Menu

Linux Mint 13 SSD Tweaks

You can install linux onto a SSD hard drive with default options and it will run fine. However there are some tweaks and adjustments you can make to make it a bit zippier, as well as make a little less wear and tear on your SSD to make it last a little longer.

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.


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.



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



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.



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.



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



Change the I/O Scheduler

The default disk sheduler works best for older style hard drives that work with spinning platters. Your new SSD drive does not operate the same. The following tweaks give you an extra speed boost.



Look for the line that starts with "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" and add the options elevator=deadline to the end of the line. Use the following as a guide



To make your changes take you have to run the following



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.



At the end of the file, just before the "exit 0" line place the following



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:



When prompted for the value enter:



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



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.