On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 8:36 PM, C wrote:

I have not heard of any issues with SSDs... at least not on the consumer market side. Iv'e got a couple OCZ Agility III's and they behave and act just like a normal hard drive - except a whole lot faster. I don't know if it makes a difference but I run all my drives (SSD and mechanical) in AHCI mode, not Legacy IDE.

Just additional on this regarding discard/trim support in openSUSE: - http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_discard_(trim)_support - http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_performance There may be special cases with high-end Enterprise level custom storage solutions which use SSDs for high volume high write cycle storage that can cause trouble, but for the consumer market, you should be able to go pick up any SSD you decide is OK for your needs and just use it like any mechanical drive. Everyone has their own opinion on which SSD is good and which is a terrible drive. The general guideline I'd suggest is to buy at least a moderately priced SSD... ie, not the cheapest (something like intel, OCZ, Crucial, Samsung etc). Once you step up into the mid range and higher, they are usually over-provisioned by a significant amount allowing for extensive wear leveling during the life of the drive. Cheap bargain basement SSDs have considerably less over-provisioning and subsequently less wear leveling capability. There's a lot of opinions on write fatigue/wear leveling too (which is essentially you wearing out the drive by writing to it too much... there is a limited number of write cycles per memory location). I've spent way too much time researching this and based on what I came up with, it seems that under normal circumstances, with normal usage and SSD has a wear lifetime far in excess of what is considered acceptable for mechanical drives (more than 50 years in most use cases, and as low as 12 to 15 in heavy server use cases). You can, in theory, wear out an SSD in a matter of several months, but it requires full write and wipe cycles constantly 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for months on end; you don't do that with regular normal computer use. I've looked into the eSATA SSD cards, but never got beyond basic research. Around 18 months ago there were issues getting them to boot on certain hardware, but as storage they worked fine - this was a hardware issue though with some BIOSs not being able to boot from anything but the SATA/IDE bus. I don't know what changes have been mad since. C. -- openSUSE 12.2 x86_64, KDE 4.10 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 21/01/13 22:41, Greg Freemyer wrote:

As to geometry (partition alignment), it should be default now to align on 1MB boundaries. If you ensure that is where your partitions land, you should be fine.

As far as I know parted now supports an 'optimal' alignment derived from the drive's geometry, which is used by default when partitioning with YaST. Do you know if this respects alignment with regard to SSDs' Erase Block Size? Will -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org