SSDs versus spinning-rust drives

[Michael Butash]

I've used ssd's as boot drives since the first 32gb units from random
vendors, and most have been terrible lasting 6mo-1yr generally before
death.  Past 4-5 years, using Samsungs or Toshiba (oddly), I've had good
luck.

SSD's need some wear-leveling involved in hardware, or they die.  My
experience at least, but I have had several die across raid pairs, one
always just flatlines suddenly.

I use encryption, raid, and lvm in fs setup, so it is simply required as
ssd trim is generally not working as a pass through function without
security issues.  If you can't do direct trim support, or wear-leveling is
involved at a hardware leveling, mine have died, at least one at a time.
This is at least 3 different vendors, including corsair, adata, and another
I already forgot.

Since moving to Samsung SSD's I've not lost one.  I use Pro's in my desktop
and my last laptop in raid, plus several evo's in some test systems that I
use for network test rigs.  All have outlasted _any_ other SSD I have
owned.  They cost more, but they haven't died like, oh every other one.

My xps15 came with a toshiba 1tb that I don't know if uses active
wear-leveling, but it's been good to me.  I use it in place of my desktop
mostly now for almost 3yr, and it's been solid, but non-redundant.  My last
laptop took at least redundant mssd's with a pair of samsung 950 pro's that
was great, but my current xps15 has one m2 sadly.

I use some other random ssd's still from failed raid pairs as odd drives
(if it dies, f-it) still, it just seems random what works.  I generally
didn't even reformat leaving them md raid drives, and they work, but in a
pair once _always_ died, till the Samsungs.

-mb


On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 1:13 PM William Lindley <wlindley at wlindley.com>
wrote:

> Contemplating ordering an SSD as at least the boot and main drive for my
> PC.
>
> Is that even a good idea?  Are /var, logfiles, and all the other stuff
> that constantly gets written to disk, still a Really Bad Idea for
> solid-state memory with its limited write cycle times?
>
> Or is that no longer an issue?
>
> And does anyone really trust SSD to maintain actual documents, family
> photos, and such over long periods of time?
>
> \\/
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