Bad experience switching to SSD on FreeBSD 10.3

[Manish Jain]

On 6/25/2016 2:44 AM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
> On Fri, June 24, 2016 3:24 pm, Manish Jain wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a rather bad experience switching to SSD on FreeBSD 10.3 amd64.
> Things would have been much worse had the SSD switch not worked for my
> other OS - Windows XP, a bit surprising because XP does not support SSD
> TRIM.
>>
>> For my upgrade, there were 3 components which I upgraded simultaneously
> :
>>
>> 1) Keyboard -> LED backlit keyboard (Cooler Master Devastator, USB) 2) 2
> GB DDR3 RAM -> 8GB DDR3 (G Skill)
>> 3) Sata HD -> SSD (Samsung EVO 500 GB)
>>
>> The keyboard upgrade itself failed for FreeBSD. The moment I switch on
> the
>> LED backlight light for the keys, console output freezes till I turn off
> the backlight. This is surprising because the keyboard works well on XP,
> which was developed almost 2 decades back. The reason this is important
> for me is because I love working in the dark, with no bright lights
> around. LED keyboards make that possible. Not just that, the keyboard
> looks sensational - particularly with LED on, when the thing looks
> futuristic.
>
> It's useful that you share that, but it doesn't resemble the subject... I
> know, sometimes it is really hard to make subject say what you will
> describe.
>
>>
>> So I resigned myself to working without the LED. Upon installation of
> FreeBSD and Gnome3, the desktop started crashing. I suspected the RAM to
> be defective and reinstalled the whole OS with the RAM switched to the
> original 2 GB - which was working flawlessly on previous FreeBSD 10.2
> installation. Upon reinstall, things were much better, but then Gnome
> Tweak Tool just does not work. This makes it impossible to get the
> Applications menu and the Window list, which I find absolutely
> essential.
>> There is no way I can work the Activities system that Gnome ships with
> as
>> default. Hotspot makes things much worse, although I think there is an
> extension that disable hotspot. But first I have to get the Activities
> menu and the Window List, without which I just can't use Gnome. If I
> can't
>> get Gnome to work for me, FreeBSD itself becomes useless as a desktop
> OS.
>
> I suspect some hardware problems, maybe not fully compatible or flaky new
> RAM. Your SSD sounds really good, I exclude that just based on its
> reputation. I myself just switched to similar Samsung (only 1 TB) my
> laptop (FreeBSD 10.3; Fujitsu Ultrabook U904). All happily works and rock
> solid for me. I do not use Gnome, I use Mate instead. My laptop keyboard
> backlite turns ON and OFF without problem (I can see somebody already
> figured out what happens in your case). I didn't test/tweak many thing yet
> (and usually I only tweak a few)... Question: did you have the same
> everything (hardware wise and settings/tweaks wise) before you switched to
> SSD? As I for one can not see any reason to blame switching to SSD for
> this bucket of problems.
>
>>
>> So I crapped the FreeBSD installation and switched to Windows XP +
> Cygwin.
>> On XP, the whole thing works fantastically. My system is much faster,
> roughly 3 times compared to when I had the SATA HD. Now I am stuck with
> Windows XP, when the entire upgrade had targeted removal of XP and
> FreeBSD
>> as the only OS.
>
> Windows XP is not supported for quite long, and after the end of support
> there were several security problems discovered, which your unsupported XP
> is vulnerable to. I would recommend to relly quit on Windows XP. I have to
> use windows occasionally (I run it under VirtualBox on FreeBSD
> machines: laptop and workstation), nothing lower than Windows 7 can be
> safely run.
>
> Good luck making FreeBSD work for you! Even if it takes some effort it's
> well worth it.
>
> Valeri
>
>> The LED keyboard situation is unwarranted - FreeBSD should
>> by now be having support for USB LED keyboard. The Gnome situation is an
> equal concern. FreeBSD is famous for making sensible choices. The Gnome
> developers have screwed up the desktop environment with rotten user
> interface choices, and the thing now needs to be fixed with extensions
> and
>> tweak tools. This leads directly to inavailability of FreeBSD for me for
> the time being. I was prepared to go without the keyboard - I could have
> tried passing the USB commands to Widows XP hosted under VirtualBox.
> That
>> might have been possible, although I am not sure it would have worked.
> But
>> the additional Gnome problem leads me to
>>    revert
>>   to XP as the only OS for the time being. Hopefully things will be fixed
>> with FreeBSD 11.0. Luckily for me, I used MBR partitioning when
>> initializing the SSD - against the advice from this forum. Because of
> that, I was able to try out XP, rather than having to roll back the
> whole
>> upgrade.
>>
>> I hope developers at FreeBSD and Gnome become aware of my experience - I
> dearly wish things will be fixed ASAP.
>>
>> Thank you.
>> Manish Jain

Sorry, the title of the my message was misleading. The problem was not 
SSD : rather it was LED keyboard and Gnome Tweak Tool.

Regards

Manish Jain