MEPIS Community Forum

I've acquired a Corsair 120GB Force 3 SSD, and my plan is to have 4 x 30GB partitions for linux OSs only. My data would stay on my existing HDDs, along with WinXP (rarely used).

What's the current thinking on partitioning/formatting for SSDs? Corsair's website is definite that no special measures are necessary, but most of the detailed information concerns Windows 7 and TRIM. Linux is mentioned in the supported OS's, but no other details as far as I can see.

Not an urgent question - I'm a patient fellow and this is just the start of my 2012 plan which includes Mepis 12 (or 13). The purchase was just a good one-day deal.

Phil

Go ahead and partition as you want, the SSD's firmware will simply do what it wants and unlike a regular hard disk, the SSD will "load balance" whatever you are doing and write it at a point where the memory space has had the least usage to avoid sector burn.

I believe what this means is, while you may have 4 partitions, on a SSD, the partition boundaries simply become reference points with a table of contents and they might actually all reside at the front of the available storage space, with each bit of data being assigned to the appropriate reference points table of contents associated with the point that represents the partition.

Example, if you populate partition 3 first, then partition 1, it may very well be that the data for partition 3 will be ahead of the data for partition 2, but it will still operate normally at the OS level.

I am no expert on this matter, this is just my opinion based on what I have read thus far, and in reality, regular hard disks with Logical Block Addressing (LBA) do something similar so it's nothing new, but most likely more active/aggressive with SSD.

Mike P

Thanks, Mike.

That's what the latest information seemed to show, but there are so many persuasive explanations from a year or so ago which said different that I wanted reassurance.

The next step is to persuade my XP installation to recognise the existing IDE HDDs. I need to change these to AHCI in the BIOS, and XP doesn't like that. It's mainly a matter of getting the right driver in the right place, so I should sort it.

Phil