5 Aug
2021
5 Aug
'21
6:25 p.m.
dep wrote:
It does, as do the comments from everyone else, and as
soon as I hit send
on this note I'll push the button to buy the WD blue 500gb ($60 at
amazon).
From what I've been able to read, the failures are more likely during
writes, which does make me wonder as to the wisdom of putting /swap on the
SSD. I do have 32gb of memory, so swapping isn't as frequent as it used to
be, but with just / on the SSD I'd be writing to it only when I install
new software or there's an update.
I wouldn't care that much, because these are robust devices and can handle
100s of 1000s writes.
Note that WD BLUE != WD RED. WD RED is more expensive but apparently much
better. But the one of the 500GB SSDs is WD BLUE and no issues so far.
The 120GB is WD GREEN and also no issues although I do not keep this machine
running all the time.
It does remind me a little of the old PC days with the
640k RAM limit. One
of the tricks for those of us with more memory was at boot to create a
virtual drive -- a ramdisk -- and copy, among other things, command.com to
it, then set COMSPEC to point to that copy. It did speed things up quite a
bit.
Boot time is interesting, but I don't reboot often enough for that to be
important to me beyond being amazed by a really fast time between the
popup errors from that damned xdg thing when I start TDE. (Was there ever
a way discovered to make that go away? I do not care what xdg thinks of my
menu.) But a significant speed improvement in program execution would be
welcome. I don't game (nor am I impressed with Bell Delphine), and loading
a thousand pictures at a time, which I sometimes have to do, is never
going to be really fast because I'm not putting my photo files on an SSD.
But if programs in general run considerably faster it seems worth it.
Still trying to figure out a way that apt upgrade would upgrade both an
SSD boot and an installation on a conventional hard drive, because in the
event of an SSD failure I'd like to be able to pop the case, move the
connector, and reboot with no other intervention. (I don't guess I'd even
have to alter the fstab, either, because the one on the hard drive would
be good for boots from it.) Not sure whether this can be done.
It depends how you setup grub on both disks ... If I were you, I would clone
the one to the other.
Actually if you want to put only / and swap on the disk, you could use much
smaller device - like 120GB or even 50GB would be more than enough.
You could buy two smaller disks for the money for 1x500GB and RAID1 and
forget about copies. Still make backups at least before major upgrades.
regards
PS: Here is smartctl output from the WD BLUE (and don't ask why it is 3Gbps)
smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [x86_64-linux-4.19.190eko4] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: WD Blue PC SSD
Device Model: WDC WDS500G1B0A-00H9H0
Serial Number: xxxx
LU WWN Device Id: 5 001b44 8b49c2a69
Firmware Version: X41100WD
User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate: Solid State Device
Form Factor: 2.5 inches
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ACS-2 T13/2015-D revision 3
SATA Version is: SATA 3.2, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Thu Aug 5 20:18:45 2021 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection:
Disabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine
completed
without error or no self-test has
ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: ( 0) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x11) SMART execute Offline immediate.
No Auto Offline data collection
support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
No Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
No Conveyance Self-test supported.
No Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 10) minutes.
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 4
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 33740
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 653
165 Block_Erase_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 47120952
166 Minimum_PE_Cycles_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 2
167 Max_Bad_Blocks_per_Die 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 30
168 Maximum_PE_Cycles_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 22
169 Total_Bad_Blocks 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 517
170 Grown_Bad_Blocks 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
171 Program_Fail_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
172 Erase_Fail_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
173 Average_PE_Cycles_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 6
174 Unexpected_Power_Loss 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 65
184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 058 054 --- Old_age
Always - 42 (Min/Max 17/54)
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
230 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0x013e0055013e
232 Available_Reservd_Space 0x0033 100 100 004 Pre-fail
Always - 100
233 NAND_GB_Written_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 3467
234 NAND_GB_Written_SLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age
Always - 6181
241 Total_Host_GB_Written 0x0030 253 253 --- Old_age
Offline - 5075
242 Total_Host_GB_Read 0x0030 253 253 --- Old_age
Offline - 18988
244 Temp_Throttle_Status 0x0032 000 100 --- Old_age
Always - 0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]
Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported