Optimise SSD

mgsurya

The PC I use has two SSDs - one has Solus Budgie installed on it and I save my data on the other. Does one need to optimise the SSDs from time to time in Solus? How can I do that? Any advice would be welcome.

[deleted]

In case your SSD supports TRIM, you can enable the fstrim timer (systemctl enable fstrim.timer) so TRIM will be ran about once in a week on devices that support it. Note that meanwhile a device may support TRIM, there are devices where that functionality may not work as intended.

kaktuspalme

[deleted] I think fstrim.timer is activated automatically? At least on my system it is enabled. I don't remember enabling it.

ximbietc

In addition to @[deleted]'s post which is sufficient, you may find this link to be informative, Solid state drive - ArchWiki.

mgsurya

ximbietc To verify TRIM support, when I ran $ lsblk --discard, the output was
According to [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive], non-zero values for DISC-MAX and DISC-GRAN indicate TRIM support. The values for nvme0n1 and nvme1n1 are non-zero. But the DISC-MAX values for sda and sda1 are 0B. So, would it be okay to enable TRIM?

ximbietc

Hi mgsurya. Terribly sorry for the delay in response. /dev/sda is an HDD right? It won't be affected if you enable TRIM as in section 1.1.1 Periodic Trim. Take note of the bolded portion.

1.1.1. Periodic TRIM
The util-linux package provides fstrim.service and fstrim.timer systemd unit files. Enabling the timer will activate the service weekly. The service executes fstrim(8) on all mounted filesystems on devices that support the discard operation.

mgsurya

ximbietc Hi ximbietc. There is no urgency about this, so the delay is fine.
There is no HDD in the PC - only the two SSDs. That is why the DISC-MAX and DISC-GRAN values for sda and sda1 have caused concern.

ximbietc

mgsurya Is /dev/sda connected as an external drive through USB?

It's possible that the SSD itself supports TRIM but its enclosure doesn't which could be the reason for your output of lsblk --discard.

fstrim will not apply the 'discard' operation on a drive if it detects that it doesn't support TRIM, but let's confirm.

First mount /dev/sda1, then run sudo fstrim -v <mount point>.

It should output: fstrim: <mount point>: the discard operation is not supported, which will indicate that /dev/sda doesn't support TRIM.

At that point we'll know for certain that enabling TRIM won't affect /dev/sda.

mgsurya

ximbietc Thanks for your advice. I should have checked this earlier. Running lsblk -f showed that /dev/sda is on an external SSD which I use for backup. It always remains connected to the PC through a USB cable.