[svlug] SSD and workstation

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:30:50 +0100
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo <mail at webthatworks.it> wrote:

> I'm going to install Debian sid on my new workstation that will come
> with a 32GB SSD, an inherited 120Gb old traditional SATA 2 HD, an AMD
> FX 6100 and 8Gb of RAM.

...

OK that's what I did:
- all ext4
- / on SSD mounted noatime,discard
- /var /tmp /home and swap on traditional HD
- /boot/efi vfat and BIOS partition on SSD

root at dawn:~# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/60-SSD-scheduler.rules 
# set deadline scheduler for non-rotating disks
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0",
ATTR{queue/scheduler}="deadline"

# # set cfq scheduler for rotating disks
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="1",
ATTR{queue/scheduler}="cfq"

Boot got noticeably faster but not impressing faster. Next time I could
invest some more bucks in a faster SSD.
I think the speedup in application startup time got a bigger
improvement, maybe because they don't do much on /var

SSD is Samsung 64Gb 830, larger and newer (840) ones should be faster.

root at dawn:~# hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1396 MB in  3.00 seconds = 465.12 MB/sec
root at dawn:~# hdparm -t /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 226 MB in  3.03 seconds =  74.68 MB/sec

Reasonably satisfied.

What's missing is making grub-efi work. Debian installer should support
it but I haven't been able to make it work.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it