Linux fine tuning for Vertex 3 SSD

Question

I've been reading about optimizations for SSD disks on Linux, there is lots of info out there although very confusing and most feel outdated so I'd be grateful if someone sheds some light on the following topics:

1. Is it still necessary/recommended to explicitly enable TRIM for an OCZ Vertex 3 (SandForce controller) on Ubuntu 11.x (kernel 3.2) with EXT4 filesystem?
   My installation doesn't seem to have enabled anything in particular.

   After some research I've gathered these two options:

   • Enable trim support with mount options "discard, noatime" on /etc/fstab, for example
     /dev/sda2 /storage ext4 noatime,discard [link]
   • Execute fstrim command periodically, e.g. a script that runs at boot time or under a schedule with cron. Some old-ish info recommends this option as opposed to discard since the latter it's said to have some performance impact. [link]

   Which one of the above is recommended if any?

2. Is it a good idea to disable EXT4 journalling to increase ssd life expectancy?

3. What about changing the disk scheduler from the default CFQ (Completely Fair Queuing) to Noop (FIFO) [link]

Thank you.

Answer 1

I use two OCZ Vertex's 3 in RAID1 in my server since a year with no optimisations.

I was able to use TRIM for the first time today because I upgraded to kernel 3.0.54 - CentOS 5 default kernel 2.6.18 wasn't supporting this.

discard itself should be enough to keep the drive operating properly for a long time. Make sure you've got the latest firmware which is 2.25. OCZ gives a nice tool on oczenterprise.com to upgrade SSD's without having to reboot the server.