[clug] best filesystem for solid state drive?

[Nathan Rickerby]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 10:54:41PM +1000, Paul Wayper wrote:
> On 17/06/09 17:56, Michael James wrote:
>> What's the best filesystem to use
>> when bin, boot, lib, etc and usr are on a solid state drive?
>>
>> Ext2 with noatime?
>>
>> I've got an old sever that I'm booting off a compact flash.
>> It also has a SATA drive to hold home, tmp, var, (the big or changing
>> directories).
>>
>> The compact flash root filesystem won't be mounted read only,
>> but isn't intended to be written much.
>
> ext2 is probably your best bet here - we'll be in flying cars when they 
> give up ext2 support in the kernel, and lack of journal makes it write 
> less to the disk.  Turning on noatime is also a good idea.  Even with 
> modest usage I'd expect your flash to last as long as the disks do.

If flying cars are being delayed by ext2 support in the kernel, I say
we ditch ext2.  We need flying cars way more.

For improved flash performance you could try the noop elevator I/O
scheduler setting
   echo noop > /sys/block/${DEV}/queue/scheduler
or by adding elevator=noop to your kernel boot parameters

The noop elevator setting works well for flash, possibly less well for
passenger elevators though (their seek time is shocking).

With wear-levelling and over-provisioning, decent flash seems to last
a while.

Nathan