On Ubuntu 16.04, with Samsung 850 EVO SSD, is any post configuration needed?
fstrim
supports the option --all
on Ubuntu 16.04.
$ lsb_release -dirc
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
Release: 16.04
Codename: xenial
$ fstrim --help
Usage:
fstrim [options] <mount point>
Discard unused blocks on a mounted filesystem.
Options:
-a, --all trim all mounted filesystems that are supported
-o, --offset <num> the offset in bytes to start discarding from
-l, --length <num> the number of bytes to discard
-m, --minimum <num> the minimum extent length to discard
-v, --verbose print number of discarded bytes
-h, --help display this help and exit
-V, --version output version information and exit
For more details see fstrim(8).
By default, Ubuntu 16.04 mounts all file systems with relatime
. This works much better than noatime
while adding only a very small number of write operations.
Do not mess with the I/O scheduler.
For peace of mind, you can use smartctl
(install it with sudo apt-get install smartmontools
if needed) from time to time to check on Life_Curve_Status
, SSD_Life_Left
, and Lifetime_Writes_GiB
:
$ sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda
...
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
...
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 047 063 000 Old_age Always - 47 (Min/Max 21/63)
...
230 Life_Curve_Status 0x0013 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 100
231 SSD_Life_Left 0x0013 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
...
241 Lifetime_Writes_GiB 0x0032 000 000 000 Old_age Always - 388
...
(Life_Curve_Status
and SSD_Life_Left
have values in percentage points: you will want to replace the SSD when they decrease below 20% or 10%. If you can, make your terminal 132 columns before running smartctl
.)
Finally, please remember that the 850 EVO is a high-quality expensive SSD from a reputable manufacturer. It is resilient and will last a long time, probably longer than any spinning disc. The only thing you can do which Samsung admits that it would help is to overprovision it a little, that is, when partitioning leave about 5% of unpartitioned space. (This will let the internal remapping / garbage collection algorithms work more efficiently; it you decide to do it then do it only when the SSD is new or after a full-disc trim or a security erase so that the overprovisioned space consists entirely of blocks known to be not in use.)