Installing SSD in desktop machine

[the_digital_dentist]

Recent price drops in SSDs have me considering adding one to my desktop machine along side the 2TB HDD that's there now.  I would be dual booting Win 7 and Linux and I think that 128GB SSD would be adequate for both OS's and the linux swap partition.  The machine has 12GB of RAM and a quad core AMD-64 CPU.

Anyone have any input?  Are there any SSD brands to seek/avoid?

[Joseph Bozarth]

I do not know a lot about the brands for this but as a side note make sure you turn off the paging file in windows or move it to the disc drive and i would not put the linux swap on the solid state. They only have so many read/write cycles and you can eat through them mighty quick with having paging or swap on them since it accesses it so frequently and it is written and overwritten so frequently.

On Apr 13, 2014 8:03 AM, "the_digital_dentist" <mark.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

Recent price drops in SSDs have me considering adding one to my desktop machine along side the 2TB HDD that's there now.  I would be dual booting Win 7 and Linux and I think that 128GB SSD would be adequate for both OS's and the linux swap partition.  The machine has 12GB of RAM and a quad core AMD-64 CPU.

Anyone have any input?  Are there any SSD brands to seek/avoid?

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[Pete Prodoehl]

Is this still a concern with modern day SSDs? They're being used in a lot of the new Macs. I have a netbook from 2007 with a 4GB SSD which is semi-failing: it gives me warnings fairly often, but it still works fine as far as I can tell. (Granted, I don't use it heavily, mainly as a RepRap controller.)

Pete

[ChrisH]

Absolutely do not put your swap partition on the SSD I'd you can avoid it, IMO. SSD's have a limited write life. Linux will swap out more-idle processes by default, so even if you aren't using all of your physical ram, it will still utilize swap.

[the_digital_dentist]

It seems I've opened a big can of worms!  I did some digging on the web and found a LOT of stuff on optimizing file system settings in Linux for SSDs.  One point that shows up frequently is that the Linux swap partition isn't really necessary unless you intend to hibernate the system or have very little RAM.  Some suggest setting up dynamic swap that is created in the file system (on either HDD or SSD) only when needed.  Others say that if you aren't hibernating, don't bother creating a swap partition at all (assuming the installer will let you get away with that).  In any case, the consensus seems to be that swap is used so infrequently that it doesn't matter if you put it on the SSD- it will mostly be a waste of storage space, not an SSD life limiter.

[Michael Warnock]

The SSD lifetime issue, is, in my opinion, generally not a real issue these days.  Wear-leveling is quite effective, and drives have more than their stated capacity available to pretend you have a reliable device, for the likely lifetime usage of the device.  I've use SSDs as read and write caches for ZFS and other filesystems, and with swap partitions that were used for hibernate, for several years now.  I haven't had a single SSD failure.  I have ocz, intel and samsung; all have been just fine for me.

~m

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 12:07 PM, the_digital_dentist <mark.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

It seems I've opened a big can of worms!  I did some digging on the web and found a LOT of stuff on optimizing file system settings in Linux for SSDs.  One point that shows up frequently is that the Linux swap partition isn't really necessary unless you intend to hibernate the system or have very little RAM.  Some suggest setting up dynamic swap that is created in the file system (on either HDD or SSD) only when needed.  Others say that if you aren't hibernating, don't bother creating a swap partition at all (assuming the installer will let you get away with that).  In any case, the consensus seems to be that swap is used so infrequently that it doesn't matter if you put it on the SSD- it will mostly be a waste of storage space, not an SSD life limiter.

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[Joseph Bozarth]

It is more of a concern with windows. Windows puts stuff in and out of the paging file so rapidly it is like it thinks it is going out of style. No matter your memory. I assumed linux would be similar but apparently it is less concerning. The swap or page is essentially overflow for the memory of a computer. It will take things that have not been used in a while and store them on the slower memory to make room for things it needs to add to the ram. So if you are running a lot of different things at one and do not have a lot of ram it is going to start using that space to avoid filling the memory. It is a bit more complicated than that with max memory limits for frameworks like java and such but that is the general overview. If you have a lot of memory you can turn it off without worry and the os will make due.

On Apr 14, 2014 12:07 PM, "the_digital_dentist" <mark.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

It seems I've opened a big can of worms!  I did some digging on the web and found a LOT of stuff on optimizing file system settings in Linux for SSDs.  One point that shows up frequently is that the Linux swap partition isn't really necessary unless you intend to hibernate the system or have very little RAM.  Some suggest setting up dynamic swap that is created in the file system (on either HDD or SSD) only when needed.  Others say that if you aren't hibernating, don't bother creating a swap partition at all (assuming the installer will let you get away with that).  In any case, the consensus seems to be that swap is used so infrequently that it doesn't matter if you put it on the SSD- it will mostly be a waste of storage space, not an SSD life limiter.

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[Michael Warnock]

I had windows 7 running on my oldest SSD (an ocz vertex 3) with its pagefile there, and an additional read cache for my spinning disks there as well.  I regularly exceeded my 16G, and used the SSD as my code workspace, in which I automatically recompiled large codebases frequently.

I'm telling you; unless you want to be confident in your SSD lasting >8 years, don't worry about it.  Use all the speed it can give you.  If windows really hits the pagefile like it's "going out of style" then you're going to feel the difference.

[Michael Warnock]

One might wonder about the past tense in my first paragraph.  That drive is now my write cache for a ZFS volume.  So it's been under unusually high write-load its entire life.  From the first review of it in google's results, it seems it came out in early 2011.  I was thinking it had been longer.  Do your own estimation, but don't be afraid that the drive will be junk before its useful life just because you let windows keep its pagefile there.

[Have Blue]

I agree - wear-leveling is good enough nowadays that you don't have to worry about putting swap on an SSD.

CompactFlash, on the other hand...  Well, I burned up a CF card in only 3 months a few years back due to the swap partition.  To be fair though, it was a plain old camera CF card and not one of the industrial rated CF cards that has onboard wear leveling.

On 4/14/2014 12:40 PM, Michael Warnock wrote:

One might wonder about the past tense in my first paragraph.  That drive is now my write cache for a ZFS volume.  So it's been under unusually high write-load its entire life.  From the first review of it in google's results, it seems it came out in early 2011.  I was thinking it had been longer.  Do your own estimation, but don't be afraid that the drive will be junk before its useful life just because you let windows keep its pagefile there.