(OT) Questions About SSDs for a Laptop

[Mark Phillips]

Michael,

Great info...Thanks!

Are there any performance (or other issues) between a raid1with two 1tb
msata ssds and rsync between one 1tb msata ssd and 7200 rpm 1tb hdd? I like
the idea of raid1 with two ssds, but not sure if I am ready to buy 2 1tb
ssds. And yes, I really need a 1 tb drive.....Just consider me a hoarder of
data...;)

Mark
On Sep 3, 2014 8:39 AM, "Michael Butash" <michael at butash.net> wrote:

>  On 09/02/2014 10:23 AM, Mark Phillips wrote:
>
> I am looking at a new Linux laptop, and I have the option of a mSata SSD
> drive or a conventional drive. I am considering a 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO
> mSata SSD for the OS and all my partitions.
>
>  1. Are there any reasons not to use a SSD for the full disk, as opposed
> to just for the OS? Other than saving money, as a small SSD would cost a
> lot less!
>
> None I can think of, I do this with mine.  I slice out root, var, var/log,
> usr, and home to lvm's, usually adding another dump slice under /mnt for
> "everything else" including vm images and such across the whole disk.  I do
> not however provision all the vg space, reserving it for another slice,
> lvextending, etc case I run out of space elsewhere.
>
>
>  2. I have seen recommendations on the net to backup the drive to a
> spinning drive. The laptop has a couple of bays, so I could put a back up
> drive in one of the bays. Does this make sense, or have SSDs matured enough
> that they will last like a spinning drive?
>
> You'll want to do the optimizations still.  I have a pretty complex setup
> I have to build at an initrd usually outside of installers, aligning
> blocks/chunks across disparate filesystems from mdraid, cryptsetup, lvm, to
> ext4.  I don't use trim (cryptsetup vulnerabilities), but it's possible to
> do full-stack traversal like that apparently.
>
> See also:
> http://blog.neutrino.es/2013/howto-properly-activate-trim-for-your-ssd-on-linux-fstrim-lvm-and-dmcrypt/
>
>
>  3. Anything else I should be aware of when moving to the world of SSDs?
>
> Yes, they die.  Often in my experience.  I never NOT raid1 them now.  My
> first I thought it'd be cool to raid0, and holy crap it was fast.  Then one
> (thus all my data) died after 2 months.  Raid1 ftw from here out.  I have
> way too much proprietary data to not keep it resilient (mdadm), keep it
> secure (cryptsetup), and keep it flexible (lvm).
>
> I've used them from the first gen sandforce and micron chips, they all die
> at some point.  Most lasting recently was my old adata sandforce2+ drives,
> but one would randomly fall out of raid, but this could have also been my
> mobo sucking (intel p65, with the oob crap southbridge).
>
> Along the way I perfected my install to the point the ssd's keep lasting
> longer, so I like to think it's that, but really not sure if hw is getting
> better, or I'm better at not slaughtering them with io.
>
> I'm currently using 2x mx100 512gb ssd's in my desktop and 2x samsung 840
> 512gb msata's in my dell e7420 that knock on wood has been great, both
> raid1 only.  I've never not been able to recover data off a raid1 config
> with linux when one fails.
>
> Happy to share my setup steps, latest to do this with mint, but sorta
> works with ubuntu other than their installers being terrible about dealing
> with me shifting the fs about under it.  I gave up doing this with 14.04,
> they crippled it entirely for this sort of setup.
>
>
>  Thanks,
>
>  Mark
>
>
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