blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</title>
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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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