Micro Mart - 10 March 2016_

22 Issue 1404

ChangeTheScheduler
Another option that can help with efficiency is changing the I/O
scheduler. The default scheduler in Linux is CFQ (completely Fair
Queueing), which is designed to deal with hard drive latencies, but
there are two other schedulers in the kernel: NOOP and Deadline.
NOOP is notreally a scheduler, just a basic FIFO queue, but Deadline
prioritisesreads over writes, which can give a moreresponsive
system for desktop use.
To find out which scheduler is in use (assuming your SSD is
sda), type:

cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

You should see something like this:

To change this setting, edit therc.local file:

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Add these two lines above the ‘exit 0’ entry:

echo deadline >/sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_
batch

If you want to use noop, add this line:

echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

If you have more than one SSD, you can add a line for each one,
just change sda to sdb or whatever the SSD is.
This last edit may need to bereapplied after a system upgrade.

KeepingItTidy
Of course, running in such a small spacerequires some
housekeeping to ensure that theroot partition does not fill
up, as this will cause the PC to slow to a crawl and eventually
shudder to a halt.
Having /var on a large partition of its own eliminates the
common problems of log files and apt cache growing to fill the
root partition, but it’s still worth keeping an eye on the size of /
var/log and cleaning the apt cache periodically with ‘sudo apt-
get clean’.

TheWindowsOption

Although Windows has a larger OS footprint, there are

ways to reduce this considerably. These include removing

programs that aren’t required and moving personal

folders, which can take up a lot of space. Such measures

can reduce the basic OS footprint to below 30GB, so a

60GB SSD should be ample.

Because the location of most system folders is listed

in the Windows registry and some programs have these

locations hard-coded in, they cannot be moved by

conventional means or by using a standard shortcut.

Instead they need to be redirected using symbolic links.

For redirecting personal system folders, Windows has had

a built-in procedure since version 7

1.Windows 7: Open the Start Menu and click on your

user name. This will open your user folder. In Windows 8

or 10, open Explorer and click on your user name.

2.Right-click a personal folder that you want to move to

another location.

3.Select ‘Properties’

4.Click the ‘Location’ tab.

5.The dialogue box shown below will open.

6.Click ‘Move’.

7.A dialogue ‘Select a destination’ will open.

8.Browse to the location where you want to move this

folder.You can select another location on this computer,

another drive attached to this computer or another

computer on the network.

9.Click the folder where you want to store the files

(Note: not the root of a drive).

10.Click ‘Select Folder’.

11.Click ‘OK’.

12.Click ‘Yes’ to move all the files to the new location.

h

The life of an MLC device is

roughly two thirds of that of an

SLC device, which is still about

four times that of a typical

mechanical hard drive

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