Ubuntu and SSD? Will it make a differance?

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Kelly2601

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Oct 20, 2013
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Hi,
I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and i was wondering if a SSD would really make a differance or will it be just a little faster? I know it makes a massive differance in speed in Windows but how about in Ubuntu or any Linux distro?
Thanks
 
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dmroeder

dmroeder

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It definitely makes a difference for bootup times. I'm not sure if there is much other benefit. I suppose there are theoretical benefits of faster loading times of programs but I suspect that the differences would only be noticable through benchmarks. Here is a guide about SSD's and Linux.

I don't think the distribution really matters, maybe only the file system used.

I have Mint installed on a SSD, then I have a traditional 2TB drive for storage.
 
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C

Chainzsaw

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Hmm Linux is generally fast anyways, however SSD's would give that much more of a boost in terms of responsiveness. It would probably give your system a "snappier" feel to it.

I know I can't go back to a regular old HDD after using SSD's for a few years now. Restarts, opening programs, encoding are all real fast.

Of course it's all subjective. Do you really need an SSD? no. Are they nice to have for the reasons above? Yes.

So really - it's all dependent on your situation with $, and if you want to put the effort into installing one (not that it's hard).
 
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G

Guest

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One very good advantage is that in Linux OS there's no fragmentation. The ext4 is a lot smarter file system than the ntfs. SDD's are not good with the defragmentation procedure, it decreases their life. In terms of speed, as they said above... Linux are very fast anyway.
 
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Ijack

Ijack

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That's not correct. Fragmentation doesn't affect SSDs as it only slows mechanical hard disks down because of the increased head movement necessary to read a file. An SSD can access a file just as fast if it is fragmented as if it is not. It is standard procedure not to defragment an SSD.

 
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skittle

skittle

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defragmentation is indeed meaningless on SSD however TRIM support is necessary to keep SSD quick.
 
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Ijack

Ijack

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Oh yeah, you want TRIM. I don't bother with using my SSD for my Linux installations. They are plenty fast enough for my needs as is, what with disk caching and the like. Another big advantage of SSDs (if I could afford one big enough) is that they are silent (and use less power). They are certainly the future of storage but can't completely replace mechanical disks just yet.
 
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Guest

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I will post that from another site "Zero mechanical seek time certainly does not mean zero I/O time. No matter how fast an SSD can be, its I/O time can never be zero. File system fragmentation affects I/O time in an SSD even when the mechanical seek time is zero. To put it another way, the misconception that SSD does not suffer from file fragmentation derives from seeing the performance degradation as a problem of the storage device alone, a problem of whether there is mechanical moving part or not, but not as a problem concerning the system as a whole. The question at issue here is I/O time, not seek time."

 
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skittle

skittle

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I think you do not understand how NAND works...

In reality the only thing defrag accomplishes on an SSD is to decrease the life of your drive by increasing number of writes.
 
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Chainzsaw

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It all comes down to this:

Do you have spare cash laying around burning a hole? Do you want slightly more responsiveness from your computer?

Or can you do without it, sparing that extra cash for something else?

This upgrade is not needed, but is nice to have.
 
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G

Guest

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I didn't say that defragmenting an ssd is a good idea. Indeed it decreases its lifespan. I just said that ext4 is far better than having an SSD with ntfs. Ext4 has a smarter way of allocating files and it's less likely that fragmentation will occur.

 
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Ijack

Ijack

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Your answer would be relevant if file fragmentation affected the speed of access of an SSD. It doesn't. You may be getting confused with free space fragmentation (or possibly you are reading articles from the very early days of SSDs?). I would say that free space fragmentation is probably more of a problem with extx file systems because of the way they divide the disk into a number of groups. Although this is a very good way of reducing the distance that heads tend to move when accessing individual files it does mean that free space is more fragmented.

Fragmentation really isn't a problem with good, modern SSDs.
 
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nss000

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Haha your spare change model; briefly and well-spoken I think.
When I recently built-out a Xeon workstation I bought two (2), 7200 1-T HHDs one of which was an **enterprise** class unit. Cost an extra $40, but I'll drop-dead before it does.

I emphasis robust local storage behavior (crap-on-the-cloud) , and local teks warned me away from SSDs . Besides, my still-testing Xeon system has 24-G RAM: what program(s) can't load into that?




 
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jasonditz

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It really depends what you're doing with the Ubuntu system. If you're using it as a simple desktop, you'll notice at boot and that's about it. If you're dealing with huge database files or some other application that is accessing the disk a lot, you'll notice a big difference.
 
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nss000

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I note you use the word **HUGE** describing the database files making SSD worthwhile. HUGE = so big no casual home computer usr would ever run into such a file ..?



 
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jasonditz

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That's about the size of it. I hate to say never because sometimes huge data manipulation crops up in places you don't expect, but generally speaking if you're doing something like that, you know about it.



 
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Herbert Matthews

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Speed test with hdparm (get/set ATA/SATA drive parameters under Linux)
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

Output:
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 4476 MB in 1.99 seconds = 2244.15 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 714 MB in 3.00 seconds = 237.77 MB/sec

Disk I/O test
# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

Output:
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.69718 s, 229 MB/s

http://namhuy.net/1541/intel-520-ssd-180gb-dell-1121-ubuntu.html
 
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