra £40. (Or maybe 256GB would be enough and I'd benefit more from spending my money upgrading multiple machines?)
I'm using a 128Gb Crucial MX100 for my desktop Ubuntu Linux machine, it has certainly speeded up the boot time though that wasn't really the point for me as it stays turned on all the time.
I have a 1Tb ordinary disk mounted on /home and the 128Gb SSD does everything else, very simple to set up. The 128Gb SSD is still showing only 7% use.
The ordinary hard disk rarely rattles, the only thing that seems to make it do anything is Firefox browsing because the cache is kept in /home/chris/.mozilla. I guess I could move that too but it hardly seems worth it.
On 4 March 2015 at 13:25, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
The ordinary hard disk rarely rattles, the only thing that seems to make it do anything is Firefox browsing because the cache is kept in /home/chris/.mozilla. I guess I could move that too but it hardly seems worth it.
Interesting that you have everything except your home directory on the SSD card; for me the most often accessed files (other than executable binaries, libs, etc) are in my home directory.
I have ordered the Crucial 500GB SSD. I would like opinion on whether it's worth buying a PCIe SATA card to go with it?
On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 03:06:15PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 4 March 2015 at 13:25, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
The ordinary hard disk rarely rattles, the only thing that seems to make it do anything is Firefox browsing because the cache is kept in /home/chris/.mozilla. I guess I could move that too but it hardly seems worth it.
Interesting that you have everything except your home directory on the SSD card; for me the most often accessed files (other than executable binaries, libs, etc) are in my home directory.
Yes, but what else is there? There's a few bits and pieces like /boot and /run but they're so small they're not worth bothering about (i.e. leave them on the SSD). In reality the only times I read/write my home directory are:- Reading mail and news, speed not hugely important as I can't read at a magabyte a minute.
Program development, yes I could probably speed up compiles a bit by moving to SSD but I don't use a compiler often enough to worry.
Managing sound and photo files, too large to fit on my SSD now.
... and as I said, Firefox cache files.
I have ordered the Crucial 500GB SSD. I would like opinion on whether it's worth buying a PCIe SATA card to go with it?
No idea, though my gut feeling is that all the extra argy-barge probably isn't worth it.
** Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk [2015-03-04 12:54]:
I'm considering SSD upgrades to my desktop and/or laptop, likely starting with my desktop.
I generally need a decent capacity on my desktop so that will be traditional storage, but I want the boot device to be SSD.
I know almost nothing about SSD so I'd like some advice.
I'm looking at (eg) Crucial MX100 SATA 512GB (~£140), but I could go up to Samsung Evo 850 for an extra £40. (Or maybe 256GB would be enough and I'd benefit more from spending my money upgrading multiple machines?)
What I want to achieve is (a) O/S boots and runs from SSH, so loading apps etc is faster, (b) any swap space is on SSD, (c) and temp space (including browser caches etc) is on SSD, and (d) (it would be nice if) anything else on slower storage could be cached on SSD.[1]
Getting fast storage is great if my hardware can make good use of it. So how do I find out whether my Linux boxen will support transfer rates that make SSD worthwhile? If my motherboard can only give me 3Gbps, is it fair to assume that I will still see major improvements over traditional hard disks even if not the full benefit of the SSD?
What other things should I know? Any tips?
[1] My typical usage seems to be Firefox or Chrome open with 100+ tabs, maybe a couple of VirtualBox VMs open, maybe a few LibreOffice docs open.
** end quote [Mark Rogers]
Have you thought about looking at the hybrid drives? There are some drives now that use SSD technology to provide a cache for the most used data from a standard HD within a single form factor. I've not looked into whether this is done at a driver level (in which case check for Linux support) or within the drive itself. I suspect the latter, but I'm not sure.
http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/Hard-Drive---SSD/subcat/Hybrid-&... http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/satahybrid...
On 4 March 2015 at 16:40, Paul Tansom paul@aptanet.com wrote:
Have you thought about looking at the hybrid drives?
I have tried these in the past and to be honest not really seen much difference compared to traditional drives, I'm not sure why. I figured I would have more luck if I decided what was on SSD and what wasn't, than relying on the drive to decide for me. I might well be wrong...
On 04/03/15 12:53, Mark Rogers wrote:
I'm considering SSD upgrades to my desktop and/or laptop, likely starting with my desktop.
I generally need a decent capacity on my desktop so that will be traditional storage, but I want the boot device to be SSD.
I know almost nothing about SSD so I'd like some advice.
I'm looking at (eg) Crucial MX100 SATA 512GB (~£140), but I could go up to Samsung Evo 850 for an extra £40. (Or maybe 256GB would be enough and I'd benefit more from spending my money upgrading multiple machines?)
What I want to achieve is (a) O/S boots and runs from SSH, so loading apps etc is faster, (b) any swap space is on SSD, (c) and temp space (including browser caches etc) is on SSD, and (d) (it would be nice if) anything else on slower storage could be cached on SSD.[1]
Getting fast storage is great if my hardware can make good use of it. So how do I find out whether my Linux boxen will support transfer rates that make SSD worthwhile? If my motherboard can only give me 3Gbps, is it fair to assume that I will still see major improvements over traditional hard disks even if not the full benefit of the SSD?
What other things should I know? Any tips?
[1] My typical usage seems to be Firefox or Chrome open with 100+ tabs, maybe a couple of VirtualBox VMs open, maybe a few LibreOffice docs open.
Swap space on SSD? Surely it's easier, quicker and faster to just shove more ram into the machine? RAM should be faster than SSD, and if you have enough of it, then swap space won't be used.
Cheers Steve
On 4 March 2015 at 20:28, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
Swap space on SSD? Surely it's easier, quicker and faster to just shove more ram into the machine? RAM should be faster than SSD, and if you have enough of it, then swap space won't be used.
Most motherboards max out at 16GB RAM and I always find the O/S still finds some use for swap even if there's RAM available. I figure that if SSD is there it makes sense that if the O/S is going to swap at all it should swap to whatever is closest to RAM in speed, which is SSD.
In an ideal world I'd have masses of RAM instead of SSD, but even then I'd want data written to disk in case of power failure, and loading apps etc still means pulling them from disk, so in that ideal world I'm going to want SSD as well. Given the limitations on expanding RAM I figure it's worth seeing how far I can get with SSD.
Either I'm going to see a huge performance increase or wonder why I bothered. I guess I'll know which soon enough!
On 05/03/15 00:12, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 4 March 2015 at 20:28, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
Swap space on SSD? Surely it's easier, quicker and faster to just shove more ram into the machine? RAM should be faster than SSD, and if you have enough of it, then swap space won't be used.
Most motherboards max out at 16GB RAM and I always find the O/S still finds some use for swap even if there's RAM available.
I'm *Very* surprised to hear this. It's not my experience.
I figure that if SSD is there it makes sense that if the O/S is going to swap at all it should swap to whatever is closest to RAM in speed, which is SSD.
You'd hope, but if you're saying that your O/S is using swap space when there's RAM free then I wouldn't bank on it! You know BTW that if you have multiple swap devices/files, you can set the priority of which gets used? I think you can do it with the swap or is it swapon command.
Incidentally, on my low-powered under-resourced craptop, lubuntu decided in its infinite wizdom to install compressed ram-based (pseudo-)swap space on "zram" drive. It seems to work well. That's higher priority than my actual swap partition, consequently the physical swap rarely gets used.
In an ideal world I'd have masses of RAM instead of SSD, but even then I'd want data written to disk in case of power failure, and loading apps etc still means pulling them from disk, so in that ideal world I'm going to want SSD as well. Given the limitations on expanding RAM I figure it's worth seeing how far I can get with SSD.
Either I'm going to see a huge performance increase or wonder why I bothered. I guess I'll know which soon enough!
I'm sure SSD will give you faster boot time and program loading time. It will work swap files/partitions faster than a regular HDD too. It'd be interesting to see comparisons of otherwise identical machines with/without more RAM or SSD, but I'm sure it'd be hard to manage a fair comparison. Let us know how fast things get.
Steve
On 5 March 2015 at 10:29, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 05/03/15 00:12, Mark Rogers wrote:
Most motherboards max out at 16GB RAM and I always find the O/S still finds some use for swap even if there's RAM available.
I'm *Very* surprised to hear this. It's not my experience.
The 16GB limit or the O/S swapping?
On the former, that probably indicates I use cheap motherboards :-)
On the latter, it might be the way I read the output from (eg) htop but I rarely see swap usage at zero, even on a clean boot before much RAM is in use.
You'd hope, but if you're saying that your O/S is using swap space when there's RAM free then I wouldn't bank on it! You know BTW that if you have multiple swap devices/files, you can set the priority of which gets used? I think you can do it with the swap or is it swapon command.
I would get rid of the disk based swap and only give it SSD swap to play with, limiting its choices somewhat!
Incidentally, on my low-powered under-resourced craptop, lubuntu decided in its infinite wizdom to install compressed ram-based (pseudo-)swap space on "zram" drive. It seems to work well. That's higher priority than my actual swap partition, consequently the physical swap rarely gets used.
Thanks, that might be worth a look. I'd like to see more use of memory and disk compression generally; both often bring performance gains.
I'm sure SSD will give you faster boot time and program loading time. It will work swap files/partitions faster than a regular HDD too. It'd be interesting to see comparisons of otherwise identical machines with/without more RAM or SSD, but I'm sure it'd be hard to manage a fair comparison. Let us know how fast things get.
Will do!
On 05/03/15 00:12, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 4 March 2015 at 20:28, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
Swap space on SSD? Surely it's easier, quicker and faster to just shove more ram into the machine? RAM should be faster than SSD, and if you have enough of it, then swap space won't be used.
Most motherboards max out at 16GB RAM and I always find the O/S still finds some use for swap even if there's RAM available. I figure that if SSD is there it makes sense that if the O/S is going to swap at all it should swap to whatever is closest to RAM in speed, which is SSD.
It's possible to control "swappiness" on Linux. This is certainly true for Gentoo and Ubuntu, and probably for all distros. The default setting is 60 out of 100 which is much too high for normal desktop use but ok for servers. For SSD's, it's silly.
# cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
The value will probably be 60
The way to control this is to edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add the value of vm.swappiness=1 to the file (and reboot). This will minimise swap dramatically. Note that you do need a lot of memory to do this!
I know SSDs are fast, but they also have a limited life for writes. In my opinion, therefore, they are unsuitable for transient data such as logs, swap files, and so on.
There are many guides on the net for maximising the life of an SSD in Linux (which is far easier than in Windows, BTW), and I recommend reading a few before you make any decisions.
Here is a really good one for starters:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd
Cheers, Laurie.
On 5 March 2015 at 10:59, Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com wrote:
It's possible to control "swappiness" on Linux. This is certainly true for Gentoo and Ubuntu, and probably for all distros. The default setting is 60 out of 100 which is much too high for normal desktop use but ok for servers. For SSD's, it's silly.
I have played with this in the past but not really been able to see a difference. I can't say I've done any serious analysis though.
I know SSDs are fast, but they also have a limited life for writes. In my opinion, therefore, they are unsuitable for transient data such as logs, swap files, and so on.
Everything I've read recently suggests that modern SSDs have sufficient life in them to outlive their usefulness before they wear out even in fairly heavy usage. SSDs get a bad rep here but it's not as if hard disks don't wear out too! As SSDs are solid state there's more potential for them to live forever if it weren't for the limited writes, but I wouldn't bank on a heavily used hard disk being any use mechanically in 10 years time even if technically the platters are still perfectly capable of being written to.
That said, any guides (such as the one you linked to) for maximising their life is appreciated. Also, it would be useful to know what the symptoms of this type of failure would be? Would the controller pick up errors or would it blindly write data unaware it couldn't get it back? Unlike a hard disk, I would have thought that when it starts to fail in this way your existing data is still pretty safe (unlike when a hard disk fails, for example)?
I did make a decision when I decided to go down this route that I wouldn't give the SSD "special treatment" by trying to keep certain data off it. If it fails in a couple of years that's a lesson learned (and learning lessons is part of the reason for doing this). If it fails before that I'll make use of the warranty!
As an aside, I have some virtual servers with Digital Ocean who use SSDs across the board and provide documentation for enabling swap files on the SSD. I am sure they're using higher grade SSDs that I have ordered but all the same that indicates that they don't see limited writes as a major issue any more.
I am very much a novice with SSD though so I really appreciate corrections.
OK, so I now have a 500GB SSD drive, capable of ~5Gbps but limited to 3Gbps by the SATA interface.
Has it made a difference? Too right it has! The PC has life that it never had before. To be fair I have also started with a fresh installation of Ubuntu (it was previously Kubuntu) but I have a new laptop running the same Ubuntu release which by comparison runs like a dog despite being much newer hardware.
My feeling is that multi-tasking is where it really lifts the performance: as soon as the old disk had one process needing data from one side of the disk and another needing data from the opposite side it was grinding to a halt, but the SSD is truly random access.
It's too early to justify upgrading the laptop as well but so far it's been way better than any other performance upgrade I've tried.
-
Chris Green -
Laurie Brown -
Mark Rogers -
Paul Tansom -
steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk