I use an SSD with openSuse 11.4 and had no problems so far. To minimise write-access and to support TRIM on that SSD I did the following: 1) Mounted / with "discard"-Option 2) Moved SWAP, var and temp to a separate disk 3) home has been on a separate disk from the beginning and it still is System running fine for allmost 6 months now. Cheers, Martin Am 22.11.2011 19:45, schrieb Greg Freemyer:

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

...

We are currently exploring installing openSUSE on a system with SSD storage. I am curious what others have experienced with these disks. Specifically,

1. What version of openSUSE has the best support? I guess the obvious answer would be 12.1. But what version first had decent support? The SSD suppliers suggest that Linux kernel 2.6.33 is a minimum requirement.

2. What SSD features are good to have and are supported in openSUSE?

3. What outstanding issues are there that might make one think twice?

A big reason for this is that good SCSI disks are currently unavailable in Sweden at this time. So we are looking for an alternative for some installs we plan over the coming months. Any advice is welcome.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Oberholtzer

Roger,

My understanding is SSDs have a higher failure rate in the real world than rotating disks. In particular, they seem to have a higher sector or block failure rate. So you might want to consider raid-1 if the data is important.

I suggest reading:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_Idle_Time_Garbage_Collection_support and http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_discard_%28trim%29_support

I wrote most of that content, so let me know if you have questions. It may be a bit out of date since I wrote most of it a couple years ago.

Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 22:40 +0100, Smartysmart34 wrote:

I use an SSD with openSuse 11.4 and had no problems so far. To minimise write-access and to support TRIM on that SSD I did the following:

1) Mounted / with "discard"-Option 2) Moved SWAP, var and temp to a separate disk 3) home has been on a separate disk from the beginning and it still is System running fine for allmost 6 months now.

Doesn't this mean you've installed a [high-performance] SSD and then moved all the I/O to another disk? Swap, /var, and /home are going to be where you reap the benefits of the SSD. Provided you have sufficient RAM the applications and libraries you use from /usr [typically in the / volume] are going to be cached in short order. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 22:40 +0100, Smartysmart34 wrote:

I use an SSD with openSuse 11.4 and had no problems so far. To minimise write-access and to support TRIM on that SSD I did the following:

1) Mounted / with "discard"-Option 2) Moved SWAP, var and temp to a separate disk 3) home has been on a separate disk from the beginning and it still is

System running fine for allmost 6 months now.

Be sure to minimalize write access. I forgot once. On a 11.3 system swap was stil active, After a zypper dup towards 11.4 the sdd gave that many seek/read errors, that the sdd wasn't usable anymore. hw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 09:16, Hans Witvliet wrote:

On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 22:40 +0100, Smartysmart34 wrote:

...

I use an SSD with openSuse 11.4 and had no problems so far. To minimise write-access and to support TRIM on that SSD I did the following:

1) Mounted / with "discard"-Option 2) Moved SWAP, var and temp to a separate disk 3) home has been on a separate disk from the beginning and it still is

System running fine for allmost 6 months now.

Be sure to minimalize write access. I forgot once.

On a 11.3 system swap was stil active, After a zypper dup towards 11.4 the sdd gave that many seek/read errors, that the sdd wasn't usable anymore.

Why is everyone still perpetuating the belief that Flash based SSDs still need this careful management of write cycles? Do the math... with current SSDs and their write cycle ratings (a current/new SSD does not have a write cycle rating of 10,000 like they did 4 or 5 years ago... you are looking at 5,000,000 or more write cycles now), you would have to basically do many hundreds of GBs (or even several TB on larger drives) of writing every single day for 40 to 50 years or even more to hit the write access barriers. Everyone is basing this whole "I have to minimize write cycles" thing on SSD specs of several years ago. Same goes for setting aside 15% of the SSD for "spare" space. Many/most SSD manufacturers already do this, so as a user you should be able to just use whatever you see as available space and not worry about it. All this fiddling and worrying about write cycles and extra leftover buffer space may make sense on a server storage deployment, but for a home user, you'd have to try really really really hard to hit the barrier even with /swap, /tmp, /var on the SSD. Basically, buy a good quality SSD and don't worry about it. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 11:09, Graham Anderson wrote:

On Wednesday 23 Nov 2011 10:05:28 C wrote:

...

Same goes for setting aside 15% of the SSD for "spare" space. Many/most SSD manufacturers already do this, so as a user you should be able to just use whatever you see as available space and not worry about it.

I was under the impression that consumer grade SSD's had very little or no reserve space to help bring the cost down. Admitedly this assumption is only from reading a few articles from Anand Lal Shimpi comparing SSD's a while back.

It is really hard to keep up with all the info flying around on SSDs. One place (blog/forum/mailing list) says, with no references, based mainly on hearsay, that the SSDs have no extra space at all.. and another says they do. I've looked at the data sheets of several SSD manufacturers and most state an over provisioning of a certain percentage. IBM, Toshiba, and Intel (among others) for example all have published their claims/statements of over provisioning as a major sell point. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org