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14 <h1>
15 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
16
17 </h1>
18
19 </div>
20
21
22 <div class="entry">
23 <div class="title">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</div>
24 <div class="date">17th July 2013</div>
25 <div class="body"><p>Today I switched to
26 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
27 new laptop</a>. I've previously written about the problems I had with
28 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
29 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
30 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
31 sustained writes. My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
32 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
33 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
34 disk instead to fix it once and for all. The Samsung disk survived
35 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
36 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
37 decided to trust it with my data. I have installed it as a Debian Edu
38 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
39 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
40 station from now on.</p>
41
42 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
43 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
44 performance and increase life time of the disk. The Linux kernel and
45 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
46 environment. To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
47 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning. The
48 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
49 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
50 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
51 package. If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
52 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
53 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
54
55 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
56 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD. It is adjusted to my use case,
57 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
58 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
59 top of this again. See the README file in the package source for the
60 references I used to pick the settings. At the moment these
61 parameters are tuned:</p>
62
63 <ul>
64
65 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
66 (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
67
68 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
69 this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
70 0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
71
72 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
73 systems.</li>
74
75 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
76 /etc/fstab.</li>
77
78 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
79
80 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
81 cron.daily).</li>
82
83 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
84 to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
85
86 </ul>
87
88 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
89 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
90 little gain. My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
91 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
92 computer. I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
93 from getting the data on the disk (see
94 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
95 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
96 right thing to do.</p>
97
98 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
99 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
100 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
101
102 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
103 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
104 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
105 instead of during my work.</p>
106
107 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
108 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
109
110 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning. I expect
111 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
112 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
113
114 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
115 there.</p>
116
117 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
118 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
119 disk. It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
120 the Lenovo firmware. But I have not tried and did not want to do so
121 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
122 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
123 back.</p>
124 </div>
125
126 <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.</div>
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477 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
478
479 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
480
481 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (55)</a></li>
482
483 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
484
485 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (38)</a></li>
486
487 </ul>
488
489
490 </div>
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