Episode: 1837
Title: HPR1837: Put an SSD in your Linux Box
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1837/hpr1837.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:56:24

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This is HPR Episode 1837 entitled put an SSD in your Linux box and in part of the series
how I upgraded my PC, it is hosted by 2B Frank and in about 18 minutes long, the summary
is what to check, read and update if you want to upgrade your Linux PC with a solid
state disk.
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Hello HPR listeners, my name is Toby Frank, today I would like to share something with you
that I recently learned and that's putting an SSD in your Linux box.
That's a solid state disk, it's basically a disk which has 2.5 inches of size, much like a laptop
hard disk actually, but it has flash media inside that's a bit like what you have in your USB
sticks. It promises to be much faster which is especially interesting for older machines
and also does it have another advantage? Well that's the main advantage I think and as far
as life disk life is concerned, I'm not really sure and I think they're too recent to have
completely reliable data. Anyway I decided I have a box, the Linux box which is now about 6 or 7
years old, where the hard disk is certainly getting old and I decided instead of just replacing
it to the normal hard disk, give it an SSD and see what you get and that's what I did so I
the good thing is good thing to do is you should check some wikis, the arch wikis, if you
boom too wiki maybe to see what SSD disks are recommended for Linux. I think most of them work by now.
I after some checking and talking to some geek colleagues who are however mainly on the windows
or Mac, I chose a crucial SSD with 256 gigabyte and put that in my desktop. It's also very good
for laptop which with its size can easily fit into a laptop and will make the laptop even faster
and also the advantages that you don't have any physical movement in it anymore as with the old hard
disk where you could crash ahead on the physical disk since this is just bits being written inside
the flash drive, you can shake it quite a little bit more without damaging the disk.
So those would be the reasons, what else would you check? You should check how all your
systems have a look in your bias and search for an option that is called AHCI that's advanced
host configuration interface and your bias has to support that. In any case if your box is as old
as mine then it's probably a good idea to do a bias update to be able to really profit from
the disk speed otherwise it might not be very useful and much faster and in that case my mainboard
was gigabyte and still is a gigabyte mainboard that offers from 2007-2008 that offers updates
for the bias however this was a bit of a shock at first you go to the manufacturer's website
type in your exact and you have to lock on boot up what the exact number and label of your bias
is your bias version and your mainboard version and look for an update and these update files were
in XE format so Windows Executables and first of all I thought oh dear I don't have any Windows
any more harm I'm going to apply that but actually downloading it and extracting it most of these
files maybe just self-extracting archives so it's a program that does nothing more than extracting
the file that is actually enclosed in it and what you can do if you get wine installed and Linux
you just go to the command line and say wine and then the file name and wine will run the
exit file for you and when that does at least in the case of my gigabyte mainboard it extracted a
file that you can actually then put on a on a USB stick and then on boot up you go into the bias
options and there's an option that's called Q flash which allows you to flash the bias in itself
in it's that the bias can flash itself then look at the options in my case it also offered an
option to save the current bias version somewhere which I skipped because I wanted to go really fast
but if you can do make a backup of the old flash if anything goes wrong you can re-flash the old
version of the bias back anyway and still have a usable system. Anyways in my case this all worked
you have to be a bit courageous to actually this is like feels like a bit like replacing the motor
in your car and wondering if it still works afterwards in some way but it went just fine the other
thing you should do is also look in the wiki if your system supports trim TRIM
which is a command that actually cleans basically cleans up as I've understood it the file system
on your SSD so it doesn't lose speed because files get scattered all over the system
but most of the I think all recent Linux versions have a recent enough kernel to support this
trim parameter you can check that with a command called HD Parm that's HD PARM I put the command
in the show notes and some links to among others the arch wiki which has a very detailed description
of everything you can do with an SSD okay so we've updated the bias the next thing you should do many
sites recommend is updating your firmware from the SSD on the SSD actually so you go to the
manufacturer's website crucial in my case and you find another file in this case it wasn't an
excerpt but an ISO and ISO is a disk image that you download and then using a tool like k3b
or a Bracero or any other disk burning tool really burn that on a CD then start your computer with
that and it should do the rest by itself and replace the firmware on your SSD with the latest version
again in my case that went without any trouble be careful when you do that
carefully read the options the program offers you on screen because it will be shame to mess up
in the disk okay then physically put in the disk that's not too difficult one remark I would have
is there's a frame you can put it in which is like a 2.5 inch classical frame where you put your
disk with some screws in in a free spot in your desktop computer if it's a laptop anyway you
don't have the choice you should put it where the other disk was but I found that actually
thinking about vibration everything now again flash disks are a lot less vibration
sensitive or anything compared to standard hard disks but I just ended up using some blue tag
blue tag is like like a little sticky mask that you can attach stuff with you can
attach process to your wallet anyway you can stick it anywhere in the disk that you put in the
two leads from the two cables that come from a main board the one is the power and the other is
the SATA data cable and then you basically set you will boot up your disk and there will be no
change if you left the old disk in it will still boot from the old disk because you can select
what disk it's booting from in the bias again and we haven't changed that yet and maybe we shouldn't
do just yet usually if you get one other disk in there the Linux system like Ubuntu will
call it SDA and the new disk probably SDB you can check that using G part of the Linux partitioning
tool or going to the command line and just typing it I think it's pseudo f disk dash l so f disk
in one word and dash l which lists all the partitions you have on the system so then you can either use
G part to go ahead and format or already format the disk for you or you can let your installer for
example the Ubuntu installer do it for you when you do a new install on your system recommend it
one I think what most sites and then sources recommended was EXT4 which is a bit of the standard
Linux file system some also say you could use battery affairs but I think battery affairs still
has some stability issues in some cases so if you're not too experienced user like me you should
I think go for EXT4 to be on the safe side then sites also recommend something that should be
considered that is not to wear the disk out too fast the SSD avoid that there's too many
rights I didn't think reads is not the problem it can do almost unlimited reads but the rights
are not endless and we should limit them as much as we can so some sites recommend not using a
swap partition if your memory the computer's RAM is more 4GB or more now I'll come back to that
in a minute I have tried that some other sites also recommend putting slash var and slash temp
on another disk if you have another disk of course as there's also frequent rights from the system
on that one so then you should go ahead and install Linux with your standard installer the Ubiquiti
installer or the Fedora installer or the Magaya or whatever is the distro of your choice and I think
most of these can easily handle and format SSD disk correctly by now I would leave it up to you
if you format just one root partition in a home partition if you just do the root partition
or if you add another data partition since SSDs unless you get very expensive ones are
considerably smaller than normal hard disks be aware that there's not unlimited space on that disk
the other option is of course leaving for now I left my hard mode hard disk in but that's only a
temporary solution because it's going to die sooner or later but I think it's a good idea if
you get big amounts of data a lot of photos a lot of videos or big audio files from podcasting
or anything else you might want to have a big disk that's really a standard hard disk and you
can use as a data partition to put your big files on and yeah then at the install consider if you
want to encrypt your home file system installers like they want to install will ask you this if
you want to encrypt your home partition probably a good idea for a laptop that you take a lot
to internet cafes and go to many places with if ever you leave it somewhere nobody can access
your personal data it will slow down the boot up a bit especially so you might lose some of the
advantage you gain by putting in an SSD I didn't encrypt the home partition because my
system is at home and doesn't leave home so I consider that was a risk I could take
that there's not too many people coming into my apartment and actually trying to look at my
computer and I have to say boot up is really really fast it really shaved a lot of time off the
the boot process and it's almost there instantly once the system check is done is quite impressive
and also later if you launch programs and stuff it is considerably faster
coming back to the swap I mentioned earlier that some sites suggest to not install a swap
partition I did that first but had some stability problems actually as programs like totem the
gnome or marty media player crashed actually when I tried to read a video even audio apparently it
uses swap quite a bit and it will crash regularly and there was one or two other programs I think
I can't remember when it was written box I think not but most impressive was really totem that
never crashed on me another on other boxes and the same Linux version actually but always
crashed on this one so the solution I chose was to actually use the swap partition that was
still on my other hard disk and edit the FS tab at the entry for that one and then it would boot up
and actually now everything works just as normal one more thing to be said in conjunction with
the FS tab that's the ETC etc slash FS tab file which has your file system information on
what disks are mounted and will just get this get mounted automatically when your computer starts up
some sites recommend to adding a parameter which is either called no A time others said you should
prefer a rail A time and both are meant to reduce the number of writes I think what actually
happens is that the system writes a little marker inside the file system every time you try to
access the file a timestamp and with this no A time or relay time parameter it doesn't do that
so it wears the disk down a little more slowly I think be careful editing FS tab if you do make a
mistake your system might not start make a copy of your FS tab call it FS tab.old put it where you
found the other one in slash ETC and carefully read the arch wiki or some other wiki that tell you
where to add this no A time or rel A time parameter so pretty much that was pretty much all I had to
say and to share with you about using a SSD as I said have a good look around about your bias
about what disk you want to get what you use case is if you want like me to leave another hard
disk in after all which makes things easier I think and check how you could update your bias and
if it supports AHCI and then go and use your SSD okay so this is to be frank signing off for
this time be safe use linux join the love share the software okay take care bye
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