The best filesystem for a (laptop) SSD?

E.Ville

I've recently purchased an SSD (OCZ Vertex 2, 40g, MLC) to be used in my laptop.

My laptop is used intensively, it's my typewriter at school and my plaything when I get home but it's still a laptop and as such it won't be seeing massive I/O and huge backups (I backup my notes and code daily/weekly, but that hardly counts).

Now I never really bothered with the filesystemtype, I used ext4 for everything as it's recommended most, but with my new SSD I want to do things right. (which may be Ext4)

What I find most important on my laptop is the boot time, battery life and the SSDs life. Stability is less of a concern for me because as I said it is also my plaything so I'm used to stuff breaking down.

After reading this I would say JFS is the best choice, it's generally a great performer and I heard it's also very power efficient.

However, I do still have a few questions on which I hope you could enlighten me:[ol][li]JFS is a journaled filesystem, and it's been said this significantly reduces the lifetime of an SSD: is this true? And if so, can you have JFS without journaling? this guy claims the effects are trivial but he uses SLCs in his calculations.[/li]

[li]Is the efficiency of JFS really noticable? (i.e. will I get some extra minutes out of my battery?)[/li]

[li]SSDs perform better when there's less data on the drive, so should I instead go for a compressed FS, do these boot faster (less data to load) or slower (decompressing)? and do these filesystems drain my battery?[/li][/ol] any input is appreciated.

woboyle

For this, JFS is probably a good choice. I use it on some embedded Linux systems I work with as a root file system. However, bear in mind that most kernels aren't configured to support JFS, so if you want to use it you may well have to custom configure and build your kernel. Not a major problem - I do that for just that reason myself on my workstation so I can read/write my embedded devices. But, if you have never configured and built a Linux kernel, do spend some time reading up on how to get the kernel source for your distribution and the steps you need to go through in order to configure, build, and install the new kernel. For a single-core system, that will take several hours probably. If you have a multi-core processor, you can build it with multiple jobs (the -jN argument to the make command, where N is the number of threads to use), which will pretty much speed up the process linearly. On my 8 core system, with -j8, an enterprise 2.6.32 kernel build takes about 15-20 minutes.

marc

I'd go for xfs and remember to use the async mount option. From the mount manual:

sync   All  I/O  to  the  file system should be done synchronously. In case of media
                     with limited number of write cycles (e.g. some flash drives) "sync" may cause
                     life-cycle shortening.