What are the best options for a root filesystem hosted on SSD under Linux

Posted by stsquad on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by stsquad
Published on 2010-04-15T13:04:04Z Indexed on 2010/04/17 3:43 UTC
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ssd

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linux

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filesystems

I'm working on an embedded system which is going to be booting and hosting it's rootfs on an SSD disk. We are currently looking at using Intel X-18M SSDs.

The file system structure will have a fairly static /usr section (modulo software upgrades) and an active /var and /var/log for maintaining state and logging. Given the wear-levelling done by the underlying flash does having separate partitions help or hinder?

As modern SSDs appear as straight block devices and hide their mapping magic behind their firmware is there any point trying to optimise the choice of file-system that sits on-top of the SSD?

Finally does enable SMART monitoring make any sense in this context or are their SSD specific ways of determining the underlying health of the storage hardware?

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