Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives

Tombuntu ^ | September 4th, 2008 | Tom

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

SSDs (solid state drives) are great. They’re shock resistant, consume less power, produce less heat, and have very fast seek times. If you have a computer with an SSD, such as an Eee PC, there are some tweaks you can make to increase performance and extend the life of the disk.

1. The simplest tweak is to mount volumes using the noatime option. By default Linux will write the last accessed time attribute to files. This can reduce the life of your SSD by causing a lot of writes. The noatime mount option turns this off.

   Open your fstab file:
   sudo gedit /etc/fstab

   Ubuntu uses the relatime option by default. For your SSD partitions (formatted as ext3), replace relatime with noatime in fstab. Reboot for the changes to take effect.

2. Using a ramdisk instead of the SSD to store temporary files will speed things up, but will cost you a few megabytes of RAM.

   Open your fstab file:
   sudo gedit /etc/fstab

   Add this line to fstab to mount /tmp (temporary files) as tmpfs (temporary file system):
   

   tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

   Reboot for the changes to take effect. Running df, you should see a new line with /tmp mounted on tmpfs:
   tmpfs 513472 30320 483152 6% /tmp

[Fichori]

Ah, yes.

I run Slackware (Linux) on an embedded VIA Eden 400/667 MHz computer that controls my pellet stove.

It uses a CompactFlash card, so I did the first two of these tweaks. (as well as disabling logging)

[Fichori]

Its amazing what people have done with Ubuntu.

My experience with it has really impressed me.

There is a [free] CNC machine control version that lets you connect your CNC mill or lathe controller to the printer port [or other IO card] and and carve out shapes under high precision computer control.

Those EEE computers are kinda neat too!