On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 13:05:11 -0700
William Lindley <
wlindley@wlindley.com> wrote:
> Contemplating ordering an SSD as at least the boot and main drive for
> my PC.
>
> Is that even a good idea?
Yes yes yes yes YES!
I've been doing that for 5 years, and my 5 year old computer is still
quick as lightning.
> 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?
Yes. Have them be RAM drives or spinning rust.
>
> 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?
For me, it's not an issue of trust. For me, it's simply that I need
more than a terrabyte to store all my stuff, and AFAIK consumer grade
(reasonably priced) SSDs top out at 1TB. As far as trust, anything you
don't back up regularly and store safely is just a temporary file.
Here's how I set up my computer:
My / is a 256GB SSD. On it I've mounted spinning rust partitions for
/home and my other various data directories, as well as /var. The only
things residing directly on the root filesystem are /usr, /lib, boot,
/etc, and /sys. These are all the directories that get mostly read and
seldom written. My computer sprints as all commands are pulled from SSD
inststead of ring and sector. I be sure to delete uselessly old kernels
and associated stuff out of /boot every once in a while, and ever few
days I do the following command:
fstrim /
As a result, my SSD has the following population:
[slitt@mydesk data]$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 220G 23G 186G 11% /
[slitt@mydesk data]$
SSDs don't get into real write trouble until they're full enough that
most writes take place in a small percentage of the SSD. On my SSD, the
few writes that get done have room to roam, especially because I delete
old stuff and run fstrim to reclaim deleted space.
One more benefit of SSD / that most can't take advantage of but I can:
With my tiny SSD /, I can still do MBR boot, while still taking
advantage of GPT formatting of my immense spinning rust disks that get
mounted.
SteveT
Steve Litt
November 2019 featured book: Manager's Guide to Technical
Troubleshooting Second edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mgr
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