Linux Mint 17 SSD Tweaks

Below is a guide to get the most out of your linux mint 17 (or any ubuntu 14.04 derivitive) installed on a ssd drive

Enable AHCI Mode

Its hard to tell you exactly how to do this as BIOS settings vary too much. However in your bios make sure your sata controller is set to AHCI mode. It has to be in this mode in order to enable TRIM on the drive.

Install Using EXT4 Filesystem

You can install using any file system but ideally you should stick to ext4 to get the most out of the drive.

Enable Trim

I wont go into details of what trim is, but needless to say it will lengthen the life of your drive tremendously. Open /etc/fstab.

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Add "noatime,nodiratime" to your / mount point options...use the following as a guide

UUID=69328b54-4e9c-4724-a3fb-bf858df3058a / ext4 noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

Move /tmp To Ram

If you have 4GB or greater ram you can save a lot of wear on your SSD by changing /tmp to be in ram. While keeping the text editor open from the above step add the following line to the end of the file.

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodiratime,mode=1777 0 0

Run TRIM Regularly

Although the above edits to the /etc/fstab help its a good idea to set up TRIM to run on a daily basis to do clean up. The following will have it run every time you reboot. You can also run the command from bash if/when you want.

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

When your text editor opens paste the following in it and save and quit

fstrim -v /

And remove the old trim job

sudo mv -v /etc/cron.weekly/fstrim /fstrim

Change How Swap Operates

A lot of people think swap is just for when you run out of ram, but modern distributions move programs to swap when minimized and not used for a period of time. You can set this threshhold, a setting of 0 means never send programs to swap which can crash some programs so I tend to use a value of 10.

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

At the end of the file, place the following

# Sharply reduce swap inclination vm.swappiness=1 # Improve cache management vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

Change WebBrowser Cache Location

As your surf your browsers cache folder is constantly written and read to. If you have enough ram (4GB or greater) you can save a lot of wear and tear on your SSD by moving your cache folder to /tmp (the ram drive we made in previous steps).

For firefox open up the link http://about:config, accept the warning and continue. Right click on a empty part of the page and select New->String. Enter the following as the string name:

browser.cache.disk.parent_directory

When prompted for the value enter:

/tmp

Chrome users have to make a different change. Open up a terminal and enter the following

ln -s ~/.cache/chromium /tmp

To make all your changes take reboot your system. You should notice a increase in performance as well as extending the life of your SSD.