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On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 17:20 +0100, Gordon Henderson wrote: > 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/sda > > You 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 > Thanks Gordon, it is all setup, aligned and everything. Like most things, it looks more daunting initially than the actual doing of it. The SSD is in 3 partitions, 100mb /boot, 15GB /, and rest is /home. Each partition start is divisable by 1024 in 128k blocks. cfdisk is certainly a little simpler than fdisk, but neither were a problem, I did try both while I had new drives to play with and my data drives unplugged.. Much safer :] -- 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