Install Linux on an SSD

When you want to install Linux to an SSD, there are a lot of things to think about. This wiki post will look at all those things.

1. start your partitons on a 4k boundary

Because SSD's use 'blocks' of 4k in size, you must line up the partition boudaries on a block boudary for the best performance.

In fact, it is even better to start your partitons on a 512k block boundary. To do that, start fdisk with the parameters '-H 32 -C 32 -c' and create a completely new partitiontable.

fdisk -H 32 -C 32 -c

Note: Intel SSD's uses smaller blocks so use a different command:

fdisk -H 16 -S 16 -c

2. Optimize I/O

To adjust the stripe widht and stride of an EXT4 filesystem, use this command to create a new filesystem:

mkfs.ext4 -E stride=128,stripe-width=128 /dev/sdaX

where sdaX is of course your ssd partition.

To tune an already existing filesystem, you can use:

tune2fs -E stride=128,stripe-width=128 /dev/sdaX

Intel users should use the value 32 for the stripe width

You can also use a different i/o scheduler, the deadline scheduler, because the one that is used as a standard in the kernel is optimized for magnetic hard drives.

Modify /etc/rc.local (or /etc/rc.d/boot.local on openSUSE) and insert just before 'exit 0'

echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler