Is SSD supportes in RHEL 5.x
Dear all,
Is it possible to install RHEL5.x into Solid State Disk (SSD) HDD?
//shyfur
Responses
Yes, your SSD should just appear as a regular SATA hard drive.
If you are using your SSD as a data drive (a filesystem other than /boot or /) on RHEL 5.6 or later, then you could use ext4 as your filesystem. RHEL5 does not have support for the "discard" mount option which will enable the ATA TRIM command. This command advises the SSD to internally wipe blocks which are no longer in use, for example if you delete a file.
If you are using your SSD as a boot drive, then you have to use ext3 for RHEL5, but most modern SSDs have clever internal garbage collection so they will do a "trim-like" operation themselves periodically anyway.
Some people say you can easily wear level an SSD but this is not as bad as it sounds. You'd need to write around 8Gb a day, every day, for 10 years to exhaust the write cycles available to a modern SSD. In 10 years SSDs will probably be "those old things?" like the "huge" 120Gb hard drives we had in 2002 ;)
You can still do a few tweaks to make your SSD work a little better. One easy win is to mount /tmp as tmpfs. You might wish to mount /var on magnetic storage as that's probably where most of the IO generated by the OS itself will be (package cache, logging, mail, etc).
You'd also be better to align your partitions to the underlying memory cells in the SSD to avoid performing writes to two memory cells for one write action. These cells are likely 512kb in size, so starting your partitions and LVM PE allocations in 1Mb increments is probably a safe bet.
The RHEL5 installer cannot do this, but you have some options. You can pre-create your partitions in Rescue Mode then "Create Custom Layout" using those partitions in the installer. You would use the same LVM commands as in
How can I optimize LVM on top of RAID?
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/41644
or kickstart the install as per
Can RHEL5 kickstart align partitions?
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/60086
RHEL6 supports ext4 (including discard) as a boot filesystem, and the installer is much smarter in regards to aligning to underlying storage.
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