Re: [gentoo-user] Finally got a SSD drive to put my OS on

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

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On Sun, Apr 16, 2023 at 1:44 AM William Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au>
wrote:
>
>
> On 16/4/23 15:18, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > On Sunday, 16 April 2023 02:47:00 BST William Kenworthy wrote:
> >
> >> look into mount options for SSD's (discard option) and "fstrim" for
> >> maintenance. (read up on trimmimg - doing a manual trim before the
drive
> >> reaches full allocation (they delete files, but do not erase them
> >> because erasing is time consuming so its an OS controlled operation) or
> >> auto trimming (which can cause serious pauses at awkward times) can
> >> prevent serious performance degradation as it has to erase before
> >> writing.  I am not sure of the current status but in the early days of
> >> SSD's, this was serious concern.
> > In short, see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SSD .  :)
> >
> Excellent, condenses it nicely.
>
> BillK
>
>

OK Dale, I'm completely wrong, but also 'slightly' right.

If you have an SSD or nvme drive installed then fstrim should be
installed and run on a regular basis. However it's not 'required'.

Your system will still work, but after all blocks on the drive have
been used for file storage and later deleted, if they are not
written back to zeros then the next time you go to use that
block the write will be slower as the write must first write
zeros and then your data.

fstrim does the write to zeros so that during normal operation
you don't wait.

I've become so completely used to Kubuntu that I had to read
that this is all set up automatically when the system finds an
SSD or nvme. In Gentoo land you have to do this yourself.

Sorry for any confusion. Time to unsubscribe from this list
I guess and leave you all to your beloved distro.

Bye,
Mark

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