I’ve got a new Thinkpad X220i with a 128GB SSD.
Reading around the internet I found a lot of stuff about squeezing a bit more throughput from your drive.
I did a couple of benchmarks in Ubuntu 11.04:
- Adding noatime,discard to /etc/fstab
Result: No change. Not better or worse, but in theory the “discard” will help in the long term
Decision: Switch this on.
- Setting the scheduler to noop in /etc/rc.local
Result: Average read rate increased by 2MB/s but Average access time went from 0.2ms to 0.3 ms. In itself that’s not a real problem, but the graphs show a different picture.
Without NOOP
Note the scale on the right hand side.
With NOOP
The access speed is all over the place.
Decision: Switch this off
I’d be interested in hearing if your experience differs, but it seems to me that “Doing nothing” is a valid choice. Ubuntu, out of the box, doesn’t really require any fettling in order to get the best from your SSD.