[arch-general] Optimising ssd setup?

[Sander Jansen]

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Curtis Shimamoto <
sugar.and.scruffy at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/07/13 at 04:24pm, Mike Cloaked wrote:
> > As part of my planning for setting up a home build computer which will
> use
> > two ssd drives - one a Crucial M4 mSATA drive (for root and boot
> > partitions) and a second larger Crucial M4 SATA III drive for the rest, I
> > have been reading up about partitioning and optimising such drives -
> >
> > It seems that it is important to partition with proper alignment to MiB
> > boundaries for partitions but I am unclear if this happens automatically
> or
> > not when setting up GPT partitions with gparted? ( I usually partition
> > using a liveusb running PartedMagic and then run gparted before
> installing
> > arch)
> >
> I am not user about gparted, but I know that gptfdisk handles this
> automatically as does fdisk these days.  I am not so familiar with parted
> in general, so maybe someone else can step in here.
>
> > Also I have been seeing various bits of advice about ensuring that
> > excessive writes are avoided by using a non-default IO scheduler - with
> > "deadline" being the better option for SSDs than the default CFQ
> scheduler
> > - and it would seem that adding the parameter to the kernel line for boot
> > once a system is set up is perhaps a good way forward? How does that work
> > if UEFI booting?
> >
> I use a udev rule to determine what scheduler should be used for what.
> At one point I had both rotational disks and a solid state drive. So I
> continued to use CFQ for the rotational and I use NOOP for the flash
> based media.  This is what I use:
>
> ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0", \
> ATTR{queue/scheduler}="noop"
>

Yet, according to https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/22605, CFQ should be able
to handle SSD just fine. So does it really make a big difference?

Sander