SSD hard drive Linux question?

[Win2000Fan]

I know this belongs under hardware but most people at that thread know little about Linux.

I am thinking of buying the WD Blue SSD 500 GB hard drive for Linux (Ubuntu 18.04). Because my motherboard is older I can not use the newest M2 SSD's. I am already using the same SSD drive for Windows 10 and love how fast it is. However I have read that there can be issues with Linux and SSD's. So I have several questions I am hoping you Linux lovers could help me with.

1. Are there really issues with SSD's and Linux? I have not read of any real issues concerning Western Digital SSD's, it has been more of an issue with the Samsung's. Should I wait awhile before I do this?

2. How do you advise I should load Linux? I am planning completely reloading Linux from scratch. What are your thoughts on this?

3. Can I still dual boot, using grub loader, between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04?

Last are there any of you out there that are running Linux in an SSD and if you are how do you like it? Is there a huge speed improvement over older mechanical hard drives? I know Linux loads differently and that is why I am asking.

Thank you for your help.

[thetargos]

Hello there!

Well, a few answers for your questions:

• I have not ran into any issues with Linux on SSDs, I run three machines with SSDs and Linux: my personal rig has two of them, one M2.NVMe, one SATA III, my wife's system has a SATA III Liteon SSD for the OS and her home directory and my laptop has a WD Blue 1Tb SSD. Now, I think you are refering to how Linux may induce more wear and tear on the drive, well, Ext4 uses TRIM which reduces that (AFAIK, automagically). All systems run amazingly.
  
• Since you are going with a SATA one, Linux treats them as a regular drive, so the same principles apply and it should be fairly transparent.
  
• You can still dual boot if that is what you want with this drive, since the same basic connectivity is not affected by the drive and its interface, the very same principles you currently use for dual booting Windows and Linux still apply.

You will notice quite a bump in speed! Especially when loading the system, installing updates and starting up applications. Games, though (I use one of my SDDs for games) benefit little, to nothing at all, at least for native games. Other than that, the drive should work just as a regular disk. I think that when an SSD reaches its EOL, you get a lot of I/O errors, something to keep in mind.

[Win2000Fan]

Toast. I have read where some models of Samsung's had issues.

[thetargos]

Originally posted by shellback84:

Toast. I have read where some models of Samsung's had issues.

I have two Samsung drives, one SATA EVO 850 and one M2.NVMe Evo 960, so far so good.

[Win2000Fan]

Originally posted by thetargos:

Hello there!

Well, a few answers for your questions:

• I have not ran into any issues with Linux on SSDs, I run three machines with SSDs and Linux: my personal rig has two of them, one M2.NVMe, one SATA III, my wife's system has a SATA III Liteon SSD for the OS and her home directory and my laptop has a WD Blue 1Tb SSD. Now, I think you are refering to how Linux may induce more wear and tear on the drive, well, Ext4 uses TRIM which reduces that (AFAIK, automagically). All systems run amazingly.
  
• Since you are going with a SATA one, Linux treats them as a regular drive, so the same principles apply and it should be fairly transparent.
  
• You can still dual boot if that is what you want with this drive, since the same basic connectivity is not affected by the drive and its interface, the very same principles you currently use for dual booting Windows and Linux still apply.

You will notice quite a bump in speed! Especially when loading the system, installing updates and starting up applications. Games, though (I use one of my SDDs for games) benefit little, to nothing at all, at least for native games. Other than that, the drive should work just as a regular disk. I think that when an SSD reaches its EOL, you get a lot of I/O errors, something to keep in mind.

Thank you for all the info and your time.

[Win2000Fan]

Originally posted by Rogue:

In the past, there were some issues/concerns, but it's mostly not a problem anymore, especially with newer kernels.

"Some firmware versions on some SSD models have bugs that result in data corruption when used in certain ways. For this reason the Linux ata driver maintains a "blacklist" of certain things it shouldn't do on certain drive/firmware combinations. This list is in the linux source at drivers/ata/libata-core.c. If you have a blacklisted controller/drive combination, you are at risk until a newer kernel avoids the problem.

In particular, many drives, including Samsung, Micron, Crucial have problems with discard/TRIM.

Make sure you review the latest version of that file for your model, and if present then make sure it's also in the version of the kernel you intend to run or find some other way to avoid the problems (like not using discard/TRIM, or a particular firmware version)."

Quoted from https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization

I have a Samsung 850 EVO and I've been running various Linux distros on it for a while now. Currently, I'm using Arch with periodic TRIM enabled:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_state_drive#Periodic_TRIM

Thank you for the very important info. I thought I had read at Amazon about at least one of the newest Samsung M2 SSD firmware not able to work with Linux and the main reason I was concerned.

[Aoi Blue]

Linux is actually better with SSDs. However, you have to make sure Linux is aware that it is an SSD and formats it accordingly.

EXT4FS, BTFS and F2FS all work well with virtual block SSDs provided you enable the SSD features. Newer distros will properly do this as newer builds of mkfs will pull the device info to determine how to best format the drive. So long as you are using direct disk access this will work well, and there is no reason not to on a desktop SSD.

I recommend F2FS for SSDs. as it is specifically designed to work with flash devices. It auto wear-levels and places writes to physical block bounderies in order to reduce controller load and flash unit wear. It auto-tunes for a variety of controller types and memory types. It's probably your best option.

BTFS while technically stable is still very young, and I would recommend against it.

Most of your recent horror stories about Linux losing data are with BTFS. F2FS has all the advantages of BTFS, and has had corporate backing to reach stability faster. It also has been in widespread use on many devices for several years now.

Microsoft has an actual add campaign to spread horror stories of Linux failure wide and far, while minimizing the Windows horror stories. The fact is that Windows failure rate for everything is insanely higher.

To summarize, with F2FS, Linux will run better on an SSD than Windows.

[Bobtail Squid]

Never had issues with Sata SSD

[x_wing]

Originally posted by shellback84:

2. How do you advise I should load Linux? I am planning completely reloading Linux from scratch. What are your thoughts on this?

Out of avoiding to put the swap partition in the SSD (if you're concerned about your SSD lifespam and you usually run out of physical ram), you can use the same way you use a HDD if you're on a modern Linux distro.

Originally posted by shellback84:

3. Can I still dual boot, using grub loader, between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04?

You can, but if you'll have each OS on a different physical drive, I recommend you to select OS boot by using your UEFI/BIOS boot drive selection.

Originally posted by shellback84:

Last are there any of you out there that are running Linux in an SSD and if you are how do you like it? Is there a huge speed improvement over older mechanical hard drives? I know Linux loads differently and that is why I am asking.

You get a big speed improvement on boot and any I/O operations. I see the difference mainly when I use docker to build images. Also, compiling gets a big boost (gentoo users probably loves this).

[WarnerCK]

Originally posted by shellback84:

Thank you for the very important info. I thought I had read at Amazon about at least one of the newest Samsung M2 SSD firmware not able to work with Linux and the main reason I was concerned.

I've been using SSDs with Linux for years. I'm using an M.2 Samsung drive now. It's fine.

[Win2000Fan]

I can always depend on the Linux folks to give mature answers and help. I will be taking your advice. Thanks to you all. Shellback84

[phillippi2]

I actually have 2 ssd's. One's a 500gb, the other one's 1tb.

The only real issue you might run into is the drive slowing down if you save to/delete stuff very often. This includes installing programs (especially through the command line, since that tends to install where the O.S. is located). An HDD is recommended for that. Even if you do use an SSD in such a manner, they will last a good while. My 500gb is going on 2 years.

[ack0329]

No Problems here with 2 notebook SSD's (SATA), 1 PCIe SATA SSD, 3 NVMe PCIe SSD's on a few systems
Just FYI,

Always trying to help, Mark

[Zyro]

About reinstalling: You can try to move your installation. If it doesn't work out, you can always reinstall. Just make sure you're not naking a bytewise cooy of the HDD.

The speed improvements should be similar to those under Windows: Greatly improved responsiveness, but no big gains wrt games.

I'm running my system from an SSD for years now (the first one was 80 GB) without problems and hate it when I have to touch a PC without SSD.

[ack0329]

here is my trim command
$ sudo /sbin/fstrim -v --all || true
[sudo] password for ack:
/home: 322.8 GiB (346574139392 bytes) trimmed
/windows: 159.2 GiB (170890711040 bytes) trimmed
/mnt/sda1: 625 GiB (671051759616 bytes) trimmed
/mnt/512GB_SSD_PCIe: 432.3 GiB (464186445824 bytes) trimmed
/: 16.4 GiB (17607323648 bytes) trimmed

3 different SSDs
Just FYI

[ack0329]

actually Just 2 differnet SSDs both NVMe (one oddly SATA/PCIe?? and the other simply PCIe
make sure SATA in the Bios is selected to AHCI (I believe?? Advanced Host Contrtoller Input), and ALSO Disabling RAID may solve a problem (Linux Not seeing the SSD in a prebuilt machine)