Hey all-
I’ve just gotten a 250 GB Samsung SSD for my IBM/Lenovo T61 laptop and want to install openSuse 13.1.
What are the recommended FSTAB entries for our OS? What files should I put in tmpfs other than /tmp?
I’d like to do this right and would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance…
Recommend you have a look at my Presentation Slidedeck on this topic
https://sites.google.com/site/4techsecrets/slide-presentations-30min
Nearly everything in the slide deck is still relevant for openSUSE 12.1, 12.2. 12.3, 13.1 (as of this writing).
The only thing that has changed is whether to implement the nVidia driver (if you even have one).
In a nutshell, the slide deck descrbes what I consider the most important changes which should be made. There are a number of new optimizations in the referenced Arch Wiki since I created the presentation, but those optimiztions have minimal effect compared to the recommendations in my slide deck.
As for tmpfs, I recommend just letting the openSUSE install set things up for you, it does a very good job. The only issue I’d mention is in 13.1, making /tmp tmpfs is fine for speed but can and will be a problem on a system with limited memory. Remember, normal file move/copy will create a temporary copy of the file in /tmp, so if for example you only have 2GB of free RAM and you’re downloading a 4GB file, that can be a problem. The simple solution is to place /tmp back on the HDD.
TSU
So would something like this in FSTAB be appropriate for 13.1 on an SSD?
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_250GB_S1DBNSADC17408K-part5 swap swap noatime,discard 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_250GB_S1DBNSADC17408K-part6 / ext4 acl,user_xattr,noatime,discard 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_250GB_S1DBNSADC17408K-part7 /home ext4 noatime,acl,noatime,discard 1 2
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/spool tmpfs defaults 0 0
How do the settings look? Anything else in FSTAB??? Thanks!
Not in swap leave that line alone ie remove noatime and discard off that line they only apply to ext4 partitions and swap uses a different file system method
Thanks Gogolthorp for catching this.
Question: If I insert the following line in FSTAB using a text editor,
tmpfs /home/william/.thumbnails tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
will I need to do anything else in order for future .thumbnails to route properly to tmpfs? Anything else?
Interesting.idea looks right to me should work
Just a note the more you put to tmp file system the less memory you will have to work with. It is all a balancing act.
Yeah, good point. I see a RAM upgrade in the cards as a result of the new SSD.
It seems like there may be a few other session related files that could be moved to tmpfs that will reduce read-writes on the SSD. Thanks.
Reducing writes will increase the life of an SSD but remember they are designed with extra memory and write leveling software to spread the writes so should last for years even if you don’t do anything. My point is you can over do a good thing. 
On Sun 29 Dec 2013 05:26:01 AM CST, gogalthorp wrote:
Reducing writes will increase the life of an SSD but remember they are
designed with extra memory and write leveling software to spread the
writes so should last for years even if you don’t do anything. My point
is you can over do a good thing.
Hi
My OCZ Vertex4 is rated at 20GB of writes a day and a 5 year warranty,
have not even worried about switching stuff to tmpfs. I do have 8GB of
ram, and set the swappines, plus added the io scheduling.
@OP, what are the tech specs for your drive (URL)?
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLED 11 SP3 (x86_64) GNOME 2.28.0 Kernel 3.0.101-0.8-default
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On 2013-12-28 22:16, portsample wrote:
>
> Thanks Gogolthorp for catching this.
> Question: If I insert the following line in FSTAB using a text editor,
> tmpfs /home/william/.thumbnails tmpfs
> defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
>
> will I need to do anything else in order for future .thumbnails to route
> properly to tmpfs? Anything else?
Thumbnails are only written once, I don’t see why bother. :-?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Elessar))
Am up and running now with this,
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_250GB_S1DBNSADC17408K-part5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_250GB_S1DBNSADC17408K-part6 / ext4 acl,user_xattr,discard,noatime 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_250GB_S1DBNSADC17408K-part7 /home ext4 acl,user_xattr,discard,noatime 1 2
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
Question: Does tmpfs get “noatime” specifier as well? Thanks.
Here is a link to a highly useful and thorough how-to for optimizing openSuse for solid state hard drives.
Have fun!
My oldest SSD is 7 years of age now, used intensively, it still works fine, never used any tweaks.
Now, on my laptop, the installer has added
discard,noatime
to fstab
My 2 cents: leave defaults where they work.
how to setup deadline i/o scheduler permanently for SSD? im on 13.1, i added elevator=deadline to grub2 also added script set deadline on boot but when i look “cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler” it showed CFQ in result… also my SSD shows some errors on smartctl (ATA Error Count: 23)
errors like this, what u think? i know smart is not working very good on SSDs… my SSD also brand new not used much…
Error 23 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 79 hours (3 days + 7 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.
After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
84 51 10 e8 fc e1 40 Error: ICRC, ABRT at LBA = 0x00e1fce8 = 14810344
Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------
60 40 28 68 fd e1 40 08 14:32:46.673 READ FPDMA QUEUED
60 18 20 40 fd e1 40 08 14:32:46.673 READ FPDMA QUEUED
60 10 18 28 fd e1 40 08 14:32:46.673 READ FPDMA QUEUED
60 38 10 e8 fc e1 40 08 14:32:46.672 READ FPDMA QUEUED
60 10 08 d0 fc e1 40 08 14:32:46.672 READ FPDMA QUEUED