[Discuss] SSD

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 10:45:06AM -0400, Guy Gold wrote:
> On Thu,May 31 10:31:AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> > 
> > The MTBF of SSD's is sort of a black art.  When they first came out years
> > ago, they posted the same MTBF, but in actuality it was much worse because
> > windows kept writing the same disk block over and over, which is fatal to
> > SSD's.  But they fixed this problem with load leveling (or wear balancing)
> > in hardware in the SSD, mapping virtual blocks to physical blocks. 
> 
> I was told that the equivalent feature in Linux, that helps prolong the life of an
> SSD , started being available from Kernel 3.0 and above, true or false ?

False.  Hardware wear leveling is in hardware.

Support for ATA TRIM -- a cue from the OS that blocks are now
unused -- was added in 2.6.33.

In your /etc/fstab, you need to add the DISCARD option to each
ext3/4 filesystem on an SSD.

-dsr-