1.8 inch Ide ssd freeze time by time

Hello,

first of all, sorry for my worst english, it's not my mother tongue

In order to give a breath to my q2010 i bought some time ago an ssd from Photofast, like this one :

http://www.photofast.tw/2009ENG/products/ssd-50idev2.html

To replace a 4200rpm drive i expected to see lot of improvement.

Running on gentoo 2.6 kernel i first was a bit disappointed, search any informations about another people running 1.8" ide ssd but i don't find many things.

I got lots of freeze (some seconds time by time while accessing) where throughput wasn't so high. I updated the ssd firmware (by the way i lost my partition table like some other user ... but i prepared a backup )

Recently i came back to my settings and changed scheduler from cfq to anticipatory since upgrading to 2.6.32.

And i saw a huge improvement !

So i'd like to share my experience, excepting to understand if scheduler is the only reason of such change or if someone can guess me an another idea.

Thank in advance

Regards

 

Thanks for info,
so the huge improvement taken place only by changing the default I/O scheduler, or did you also upgraded kernel version?

 

Hi,

Well, to be honest, i'm not sure if i upgraded the kernel and made the scheduler change or if i tried to change it also in the previous kernel.

I'll see if i can test the old kernel (not sure i kept all the config/source/patch)

A long time ago, i used anticipatory on all my install but rework made on cfq was impressive and i tried it again, worked nice and i switched on it after all. Anticipatory was less maintained at this time and storage/sata evolve a lot (ie ;complete rework of libsata)

Anyway we've so few source of information about (ide) ssd on linux than i wished to share it and expect many people will also do it

Regards

 

The early consensus seems to be the best I/O Schedulers for SSDs are either noop, or deadline. This Linux article, as well as numerous other Linux SSD Tweak articles, seem to think that noop is the way to go.

I'm using deadline, likely because of both Dan Weinreb's blog post recommendation, but also Theodore Tso's comments on the subject too. I do know that since switching my I/O scheduler, I too have seen a big improvement in "system stalls" to where I don't even notice if it happens at all anymore. But by far the biggest benefit for my system, (Gentoo), was to get 8GB of memory, and move not only /tmp to my 4GB RAM cache as Dan's blog post points out, but since I moved my portage tmpdir to RAM cache, all of my Gentoo compiles are done in RAM as well. I know that's not SSD specific, but it's still way cool.

For anyone who wants a good read on Linux I/O schedulers in general, this is a good article.

Good Luck..