Archlinux SSD upgrade from Ubuntu
I've upgraded to a Seagate 500GB Momentus XT Hybrid SSD in my Thinkpad X201 from a 500GB Momentus 7200.4.
At first I had the idea of copying everything from my old 7200.4 to the XT via dd, though I thought it might be:
- Terrifically slow over USB2 (max read/write is 30mb/sec according to
iostat)
- Very hard to verify everything was copied perfectly
- Too easy for something to go wrong (some block size mis-alignment)
So instead I decide to backup /home to a Samsung S2 1TB USB2 drive. At first I
did this with rsync, which turned out to be a mistake because it was so
insanely slow. Instead I used cp -a and that copied almost 100GB in 1hr.
Next on recommendation from Anselm, I installed 686
Archlinux instead of Ubuntu. Unfortunately the
2010.05 install
is a bit sucky because it doesn't support
GPT
(Jamie sez I want GPT for SSD) and the auto-partitioning
sucks. Fortunately doing pacman -Syu gdisk and later grub2 (grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda --force), you can manage it. I kept it simple
and created one huge partition:
hendry@i7 ~$ sudo gdisk /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.6.13
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 976773168 sectors, 465.8 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 14A13BDD-C597-4166-92AF-A048800C59CA
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 976773134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 976773134 465.8 GiB 0700 seagate
I am a bit concerned over the requirement of GRUB2 in order to boot into a GPT partition. 202k SLOC to boot a kernel? I'm sorry, that's wrong. I need to investigate extlinux and make sure a rescue USB stick can boot into the drive.
Setting up Arch is a bit more hands on than Ubuntu, but it's a fairly pleasant grounds up approach, instead of my experience with Ubuntu where I'm constantly trying to remove shitware and fail to do so. The folks on #archlinux are friendly and I dare say funny and the forum and wiki have good information.
I had to make a few changes to my $HOME to accommodate Arch, which you might find interesting. I still need a better understanding of netcfg. I had to make an annoying addition to Xorg conf for terminus to load:
hendry@i7 ~$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-fonts.conf
Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/local"
EndSection
I've used Arch and its pacman (think apt-get) tool before. However it's only
this time I have used yaourt,
for installing stuff that basically didn't have binary packages. yaourt is an
invaluable time saver. :)
As for the speed differences... I think it's faster but tbh it's hard to tell. It could be just that Arch is so much lighter-weight than Ubuntu.