Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: gottlieb@×××.edu
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Tips for fresh install with GRUB2+RAID1+LVM2
Date: Tue, 19 May 2015 15:39:02
Message-Id: 87a8x0o9ve.fsf@nyu.edu
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Tips for fresh install with GRUB2+RAID1+LVM2 by Rich Freeman
1 On Tue, May 19 2015, Rich Freeman wrote:
2
3 > On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 11:22 AM, <gottlieb@×××.edu> wrote:
4 >> On Tue, May 19 2015, Peter Humphrey wrote:
5 >>
6 >>> On Tuesday 19 May 2015 10:53:26 Rich Freeman wrote:
7 >>>> On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk>
8 >>> wrote:
9 >>>> > Incidentally, what's the received wisdom on frequency of file-system
10 >>>> > trimming on SSDs these days? I've seen values quoted between twice a day
11 >>>> > and once a week. And how does trimming affect btrfs?
12 >>
13 >> I included "discard" in fstab for my ssd filesystems, presumably
14 >> following some installation guide. For example I have
15 >>
16 >> /dev/sda5 / ext4 noatime,discard 0 1
17 >> /dev/vg/local /local ext4 noatime,discard 0 2
18 >>
19 >> Is it preferred to instead issue explicit trim's via cron?
20 >>
21 >
22 > It depends.
23 >
24 > In theory giving your drive useful information about allocation now is
25 > better than giving it the information later. The drive can make use
26 > of that information to improve performance.
27 >
28 > In practice some drives have brain-dead firmware and they'll do stupid
29 > things with that information. If you trim part of an erase block, the
30 > drive should just file that info away and make use of that information
31 > when it can. However, some drives will immediately copy/erase the
32 > rest of the block at that moment, which creates an unnecessary erase
33 > cycle and creates IO load at a moment that the drive is already busy.
34 >
35 > So, if your drive isn't brain-dead discard is better. If your drive
36 > is brain-dead fstrim is almost as good if the drive isn't too full.
37 > I've yet to test discard and see how well it works.
38
39 Understood. Thank you.
40 allan