[clug] best filesystem for solid state drive? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Daniel Pittman]

"Roppola, Antti - BRS" <Antti.Roppola at daff.gov.au> writes:
> 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?
>>
>> 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.

[wow, your email client *really* mangled the quoted text!]

> As I understand it, noatime is quite important and why FAT is so
> popular.

Well, noatime is important.  FAT is popular because it is widely supported,
not because it is actually any damn good.

> You don't want to be writing atime to the data each time it gets read as it
> will cause the device to wear out:

The odds that extra writes are going to cause earlier failure are relatively
small, these days.  Do you know why?  FAT.

Specifically, if repeated writes to a location cause early expiration of the
device then FAT, which has a *huge* hot spot in the FAT at the start of the
disk, will burn holes in very short order.

Reducing writes, overall, is good for performance, because flash is *slow*
when it comes to writes, and doesn't hurt for lifespan, but the later is
mostly irrelevant.

Regards,
        Daniel