Setting up disks

Setting up SSDs properly used to be a pain, both on Linux and Windows. Filesystems and partitions have to be aligned to 512 (or sometimes 4096) byte sectors, otherwise the drive will not perform well. Nowadays, partitioning tools and filesystems will do all of this for you. Run

$ sudo fstab -l if you want to be sure. In order to maintain the sort of transfer rates you see in the tech tabloids, you need to make use of the Trim feature. This is where the filesystem tells the drive which storage blocks are no longer in use, so that it doesn’t need to worry about them any more.

In the absence of Trim, writing data to a single 8KB page requires its containing