I’ve got a new Thinkpad X220i with a 128GB SSD.

Reading around the internet I found a lot of stuff about squeezing a bit more throughput from your drive.

I did a couple of benchmarks in Ubuntu 11.04:

  • Adding noatime,discard to /etc/fstab

Result: No change. Not better or worse, but in theory the “discard” will help in the long term

Decision: Switch this on.

  • Setting the scheduler to noop in /etc/rc.local

Result: Average read rate increased by 2MB/s but Average access time went from 0.2ms to 0.3 ms. In itself that’s not a real problem, but the graphs show a different picture.

Without NOOP

Note the scale on the right hand side.

With NOOP

The access speed is all over the place.

Decision: Switch this off

I’d be interested in hearing if your experience differs, but it seems to me that “Doing nothing” is a valid choice. Ubuntu, out of the box, doesn’t really require any fettling in order to get the best from your SSD.