I’ve got my first SSD inbound and will be here mid-week. It’s a 250GB M.2 Crucial MX200 series, for what it’s worth. I’m hoping someone here can save me some homework
Barring some issue with compatibility between 15.04 and the NUC5i5RYK, I will likely be running Ubuntu MATE most of the time. The little beast should have enough grunt to run any desktop environment out there, but I like MATE, and Ubuntu MATE is pretty much the best implementation out there, whether taken as a stand-alone distro or considered with the rest of the Ubuntu ecosystem.
So here’s my question: Do I need to do anything in particular to safeguard performance or lifespan on the SSD? I thumbed through the Arch Wiki and some (likely outdated) Ubuntu wiki info.
I’m likely just going to tell the installer to “make it happen” and let it take the entire drive. Any caveats as pertains to SSD’s for this? Surely TRIM and sector alignment for best performance are just “handled” in that scenario, right? I’m more concerned about performance hits due to stupid setup than I am about drive degradation.
Bonus question: I’ve also got 16GB of RAM inbound for it as well, so I’ll be looking into playing with putting my FF profile into tmpfs / RAM, more for speed than anything. I’ll likely try some variant on this method: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_Ramdisk
Thanks wolfman! That article sort of points to the issue I’m running into though.
I find it hard to believe that it’s 2015 and I might have to manually enable TRIM on an SSD if I used a guided install. It’s not like SSDs are new technology. I guess I’ll have to let the installer do it’s thing and then manually check what it did
With Ubuntu 14.04 as far as I know, it only enables TRIM on Samsung SSD and Intel SSD.
However with Ubuntu 14.10 it enables TRIM on all SSDs and it runs once per week. You can view this in cron weekly job folder. (Yes that also does include Ubuntu derivatives like Ubuntu mate)
I have checked the logs and sure enough, it does run the job automatically without me doing anything.
You can just install it normally and there is no special setup required. However if you really want to look after your SSD, you can also follow tips at https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd (NOTE: I have not used those tips so I can’t comment if they are good or not)
I got Ubuntu mate running on Samsung 840 pro SSD for a while and it run so fast! I don’t bother doing special tweaks and I just let Ubuntu do it own TRIM. Modern SSD should last longer anyway.
I use an SSD (32GB) and I also use a swap partition. I assume it is anew SSD which in that case I would not worry about it too much. There is a lot of outdated / incorrect info on the net about SSD’s (most of which tell you to treat it like gold) instead of actually using it.
As long as you’re not swapping GB’s a day onto it, you won’t have a problem. Modern SSD’s are not the flaky die in 6 months things they once were.
Agreed. Although Windows-based this PC World guide is probably the most level-headed article I’ve read on the topic. (For example, the alignment references above, apart from being over 5 years old in one case, would I suspect be over the heads of 99 out of 100 users).
It was a good read, though the writer unabashedly assumes that the reader has a Tower and not a Laptop and that they are using an expensive, modern SSD which has TRIM. Cheaper SSD’s and those more than 2 years old do not use TRIM at all.
Alignment I would say is needed if you really depend on the SSD (Batch processing RAW photo’s in Photoshop) for example. Realigning really helps, but for Joe Bloggs who wants a faster boot time and writes documents I don’t think it is needed, you wouldn’t notice it.
Thanks for the input guys… I have it up and running and I’m doing some testing now.
It appears that the Ubuntu installer accurately setup the alignment, as I assumed it would. Performance seems pretty good so far, more on that in a bit, in another thread
hi guys i hope you will be able to answer my question
i hope this fit in this topic.
I’m on my way to buy a SSD and my worries start right here… I do some development in PHP and often use frameworks to ease my work. Some framework for example Laravel starts with like 11k files an empty projects. So my question is if this isn’t an SSD killer. My initial thought is to move the development environment to a virtual machine i have the computing power for that but then i will loose the speed of the SSD. Then i thought to move the Apache html folder elsewhere not to have in on the SSD.
can’t figure out by my self.
can you help me to ease my dilemma?
