Ubuntu on SSD

I have a question, normally you would expect SSD to significantly boost load times but I found this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zssbn-I18Fs

How is the kernel set up to not be effected greatly by a SSD?
Also is there any tweaks that would help utilize Ubuntu for a SSD? Would getting a SSD even be worth it with a Linux kernel?
Or is there something I'm missing in the context of all of this.

 

talking about Linux, with a sig saying "windows se7en"... how interesting.

 

I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop with SSD. Works fine, I don't understand why there's any question.

 

I find some things (for me) are easier on Linux, and other task are easier on Windows.

@highlandsun
Did you do any tweaks? Would you say running a SSD with Ubuntu makes things much faster?

 

I *believe* there are some SSDs out there that are NOT meant to be boot drives. I remember reading somewhere in the windows forum here on NBR that some guy had this same problem with his new SSD, he bought an SSD and expected it to boot faster but it actually ended up booting slower for him. I don't think this is a linux kernel issue, I think it is a buying a cheap SSD issue.

 

The Intel SSD that the Youtube video purports to be using is not one of the cheap/slow SSD's. It the highest performing SSD you can get, really.

And as for performance, the default boot of many systems runs serially, one after another, and there are a number of "sleeps" built in to many startup scripts to give the hardware time to wake up to respond to requests. If you want to have a system boot fast on an SSD, you need to design it around how an SSD works, rather than a normal mechanical drive.

 

i have dell mini 9 with a 16gb ssd that boots up quite faster than that thinkpad. the thing is, who knows how this guy installed ubuntu. he could have every service enabled for all we know.

 

I installed a fresh copy of 8.04.1 on an MTRON 6000 SSD, and I really couldn't tell the difference in boot time. The only difference I noticed was wicked quick formatting for partitions. Other than that it really didn't speed anything up, so I went back to using a hard drive.

 

So simply run a Windows OS on the SSD, then run Ubuntu on a normal 7200RPM drive.
Is their a Linux OS out there that has been utilized to be ran on a SSD?

 

Nothing specifically optimized as far as I know. Again, there are many sub-optimized services that do not start in parallel on most Linux systems, and many services simply sleep while starting up because they are waiting for hardware or something. Check out Bootchart to see a very confusing graph of what's taking time on your startups

Moblin may be able to boot quickly by default, but it's a netbook Linux, not quite a full-featured desktop. Most systems that are "instant" boot use the trick of a pre-created hibernate image to speed things up, which is kinda neat, but takes a lot of work

 

There are two types of Flash EEPROM cells used in solid-state drives: cheap, slow multi-level cell (MLC) and the much faster and more expensive single-level cell (SLC.) MLC SSDs are the less-expensive ones that have read/write performance on par or lower than that of a decent 2.5" mechanical notebook HDD. The SLC units are the ones that have throughputs of 100-200+ MB/sec and cost a fortune.

It is generally recommended to not use an MLC unit as your OS drive because it is slow and the cells have a shorter lifespan than SLC units. Some of the MLC SSDs at Newegg ad other fine retailers have a "not for use as a system drive" disclaimer on them.

Well, yes and no. Parallel startup has been in the works for a while to decrease boot times on all machines as the typical boot cycle is read lots of information from the HDD while the CPU idles, then peg the CPU while the HDD is idle, then repeat until booted. If you look at bootchart results, this is pretty apparent. BTW, Mandriva and Fedora are the big guys tackling parallel boot and using bootchart to try to keep both the HDD and the CPU crunching continually throughout the boot process.

Having an SSD versus wouldn't really affect the boot times that much unless the SSD was either many times slower or faster than a hard drive. The really big advantage SSDs have over mechanical HDDs is that their seek times are measured in nanoseconds rather than milliseconds for HDDs. This would make an SSD a bunch faster if you had to do a bunch of seeking to load hundreds of thousands of files to boot, but that's not the case, so an SSD isn't a whole lot different than an HDD for boot times. Now for database work, which DOES have a ton of seeking, SSDs blow the pants off of mechanical HDDs.

EDIT: One more thing: Linux does not need any specific modification to work with SSDs. An SSD is simply seen as an SCSI device like SATA HDDs or USB disks and it can be formatted with the usual filesystems. The SSD's internal controller does wear leveling, so we don't need special FSes to do that.

 

Hm...thanks for all the information.
As much as having a start-up boot time that's less then at least 2 min is pretty important to me. I guess I didn't really specify it before, but my bigger question was. Once in a Linux Kernel OS will I see much quicker boot times for applications? (Assuming I'm using a Intel SSD)

 

The Intel SSDs are fast SLC SSDs, so you will see a bit of a speedup in loading applications as the SSDs have a faster seek time and throughput than mechanical HDDs.