[ale] Well, this is More Fun than I thought

[Charles Shapiro]

Heh!  Thanks for the thoughtful post!.   Yeh, concerns over numerous writes
was why I decided to leave my Swap partition on the spinning-rust side.  I
don't see a whole lot of use in /tmp on this machine, and with 60 gb I
think I am safe for a while even if I start getting bad sectors.   I mostly
brainlessly used LVM _because_ it's an extra level of abstraction, but you
right that in this case it probably didn't buy me a whole lot.  I have my
eye on that old 8 GB OS partition though. Once I am sure I'm not interested
in any part of it, I'll probably fold it into /home -- or I suppose I could
make it into a /tmp if I get paranoid.   Fortunately my Core I7 mobo with
an AMI 2010 bios has always had UEFI turned off.  Still seems fast enough
for Buster though.  And you right, it's definitely a faster boot.  Old
system took a minute to get from power-on to login screen.  This one clocks
in at under 30 seconds.


-- CHS


On Sat, Jul 25, 2020 at 4:18 AM Steve Litt via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 20:37:11 -0400
> Charles Shapiro via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
> > Finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my main desktop from
> > Debian 8 to Debian 10. It had been a shameful two years since my last
> > full upgrade.  Followed the Path of Least Resistance.  The original
> > machine had a 1/2 TB drive partitioned into 8 gb of OS space, 18 gb
> > of Swap, and the rest /home.  I was seriously running out of root and
> > tmp space.  I've only filled up about 150 GB of my /home partition.
> > I've got 12 GB of memory in this thing and I don't come close to
> > using that up.
> >
> > So I hopped down to my friendly neighborhood Micro Center and picked
> > up a 120 gb SSD for a laughable $18.
>
> Nice!
>
> > The hardest part of the hardware
> > installation was squinching the data cable into the connector on the
> > side of the motherboard.  BIOS recognized it right away.  A far cry
> > from the Bad Old Days of fiddling with jumpers and entering
> > cylinders/heads/sectors.
> >
> > I partitioned half the SSD as OS and half as /tmp.
>
> You might want to reconsider that /tmp. /tmp gets written/erased all
> the time, and that's bad for SSDs. On the other hand, my /tmp contains
> only 48 MEGAbytes of data, so from a practical standpoint that's
> probably not an issue if your /tmp is like mine. I mean, if the SSD
> breaks in 3 years, you buy another one for $18, and that one will
> probably be 512GB.
>
> > lvm made it a
> > Snap to use my old swap and mount my old /home partition.
>
> I'm not a fan of LVM because it's one more level of abstraction, and
> it's one more level to drill through if something goes wrong. That's my
> personal thing: I know a lot of people love LVM, especially those who
> do encryption. But if you *didn't* want to LVM, you could also put a
> mount to your current spinning rust /home in /etc/fstab.
>
> I bet your computer is now *a lot* faster. Every program you load now
> comes straight from electronics, not from a head moving to the right
> place on a cylinder.
>
> The way I set my (5 year old, 16GB RAM) desktop up, I have a 256GB SSD
> as my root partition, and mount my spinning rust hosted data partitions
> like /home, /scratch, /d, /s, and /classic. All of those but /home are
> Steve Litt creations, and all of them get written a lot except
> /classic. So, like you, my OS is on SSD, but for my big data I get the
> cheaper cost per GB of spinning rust for my big data.
>
> Check out the following line from my /etc/fstab:
>
> /scratch/gnome-boxes /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes none bind 0 0
>
> I did the preceding because the gnome-boxes utility, which performs a
> similar task as qemu and Virtualbox, defaults to putting huge disk
> images in /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes, quickly overconsuming
> the partition I use for /home. Meanwhile, I had no disk space left to
> make a new partition and no desire to shrink an existing partition, and
> also, I have no idea of my gnome-boxes needs for the future. No
> problem: I used a bind-mount to my humongous 2.9TB /scratch partition,
> which is normally used for big and/or miscellaneous stuff not needing
> to be backed up. So my newly bind-mounted
> /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes can now grow and shrink as needed,
> without my having to tell it to (like with LVM).
>
> Another nice thing about using a small SSD as / is that you don't have
> to use UEFI: You can use old-style MBR BIOS, without losing disk space,
> if you want to use MBR and if your mobo supports it. That's what I do.
> I've heard a few too many stories of badly programmed mobo UEFI
> firmware bricking the box if you alter or delete the wrong files within
> your disk's UEFI partition.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> May 2020 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
>      of the Successful Technologist
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
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