[mythtv-users] SSD disk for the frontend

Igor Cicimov icicimov at gmail.com
Thu Apr 25 01:58:27 UTC 2013


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Josu Lazkano <josu.lazkano at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I want to configure a frontend with a ION1 board and SSD disk.
>
> The disk is a 8GB, is enought to put a clean xfce on a Debian Wheezy.
> Every time I install and use it for some days, it stop to boot because
> a inodes corruption, I use to execute fsck but it didn't work well.
>
> How could I configure the disk? Just read-only mode?
>
> I am using 4GB of memory on it and I use to shutdown when don't watching
> the TV.
>
> How could I test the health of the disk?
>
> I will appreciate any help.
>
> Thanks and best regards.
>
> --
> Josu Lazkano
>

To optimize the SSD performance you need to enable TRIM for your SSD. You
can check for it like this:

# hdparm -I /dev/sdb | grep -i trim
   * Data Set Management TRIM supported (limit 8 blocks)
   * Deterministic read data after TRIM


Then you need to add the 'discard' option to the partitions on the SSD
drive in /etc/fstab. On my system:

# / was on /dev/sdb2 during installation
UUID=7a71b85c-42e6-4135-b117-b4505cdbfd6e /               ext4
 errors=remount-ro,discard 0       1
# /home was on /dev/sdb4 during installation
UUID=0a7b2dec-a8e4-4634-bc3b-3f67bcb41443 /home           ext4
 defaults,discard        0       2

but you need ext4 for this. You can also add 'noatime' too to the options
to reduce the SSD writes and increase its lifetime. Then reboot the system.

To see the trimming in action you can run:

# fstrim -v /
# fstrim -v /home

You can also set the above as a daily cronjob if you want to execute
trimming on runtime apart from boot time.


In case you have a bad inodes or any kind of filesystem corruption I would
recommend to reset the SSD to factory settings. The SSD after booting is
protected by the BIOS so you need to boot with the SSD disconnected (from
live cd probably), then connect it and execute the following procedure
(replace sdb with what ever it shows up on your system, run blkid to find
it):

# dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4k
# hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass Eins /dev/sdb
# hdparm --user-master u --security-erase Eins /dev/sdb

and then set your fstab as above (and don't forget to replace sdb and UUID
as appropriate for your case) and reboot.

Hope this helps.

Igor
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