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On Tue, 27 Apr 2010, John Williams wrote:
I've just ordered up a couple of new HD's. One is a second 1.5TB HDD which isn't really any hassle. The other though is a super duper SSD, an Intel X25-M (or something like that) I've been doing some reading up in readiness and just wanted a couple things clearing up. I have looked around for info and seen that I should align the partitions before formatting it, using this page as a basis : http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=333059 I'm unsure if this step though: # fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdx and is cfdisk mentioned as an alternative easier to use than fdisk for someone unfamiliar with either?
I use both - cfdisk is my prefered one.
Do they open interactively to configure the partitions I want ?
cfdisk is curses/screen based. fdisk is some of commandy like.
Forgive me but despite the few years using linux as my sole desktop I haven't used fdisk to partition with, we are mere acquaintances who occasionally "fdisk -l" ;) I am equally unwilling to run that command right now, the day before the new drives arrive to test anything that might send my data to digital heaven ;)
They will both work on mounted and live disks, but are relatively safe if you don't write anything.
On your new SSD, start with: cfdisk -z -h 224 -s 56 /dev/sdX (You need to be root of-course) However, to see what it looks like, try (again as root) cfdisk /dev/sdaYou need to type a capital W to write it to disk, and even then, there's a 'are you sure' prompt, so you should be relatively safe.
For your new SSD, you probably just want one partition - that's easy to do.
As for that alignment thing - ignore it for the spinny drive - the reason it's there for the SSD is to try to force the partition to start on an alignment equal to the erase page size of the SSD. The theory being that it will help to speed up writes to the disk, but you need to make sure that you know what the erase page size it... This is assuming 128KB. Not sure it's going to make that much difference for day to day use, but you never know!
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html