Ubuntu 9.10 on SSD
Productivity Sauce
I've been thinking about replacing the hard disk on my production notebook with a solid-state disk (SSD) for quite a while. So when I stumbled upon a good offer on Kingston 64GB SSDNow V series SSD I decided to take the plunge. 64GB is a far cry from the modest by today's standards 160GB hard disk on my notebook. But since I store all my files on a Bubba Two server, I rarely use more than 15-20GB anyway. The Kingston 64GB SSDNow V series SSD model is available in several versions, including a so-called notebook kit. It's slightly more expensive than the disk itself, but it's well worth a few extra bucks. The notebook kit includes hard disk cloning software (which is, obviously, of no use on Linux) and a hard disk enclosure. The latter is a very handy addition, as you can use it to convert the replaced hard disk into an external USB drive. So I pulled the old hard disk out of the notebook, inserted it into the enclosure, and moved files and profiles to the freshly installed SSD. The entire procedure of installing the SSD and moving the files took no longer than half an hour.
While I was hoping to get a slight speed boost, my expectations weren't very high: the Kingston V-series SSD is designed for the consumer market and the disk offers relatively modest read/write speeds. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when the Ubuntu 9.10's installer zoomed through the installation process in about 10 minutes -- almost twice as fast as with the old hard disk. And I was completely blown away by how fast my notebook booted into Ubuntu 9.10 -- it took about 10-15 seconds. Still skeptical, I launched OpenOffice.org. Yep, it started noticeably faster than before. I haven't done any scientific measurements, but I can say that switching to the SSD disk has had a more significant impact on the system's performance than doubling the amount of RAM.
So if you are considering replacing the conventional hard disk on your machine with an SSD, I say go for it. Before you make the move, though, you might want to do some research to find the SSD model that fits your needs and budget.
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Ubuntu on SSD
There are various blog posts and tutorials out there for fine tuning SSD performance, primarily by reducing swappiness, and aligning SSD memory block size to "cylinder" boundaries. In my experience, they offer modest performance improvemenst, on the order of 5-10% -- hardly worth the effort.
There have been a flurry of articles/posts since mid-November on further speed improvements from a ~200 line kernel patch, OR, a few very small modifications. For example: http://www.webupd8.org/2010...to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html
This works!
Thanks to the cumulative effect of all these changes, my little netbook is now faster at most day-to-day tasks than my desktop iMac.
need help !
The SSD is in its USB box, i've got somme dmesg errors and somes stuff with lsusb
Some help ?
dmesg :
usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
[947418.386910] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[947418.391368] scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[947418.391955] usb-storage: device found at 4
[947418.391970] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[947423.389383] usb-storage: device scan complete
[947423.390065] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access PI-291 FCR-HS2SATA 1.04 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[947423.392415] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[947423.413366] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
[947423.417578] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[947423.417591] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[947423.417599] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[947423.424486] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[947423.424506] sdc:
[947423.429620] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[947423.429636] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current]
[947423.429650] Info fld=0x0
[947423.429656] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Logical block address out of range
[947423.429670] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 0
[947423.429682] __ratelimit: 22 callbacks suppressed
[947423.429690] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0
[947423.431751] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[947423.431768] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current]
[947423.431782] Info fld=0x0
[947423.431788] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Logical block address out of range
[947423.431802] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 0
[947423.431817] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0
[947423.437488] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[947423.437504] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current]
[947423.437519] Info fld=0x0
.......
lsusb => (cf Initio)
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 13fd:1840 Initio Corporation
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0bda:0158 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Stroage Device
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Any idea? I'll appreciate.
Access times vs throughput
SSD's have ridiculously low access times, which speeds everything up significantly.
Even if they don't have a very high throughput.
btrfs
Power consumption
If your aim is power saving with speed secondary, then get 40G drive.
And you may say "Well, it takes the same number of cycles to write a 3 GB file no matter what the speed, so the same energy is drained from the battery" . This is true, but the 40G also has lower idle power consumption, simply due to less memory to leak power in the idle state.
Get over the anxiety
Furthermore, what I did later was to replace the Ubuntu with Fedora 11, in the process wiping out the wasted 5GB of wasted rescue partition that Dell sent it with. So really, Ubuntu did quite fine with the 11GB it had to work with. I am not seeing any issues with boot or shutdown times.
testing speeds
Mounting SSD drives
I have a 16GB SSD on my Dell Mini-9 netbook, and set this option when I installed UNR.
SSD
SSD's rock
I installed Linux and the Boot loader to the SSD and use my old 500gb magnetic drive as my my home drive.
It boots really, really fast.
I should have only bought a 32gb drive though instead of the big expensive one I bought.
What about battery life?
TIA
SSD
Tweaking