# ssd dual boot question

## blain3

I Just bought an Intel 520 series SSD to stick into one of my 2 HD bays on my laptop. Its running a 3rd Gen i7 and by tomorrow ill have another 8GB of ram to make it a total of 16GB 1600MHZ ram. I'm new to the SSD's and I trust this comunity when it comes to these things. I would also like to dual boot with windows from the SSD for Games and such. Any suggestions? Oh and I'm looking to make compiling faster or is this not the way of SSD's?

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## jpc22

Sure, compiling on a ssd will indeed be faster than on a regular disk, but  will also degrade it faster since ssd have  limited write cycles. 

The best ssd's available now have about 3 or 5k write cycles.

You could store /usr on your ssd so that you get faster access to source code during compilation and  buffer the compilation in a ramdisk  since your going to have a decent amount of ram

The above would  be faster than your ssd while exhausting write cycles at the rate of one per sync/update instead of many per compilation, thereby making your ssd last longer.

As for games and windows on the ssd along with some linux files, space might be an issue depending on the disk capacity, but you should be fine if you manage what you want to speed up carefully.

You should also consider if the filesystem  you put on ssd has journaled access, since they usually keep track of access time  which adds a write cycle each time a file is accessed. 

mounting with noatime can counter this.

Also check if that filesystem  supports TRIM, enabling trim takes care of garbage collection and helps with maintaining performance, which is good unless you also consider encryption, since it reveals which parts of the disk are being uses.

I hope that helps

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## gorkypl

 *blain3 wrote:*   

> Oh and I'm looking to make compiling faster or is this not the way of SSD's?

 

16GB of RAM will be enough to make things faster. Just mount /var/tmp in memory (it will default to 8GB, which is sufficient to libreoffice compilation). And while we are here, you can do the same with /tmp

As mentioned by jpc22, putting /usr on ssd will also help a bit, but utilizing a ramdisk gives a really big advantage.

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## blain3

Just an update, I looked through some FAQ's and for a test this is what i have so far using a calculate install, I haven't changed anything but it dual boots win 8 pro no problem with this fstab:

# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation

UUID=94c39c56-0706-4dca-bd0f-27d9104826dd       /       ext4    noatime 0 1

# /home was on /dev/sdb5 during installation

UUID=2b69042a-40a4-4da1-a264-6976c785ca5c       /home   ext4    noatime 0 0

# /mnt/media was on /dev/sdb6 during installation

UUID=ddd4e1fb-c1d0-4e89-aa8a-a07814c0b802       /mnt/media      ext4    noatime 0 0

# /tmp was on /dev/sdb2 during installation

UUID=f8608add-e66f-45fc-a2b9-c50376f3db9c       /tmp    ext4    noatime 0 0

# /usr/portage was on /dev/sdb4 during installation

UUID=cd70cda2-231e-4b57-a37c-0e8fe5b7e489       /usr/portage    ext4    noatime 0 0

# /var was on /dev/sda2 during installation

UUID=377833cd-be39-4618-b870-181e0a68262f       /var    ext4    noatime 0 0

# /var/tmp was on /dev/sdb3 during installation

UUID=c2e23236-0020-4190-b995-9e3be09f095c       /var/tmp        ext4    noatime 0 0

# swap was on /dev/sdb2 during installation

UUID=799004d5-718d-4dae-b402-ae3116d0883b       none    swap    sw      0 0

proc            /proc           proc    defaults                0 0

shm             /dev/shm        tmpfs   nodev,nosuid,noexec     0 0

basicly ^^ is win8/root/var on the SSD, swap/extra mount points are the first half of a TB drive in extended partition, second half is ntfs windows, works fine with grub 2

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## jpc22

Thats a lot of partitions but it looks fine for your setup. 

Have you tried compiling on 16gb ram yet?

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## d2_racing

Hi, here's my current setup.

Intel SSD 520 serie 120 gigs with 16 gigs of RAM :

```

/dev/sda3      /boot            ext2       noauto,noatime,defaults                     1 2

/dev/sda1      /boot/efi        vfat       noauto,defaults                             0 0

/dev/sda4      /                ext4       defaults,noatime,discard                    0 1

#/dev/sda4      /                btrfs      defaults,noatime,ssd,discard,compress=lzo,subvol=@racine 0 1

tmpfs          /var/tmp/portage tmpfs      size=12G                                    0 0

none           /dev/shm         tmpfs      nodev,nosuid,noexec                         0 0

/dev/sdb2      /mnt/win_c       ntfs       defaults,ro,user,nls=iso8859-1,nls=utf8,umask=0 0 0

/dev/sdc2      /mnt/win_d       ntfs       defaults,ro,user,nls=iso8859-1,nls=utf8,umask=0 0 0

```

Use a tmpfs while compiling and also use trim(discard) to save your SSD.

I switched from Btrfs to EXT4.

Good luck.

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## blain3

I've since edited the fstab and compile times are fine, the dual boot works very well, and even for a lot of partitions the system is remarkably stable and fast. I really appreciate the feedback by the way guys thank you as always! I'll need to look into TRIM, I'v been a bit busy with school starting soon.

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## pigeon768

Use your SSD as a regular hard drive. Don't worry about write cycles. I've been using the same SSD for almost five years now, with a journaling FS, with swap and /usr/portage and /home and /var/tmp/portage on it, and it still works fine.

Use either btrfs or ext4 and add 'discard' to the mount options. You should have 'noatime' in your mount options set regardless of the filesystem, of what it's used for, or what kind of disk is underneath it. Even tmpfs should have the noatime flag set, unless you know exactly why you want to have atimes enabled.

edit: set 'discard' for ext4, set 'ssd' for btrfs. There also exists 'ssd_spread' for btrfs, but I don't know what the difference is.

edit #2: I lied in my edit. In btrfs, set both 'discard' and 'ssd'. 'discard' enables TRIM, 'ssd' changes certain behavior to optimize for SSD, 'ssd_spread' makes slightly more aggressive optimizations which may or may not improve performance depending on your hardware. See this for more info.

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