[ale] Quiet spinning drives?

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:15:37 -0800
Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net> wrote:

> On 2017-02-15 17:49, Steve Litt wrote:
> > On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 12:39:21 -0800
> > Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net> wrote:
> >   
> >> That's an SSD which I don't think is going to apply in this case
> >> to a single-drive system (OS, data and swap).  The concern in this
> >> case is the data rewrites (especially swap) that would wear on an
> >> SSD.  That's why I feel this machine really needs a spinning
> >> disk.  
> > 
> > First of all, you can only expect 3 years from a drive anyway.
> > Anything extra is an unexpected goodie. You're using 1GB right now.
> > If you used a 512GB SSD (I think those are under $100 now) and ran
> > fstrim on all its partitions every couple midnights, I'm pretty
> > sure it would take a loooooooong time for the drive to start
> > suffering from rewrite-itis.
> > 
> > I could be wrong, but if I am, you lost $100. If I'm right, it might
> > run perfectly for 10 years.
> > 
> > LOL, maybe use USB3 thumb drive partitions for swap and for /tmp.  
> 
> Considering this machine has only USB1.1, I don't think a thumb drive
> is going to help me much for swap. :)

Probably not.

> 
> The current drives in the system have been running for almost 20 years
> (which is why they're 8 GB drives). 

What kind of drives, how have you installed them? I've never had
anything close to that kind of longevity. I think I've had a few go 8
years.

> At least with spinning drives they
> tended to run for quite a while before old age would harm them.

I've had spinning drives blow up in 6 months, and some in 18 months.

> Granted at the volume I'm running I agree that a 512 GB drive (or
> even just a 128 GB) would take time to achieve several full disk
> writes and probably last five to ten years.  The thing is I don't
> want a situation where that data is suddenly locked up without access
> because I went over a manufacturer's endurance limit (trying to find
> the endurance report that showed a couple drives went totally offline
> after hitting the limit). 

Yes! That's why you do frequent backups. Whether it's a SSD wear
problem, a funky spinning disk, or a guy breaks into your house and
walks off with your computer, your properly made and stored backup
frees you from that worry.

> This is especially important with write
> amplification, I don't know how many writes I would actually be
> making.  I only know that I'm sending about 1.5 GB/day to the drive.

Given that you're still at only 16G after 20 years, I'm assuming you
delete almost as much as you send every day. If that's the fact, you
should probably run fstrim on every partition every night, so that
deleted space is recovered instantly, and new writes have a lot of
choice as to where to get written. My understanding is that SSD
write-wear problems happen when the SSD is mostly full (or has unfreed
deleted data), so that writes happen within small areas of the
remaining disk. By running fstrim every night, you make sure that you
don't have that kind of problem until you really have too much data for
that SSD.

 
SteveT

Steve Litt 
February 2017 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive