Livecd questions and SSD

[kah5683]

I am nearing the end of my first build.  Everthing is fine so far, except I'm getting bogged down with information overload with my new SSD.  I've spent a good part of the day researching how to handle, both here on the forum and googling.

I have a brand new 60gb SSD and 2tb hard drive, along with everything else brand-spanking new.  I've heard about the issues with SSD's and what to do about degradation.  Where I am getting hung up is aligning the SSD.  Here in the forum and elsewhere, I have found good how-to's, but I want to check - again - that this is important to do.  I've seen a few posts that say it isn't necessary, and a lot that say it is.

If it is a worthy action to take to align, the one how-to I read that seems easy to follow talks about using gparted to do the aligning.  I put in the kde livecd, and I don't see it there.

The other thing I wanted to check with this SSD is what firmware version it has.  How can I do that with the livecd?  If it needs updating, how would I go about that?  I downloaded the firmware update file from Patriot (a .ffp file of 335mb) and an updater.exe.  How would I do this?

Most are in agreement that you shouldn't put /home on the SSD, but can it be done without all my personal data (docs, videos, music)?  This way I can have both / and /home without data on there?

I've read that btrfs would be good with the SSD, but I see it may be a little quirky still.  Ext4 then instead?

Lastly, I haven't done any hibernating in a while with my computer, but maybe I should.  With that in mind, how much swap should I have if I have 8gb RAM and do some video editing here and there?  (i5 2500k - ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/gen3 - GeForce GTX550Ti)

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm antsy to finish up and see the end result.

[parnote]

From the FWIW department:

I just completed my new desktop build (see the Feb 2012 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine). I used a 30 GB SSD from OCZ. I put a 4 GB Linux Swap partition on it, then made the rest of the drive my / (root) partition. I used a 2 TB SATA-II HD, split into 4 roughly equal partitions, as my /home partition, and 3 data storage partitions.

I used nothing more than the disk partition manager in PCLinuxOS Control Center (running from the Live CD) to manage/create my disk partitions.

parnote

[kah5683]

parnote: 

Thanks for the reply.  I tend to overthink things, and that may be the case here.  This is new to me - especially the SSD - and I want to make sure it lasts like my last computer.

Your post brings up a couple questions that are a little off topic:

1.  Why did you put a swap partition on SSD?
2.  Why 4 partitions on the 2 TB HD:  /home and 3 data?  Why not just 1 big home?

Just wanted to expand my thinking on these topics...



I would love to hear other responses to my questions above.

[AS]

I am nearing the end of my first build.  Everthing is fine so far, except I'm getting bogged down with information overload with my new SSD.  I've spent a good part of the day researching how to handle, both here on the forum and googling.

I have a brand new 60gb SSD and 2tb hard drive, along with everything else brand-spanking new.  I've heard about the issues with SSD's and what to do about degradation.  Where I am getting hung up is aligning the SSD.  Here in the forum and elsewhere, I have found good how-to's, but I want to check - again - that this is important to do.  I've seen a few posts that say it isn't necessary, and a lot that say it is.

If it is a worthy action to take to align, the one how-to I read that seems easy to follow talks about using gparted to do the aligning.  I put in the kde livecd, and I don't see it there.

It's not included in LiveCD, however you can connect the internet and install it from repo, before to start the installation, same for other tools where required.

The other thing I wanted to check with this SSD is what firmware version it has.  How can I do that with the livecd?  If it needs updating, how would I go about that?  I downloaded the firmware update file from Patriot (a .ffp file of 335mb) and an updater.exe.  How would I do this?

smartctl -i /dev/sdX (/dev/sda for the first disk, /dev/sdb for the second disk ...), again not included in livecd, same as above. Alternatively gsmartctl is a GUI interface to smartctl, which is part of smartmontools package.

Most are in agreement that you shouldn't put /home on the SSD, but can it be done without all my personal data (docs, videos, music)?  This way I can have both / and /home without data on there?

you can put your home on the SSD, and you can mount additional partitions coming from the same or another disk under your home, i.e "/home/<user>/my_data", where my_data will be a partition on a different disk.

I've read that btrfs would be good with the SSD, but I see it may be a little quirky still.  Ext4 then instead?

I would start with ext4, for reliability and compatibility reasons ...

Lastly, I haven't done any hibernating in a while with my computer, but maybe I should.  With that in mind, how much swap should I have if I have 8gb RAM and do some video editing here and there?  (i5 2500k - ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/gen3 - GeForce GTX550Ti)

A little more of your RAM, say 10 GiB, for hibernatiion.
About video editing if 8 GiB are not enough and you are going to use the swap, add more RAM, otherwise it will take ages to complete the job.   

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm antsy to finish up and see the end result.

You are welcome.

AS

[kah5683]

Thanks, AS, you've answered most of the questions.

Thankfully, the SSD firmware was up to date, so I don't have to update, or know how for now.

Would still like more feedback on aligning SSD - is it important or not?  If I am paying for quality, I would like iit to last.

[parnote]

parnote:  

Thanks for the reply.  I tend to overthink things, and that may be the case here.  This is new to me - especially the SSD - and I want to make sure it lasts like my last computer.

Your post brings up a couple questions that are a little off topic:

1.  Why did you put a swap partition on SSD?
2.  Why 4 partitions on the 2 TB HD:  /home and 3 data?  Why not just 1 big home?

Just wanted to expand my thinking on these topics...



I would love to hear other responses to my questions above.

Well, first of all, I did no special "aligning" of the SSD. I tend to employ the K.I.S.S. principle whenever possible. What I can tell you is that this bugger is F-A-S-T!! I go from Grub to login in less than 10 seconds. I go from login to a working desktop in about another 5 seconds.

Why wouldn't I put swap on the SSD? There's a reason I gave you a link to the magazine article. Since my new machine has 8 GB DDR3 RAM, swap isn't going to be used all that much ... hence, I'm not all that worried about the read/write cycles. With 8 GB DDR3 RAM, about the only time swap would be used is when putting the machine into hibernation -- which I never do anyways. Plus, I wanted my swap on the fastest drive in the system.

Secondly, why not partition the 2 TB HD into 4 partitions? I have 3 partitions of 450 GB, and one of approx. 512 GB. I need the separated storage spaces -- it's a personal choice. You can, obviously, do as you wish.

BTW, I formatted everything with the Ext4 file system -- including the SSD (Linux Swap uses it's own special formatting).

parnote

[kah5683]

Thanks again parnote...was just curious about the swap and 4 partitions.  I appreciate your feedback.