Blast off with Linux
Setting up disks
Keep your SSD cells tidy with regular trimming, then set up a RAID array for your static files and enjoy the simple pleasure of filesystem labels.
Setting up SSDs properly used to be a pain, both on Linux and Windows. Filesystems and partitions have to be aligned to 512 (or sometimes 4096) byte sectors, otherwise the drive will not perform well. Nowadays, partitioning tools and filesystems will do all of this for you. Run
$ sudo fstab -l
if you want to be sure. In order to maintain the sort of transfer rates you see in the tech tabloids, you need to make use of the Trim feature. This is where the filesystem tells the drive which storage blocks are no longer in use, so that it doesn’t need to worry about them any more.
In the absence of Trim, writing data to a single 8KB page requires its containing block (which may be 2 or even 4MB big) to be rewritten. Not because SSDs can’t write to individual pages – they can, and that’s partly why they’re so fast. But doing so affects data in the rest of the block, if a drive knows a particular block isn’t in use (for example, it hasn’t been written to since the drive was initialised) then no worries. Otherwise it has to cache the whole block, modify it with the new page, erase the block and rewrite it. This is known as write amplification, where time and effort are multiplied while caching and rewriting the ghosts of files past.