I cloned Endeavour and Solus together a couple years from two HDD platters to one SSD where they live together comfortably. I think platter days are finally over.
Problem is is it was a 120GB and they get 60GB each which I have never been comfortable with. The brand is Crucial.
The limitations of my older Lenovo desktop refurb are Sata III configurations on the mobo, not PCI.
I’m ok with Sata III. Beats the hell of a platter as far as performance. I didn’t know any better about SSDs when I bought the 120GB.
Future Project: clone both OS’s again to a more breathable 250GB + SSD I will buy soon.
QUESTIONS: want durable and built to last. Brands you would rec? What brands would you avoid?
I’ve had failures in OCZ (2.5" SATA SSD) and Intel (M2 SSD). Interestingly, I’ve used those brands the least and yet they’re the only ones I’ve had failures with. The OCZ was rated as fast at the time, but I don’t trust them for reliability. The Intel I expected more from in terms of reliability. It was far from old, or extensively used but it was a catastrophic failure on a live project.
I’ve used many Samsung SATA SSD drives over the years in various commercial projects, and had no failures.
In my own systems, I use Kingston (3x KC3000 M.2’s) and some older Samsung’s (4x 850 Pro SATA SSD’s). I’d comfortably recommend either brand from experience. I find Kingston to be a bit more competitive price wise.
Find some options, and compare their rated speeds and TBW (total bytes written) and MTBF specs. The TBW and MTBF specs are probably your best guide to durability (higher values being better).
The technology of SSD’s has limited writes, even now. In early SSD’s, this was a real issue and early failure was a real potential.
Current SSD’s have largely addressed this by distributed writing and increasing the write limits, but it’s something you might still keep in mind. The specification that relates to this is the TBW.
The limited writes is one reason to consider using a file system like Btrfs, which on a default EndeavourOS installation applies light compression, to in effect reduce SSD writes and increasing the longevity of SSD’s.
The MTBF (mean time between failures) is the devices overall rated reliability.
how do you mean that? getting rid of a distro and installing another one? constant partition resizing or that kind of stuff? ideally I’m just looking for two distros, two bootloaders, same disk. no waves. I think for my use case Endeavour with Solus is all I need for a long while.
Would write-limits apply for my planned usage?
excellent to know, thank you. I have not looked into this.
BTRFS has always been one of those challenges I look forward to. I try a lot of stuff to shake any Linux complacency. BSD and creating my own WM/TM got away from me from most things I can handle. btrfs I have researched.
Any write operation, which might be saving / renaming / deleting a file, writing to swap, formatting a drive, getting updates, using the browser. Pretty much every single little thing you do on your system involves some element of write (cache, swap, configs, file system metadata, etc).
The write limits are fairly large. You can also monitor them using smartctl (replace sdX with your actual drive):
sudo smartctl -A /dev/sdX
So for my primary drive (Kingston KC3000 2TB), containing OS, apps and user profile data, my output has:
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 6%
Data Units Written: 296,344,912 [151 TB]
Power On Hours: 6,190
The drive’s TBW is rated for 1.6 petabytes / 1,638 terabytes written. Based on that, the wear on my drive might be 9.21%, however it’s reporting “Percentage Used” as 6%. I suspect this is taking the “Available Spare” into account. That’s an area of the drive reserved for when sectors become bad, and the spare can be switched in.
So if 6,190 hours of usage has worn out my drive to 6%, I could estimate that I won’t hit 100% for another 96,977 hours. If you do the maths on that, that’s a decent amount of time, like 22 years if I’m using the PC for 12 hours every day.
Mind you, my second KC3000 2TB is still reporting 0% usage, so I could always swap them over long before then
I should note too, I do a lot of video, photo and development work. All of which have very high write activity, so I’d expect my stats be higher than average.
Another thing to note too, is that a larger drive in any particular series, will have a higher TBW rating. This scales with drive capacity, so the TBW of a 512GB drive, is typically twice that of a 256GB drive, etc. If you’re wanting longevity, even if you’re not necessarily needing the space, take that into consideration.
As far as drives I’ve used that “last”—Samsung is the #1 choice…I’ve started trying Lexar drives…no real info yet–they seem to be as fast as Samsung & a bit less expensive. I’ve got a Samsung 850 that is still running very well in one of my laptops…a couple of 860’s in my DAC….if you want one that lasts…that is my opinion. I also offload high read/write tasks (browsers & similar) to a spinning drive or a separate sacrificial SSD.
this is the real context I truly value, thanks for breaking it down. I did not know every single move you made would tax an SSD. Platters seemed to last 20-30 or more years with some wear but…6190 at 6% is awesome and so is 22 years.
drive size ration also noted. this makes my approach much more informed. I can dial this in
SDDs and HDDs available for Consumers are produced with 5 year of productive use. After this time the vendor does not take any responsibility for anything. MTBF and TBW are calculated on this premise.
In a normal environment it is almost not possible to wear a modern SSD out. Just buy something from the big 3: Soligdim (ex Intel), Samsung or Crucial. Why those? Because they actually manufacture the stuff, all other buy stuff and slap it together. Does this make those 3 better? Not necessarily so, but it makes the others worse in terms of reliability. On top of this: This three have quite a good track record when it comes to fix errors via firmware updates.
I would go with the good old Crucial MX500.
Crucial was the first ssd i bough. Crucial M500. Installed it and was blown away by the speeds of it compared by a hhd 7200rpm drive back in time. Since then i never bought a hdd drive ever again.
I made a rookie mistake years ago, i bought a nvme drive and thought it would fit in a sata m3 slot. It didn’t fit so i put the card upside down. Turned on the notetebook and something smelled like it was burning, turned the notebook off and checked the nvme drive….the chip on thr nvme drive whasso hot. Luckily there whas no single damage to the notebook it self, just the chip from the nvme that ran very very hot. The sata m3 slot also works, it runs a western digital blue m3 drive for years now.
I did some research before and asked help on the acer forum. Someone said it supported 2 nvme drives so thats why i put it upside down. The person on the forum was wrong.
Running here some Samsung (Pro!) since many years, never had problems. A bit more expensive, yes, but I think, you get it back.
Since some months one EVO in use, then you should look for TLC type, not QLC or more…
The 990 pro’s are great. I have 2x 4TB bought 2 years ago and they are bloody fast. 1 is used for the os only (i know overkill) and 1 is used as gaming drive.
Samsung is and has been a gold standard for these, at least for me. Still have a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro running in one of my boxes…well past its 10 year warranty.
from most things I can handle. btrfs I have researched.