# Gentoo on SSD. Any tricks I should know of?

## erikderzweite

I am planning to install Gentoo on a Verbatim 16Gb ExpressCard SSD. 

The drive will be used solely to increase boot process and startup time of programs, i.e. / will be on SSD, while swap, /home, /var, /usr/games, /usr/portage and /usr/local/portage (because of layman overlays) stay on HDD and /tmp will be on tmpfs.

After doing some research, I came to the conclusion that ext4 without journal will be the FS that suits my needs best.

I still have a question about drive partitions. Obviously, the SSD will be a single-partitioned drive. Are there any tricks I should apply while partitioning -- I don't really need cylinders and blocks on SSD, was thinking about GPT (as I don't dual-boot and grub seems to understand GPT).

Can anyone give me some advice on that? Any other SSD tricks you know of?

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## Dagger

Hi,

Personally on my SSD I try to minimise writes to drive by:

1) mount /tmp as tmpfs

2) mount /vat/tmp/portage as tmpfs

3) mount /usr/portage from server over nfs (if you have hdd - leave it there)

4) point distdir to tmpfs

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## albright

I think IO disk scheduler should be noop

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## erikderzweite

Thanks for the noop tip, albright.

Daggen, have you made any custom partitioning on your SSD to optimize reads/writes etc., so that the partitions will be aligned to 128KiB boundaries? 

What should I do if I intend to use the disk as a whole? Would it be wise to format e.g. /dev/sdb instead of creating partitions there?

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## Dagger

 *erikderzweite wrote:*   

> Thanks for the noop tip, albright.
> 
> Daggen, have you made any custom partitioning on your SSD to optimize reads/writes etc., so that the partitions will be aligned to 128KiB boundaries? 
> 
> What should I do if I intend to use the disk as a whole? Would it be wise to format e.g. /dev/sdb instead of creating partitions there?

 

Nope - didn't go that far.

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## erikderzweite

didn't matter, actually, because I only have one partition on that SSD. 

Well, it works reasonably well (for a driver that's in staging) -- boot time has improved to about 30 seconds from previous 1:10. And there is room for improvement, 'cause the phison driver is a bit buggy and takes about 8 seconds to start. App boot times have improved as well.

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