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I will be receiving a new laptop with an Intel 520 solid-state drive. I use Windows to meet the requirements of the few applications and games. Otherwise, I prefer UNIX-like environment, particularly Ubuntu Linux. Ideally, I would dual-boot the system for bare metal performance. is Ubuntu optimized out-of-the-box for modern SSDx yet? Or, am I better off (from the standpoint of performance and reliability) relegating Ubuntu to virtual machine?

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closed as too localized by slhck♦, Nifle, random♦ May 13 '12 at 18:38

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Ubuntu by default uses ext4, which has quite a few performance optimizations for SSDs. It also supports TRIM out of the box, although it has to be enabled. I dualboot between Windows 7 and Xubuntu 12.04 on a laptop with a 256GB SSD (128GB for each OS) and the Linux performance is quite good:

fluffy@inkpad:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/bigfile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.21788 s, 334 MB/s
fluffy@inkpad:~$ dd of=/dev/null if=/tmp/bigfile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 0.249378 s, 4.3 GB/s
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You have to explicitly enable trim on ext4 with a mount option – psusi May 13 '12 at 4:32
Which you really shouldn't need to do. – Sean W. May 13 '12 at 16:06
@psusi Thanks, I didn't realize that. I'll add a link to an appropriate 'ask ubuntu' thread I just found. – fluffy May 13 '12 at 18:29
@SeanW. But it doesn't hurt, right? – fluffy May 13 '12 at 18:33
2  
@SeanW., the upstream kernel guys still consider it to be dangerous and untested, so it's off by default. – psusi May 14 '12 at 15:27
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