Re: Best way (only?) to setup SSD's for using TRIM

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On 28/10/2012 19:59, Curtis J Blank wrote:
I've got two new SSD's that I want to set up as RAID1 and use strictly
for the OS and MySQL DB's partitioned accordingly.

I'll be using the 3.4.6 kernel for now in openSuSE 12.2 with ext4. So
after a lot of Google'n and reading it is my understanding that discard
is not sent to the devices via the raid drivers. I am aware of Shaohua
Li's patches to make it work but am not inclined to use them due to
openSuSE's Online Update replacing the kernel. I'm not against patching
and gen'ing a kernel, that used to be SOP, but just don't want deal with
that overhead. Of course unless I really need to.

So I've read, and if I understand things correctly, I can use LVM and
RAID1 and the the discard commands will be sent to the devices. Is that
correct and currently the only way or is/are there other ways?

I've also read that a lot of people are saying TRIM isn't needed because
the SSD's garbage collection is so good now TRIM isn't needed. But I
don't see how that could work because the SSD's don't have access to the
file system so they don't know which pages in the blocks are marked
unused to do any consolidation and erasing. And using TRIM is suggested
in a OCZ document I read and who's drives these are. Unless, the SDD
when it has to change a page moves the whole block then erases the old
block? But without TRIM in could be moving invalid data too because it
doesn't know that and that to me sure doesn't sound efficient and this
operation would be a perfect time to get rid of the invalid data if it
did know.


TRIM is not necessary.

In some situations, TRIM can improve speed - in other cases, it can make the system significantly slower. And it is only ever a help until the disk is getting fairly full.

Before deciding about TRIM, it is important to understand what it does, and how it works. TRIM lets the filesystem tell the SSD that a particular logical disk block is no longer in use. The SSD can then find the physical flash block associated with that logical block, and mark it for garbage collection.

If TRIM had been specified /properly/ for SATA (as it is for SCSI/SAS), then it would have been quite useful. But it has two huge failings - there is no specification as to what the host will get if it tries to read the trimmed logical block (this is what makes it terrible for RAID systems), and it causes a pipeline flush and stall (which is what makes TRIM so slow). The pipeline flushing and stalling will cause particular problems if you have a lot of metadata changes or small reads and writes in parallel - the sort of accesses you get with database servers. So enabling TRIM will make databases significantly slower.

And what do you lose if you /don't/ enable TRIM? When a filesystem deletes a file, it knows the logical blocks are free, but the SSD keeps them around. When the filesystem re-uses them for new data, the SSD then knows that the old physical blocks can be garbage-collected and re-used. So all you are really doing by not using TRIM is delaying the collection of unneeded blocks. As long as the SSD has plenty of spare blocks (and this is one of the reasons why any half-decent SSD has over-provisioning), TRIM gains you nothing at all here. (If you have a very old SSD, or a very small one, or a very cheap one, then you will have poor over-provisioning and poor garbage collection - TRIM might then improve the SSD speed as long as the disk is mostly empty.)

It is possible that blocks that could have been TRIMMED will get unnecessarily copied as part of a wear-levelling pass - but the effect of this is going to be completely negligible on the SSD's lifetime.


So TRIM complicates RAID, limits your flexibility for how to set up your disks and arrays, and slows down your metadata transactions and small accesses.


TRIM /did/ have a useful role for early SSDs - in particular, it improved the artificial benchmarks used by testers and reviewers. So it has ended up being seen as a "must have" feature for both the SSD itself, and the software and filesystems accessing them.



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