CENTOS 7 On SSD Drives SkyLake Processor

[LongShoreman]

I planning on ordering anew Lenovo workstation with SkyLake processor when they become available, I’m hoping the new SkyLake processor will support 64GB of memory. However I want to also have 2 Samsung SSD 850 Pro 2.5” SATA III 2TB, I want to install CENTOS 7 and the host operating system and from there I also plan to create VMs to run multiple operating systems. Can someone please help by answering the following questions:

1. Will CENTOS 7 install and boot in this hardware configuration?

2. Should I use LVM to manage partitions? How do I not use LVM?

3. I’ve heard a lot about using “TRIM” vs not using “TRIM because of wear on the SSD drive. Why is this such an issue?
Regular drives have been managing un-used space and reclaiming space for years?

4. What other things should I be looking out for?

[KevinJay]

Low-level operation of SSD's are quite different from a typical HHD. TRIM prevents performance degradation on a SSD by allowing the operating system to tell the SSD which blocks of data can be deleted internally. TRIM is very important to SSD maintenance. I'm not aware of any issues with TRIM 'wearing out' an SSD drive.

[TrevorH]

No idea if skylake processor based systems will be supported on day 1 but they will be eventually I'm sure. I see no reason not to use LVM, ever. The arguments for using/not using trim that I've seen are more to do with the performance impact. If using trim as a file system option then when a file is deleted the SSD is instructed to discard those sectors that used to belong to the file. That discard process takes time and can impact other i/o operations so some people prefer to not add 'discrd' the the fstab entry so that trim does not occur during normal operation. You can then run fstrim as a cronjob, say on a nightly basis, and get it to discard all relevant sectors in one go and at one time so the performance impact is all in one chunk out of normal hours.