cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Best practices for a high-performance scratch volume? (Linux)

KWeis2
New Contributor

Given a P-Series SSD in a Linux system with a NVMe driver:

Are there any best practices for a large high-performance (scratch) volume?

I'm thinking of things like

  • filesystem choice
  • format options
  • block sizes
  • partition alignment
  • I/O scheduler
  • recommended OS versions
  • must-have Linux kernel features (e.g. scalable block layer) or settings

related to the P-Series and NVMe? I.e. I'm not asking for general Linux optimisation tips.

Are there any good articles with dos and don'ts I should be aware of?

I have no specific application in mind yet (maybe Nastran). I'm just researching the topic in general.

Thanks in advance!

1 REPLY 1

jbenavides
Valued Contributor II

Hello knweiss,

We would like to thank you for choosing Intel SSDs. The response to some of your questions would actually depend on your preference and the type of workload, and you might want to check OS and app resources for more details about those. Here is some information regarding this topic:

- The current NVMe SSDs available from Intel are the Intel® Solid-State Drive Data Center Family for PCIe* (Intel® SSD DC P3700, P3600 and P3500 Series). The supported Linux distributions for these drives are Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 6.5, 6.6 and 7.0, also SLES* 11 SP3. It can also be used with any other Linux OS that has NVMe* driver backported (e.g., Linux kernel 3.10 and higher)

- In practice, the SSD can be used with any File System of your choice, however, it is recommended to use a filesystem that natively supports TRIM, such as EXT4.

- For partition alignment, you should align to a multiple of 4 KB (4096 Bytes), as with other current SSDs. Checking further on this, some users may choose to align to 512 KB or 1 MB. You might want to check further about this in Linux forums.

For more information, you can check the contact methods and recommended forums from the team that designs and maintains the NVME driver for Linux:

https://www.kernel.org/category/contact-us.html https://www.kernel.org/category/contact-us.html