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A three drive system - the sweet spot

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cranioscopical:
A couple of years ago I installed a 128 GB SSD as my boot drive…  and if anyone is interestedThat was a bit too snug for what I was doing, so I upped it to 240GB. After a while I added a second 480GB SSD, then swapped the boot drive for a 520GB SSD. I keep one 2TB mechanical drive on board for little-used junk data.

Thanks to the SSDs, computing has never been better for me.

I've lost one SSD (a 128GB OCZ Vertex) probably because I was playing around with it in an external drive cradle.

So, I like SSDs but it's probably better to buy a decently sized model to begin with than to work one's way up the capacity ladder. Now I have a few unused 128's and 240's lying around.

FWIW, as I can easily eject drives from a front-fed bay I tried a backup policy of having two identical boot drives - if one fails, shove in the alternate and carry on. That turned out to be a pain as various things didn't like the hardware change and I had to keep track of two items (I find counting things to be difficult with my socks on). For me it is easier to use a 'normal' backup strategy — it's so easy and fast these days just to stick in a new drive and restore to that.

40hz:
Brian Trapp over at Linux Journal agrees with Cranioscopical, Innuendo and xtabber regarding SSDs.

Solid-State Drives: Get One Already!
Mar 18, 2014  By Brian Trapp   
 
I've been building computers since the 1990s, so I've seen a lot of new technologies work their way into the mainstream. Most were the steady, incremental improvements predicted by Moore's law, but others were game-changers, innovations that really rocketed performance forward in a surprising way. I remember booting up Quake after installing my first 3-D card—what a difference! My first boot off a solid-state drive (SSD) brought back that same feeling—wow, what a difference!

However, at a recent gathering of like-minded Linux users, I learned that many of my peers hadn't actually made the move to SSDs yet. Within that group, the primary reluctance to try a SSD boiled down to three main concerns:


* I'm worried about their reliability; I hear they wear out.
* I'm not sure if they work well with Linux.
* I'm not sure an SSD really would make much of a difference on my system.
Luckily, these three concerns are based either on misunderstandings, outdated data, exaggeration or are just not correct.  <more>
--- End quote ---

Brian's article goes on to discuss SSDs primarily from the viewpoint of a Linux user. But he includes a discussion of the technology and the results of his real-world testing that should be of interest to anybody regardless of which OS they're running.

He concludes with the following remarks:

Summary

If you haven't considered an SSD, or were holding back for any of the reasons mentioned here, I hope this article prompts you to take the plunge and try one out.

For reliability, modern SSDs are performing on par with HDDs. (You need a good backup, either way.) If you were concerned about longevity, you can use data from your existing system to approximate how long a current generation MLC or TLC drive would last.

SSD support has been in place in Linux for a while, and it works well even if you just do a default installation of a major Linux distribution. TRIM support, some ext4 tweaks and monitoring via tune2fs and smartctl are there to help you maintain and monitor overall SSD health.

Finally, some real-world performance benchmarks illustrate how an SSD will boost performance for any operation that uses disk storage, but especially ones that involve many different files.

Because even OS-only budget-sized SSDs can provide significant performance gains, I hope if you've been on the fence, you'll now give one a try.
--- End quote ---

So there you have it...

Seems to me that (a) the people who actually own an SSD love these little guys; (b) reliability doesn't seem to be as much a concern as it originally was; and (c) regardless of what you've read (or been told) SSDs are just like any other piece of hardware (i.e. YMMV.) ;D

I guess the only real way to find out is get one and see for yourself.  8)

y0himba:
I have not yet owned an SSD.  Mine is:

C: 1Tb SYSTEM
D: 4TB GAMES (1.3TB free)
E: 2TB DOCUMENTS
F: 1TB PAGE FILE and TEMP

Vurbal:
WRT consumer SSDs I think the real world reliability is often very different than what you're likely to get from a properly configured test setup due to power quality issues. IME controller electronics have been far and away the most common failure point for modern consumer HDDs for several years now.

A significant percentage of home computers (and sadly an awful lot of business computers) have low quality power supplies which are plugged into outlets with inconsistent line quality and poor or nonexistent grounding. When you replace the mechanical bits of a hard drive with the purely electronic ones in a SSD it stands to reason cheap computers would have a higher failure rate than expensive ones. I'm over generalizing a bit because not every expensive computer has a quality power supply but a quality power supply usually makes for a more expensive computer.

That's without even getting into the issue of cooling which is a problem for all drives, but probably even more for a SSD (especially a consumer model) than a HDD.

cranioscopical:
That's without even getting into the issue of cooling which is a problem for all drives, but probably even more for a SSD (especially a consumer model) than a HDD.
-Vurbal (March 25, 2014, 04:28 PM)
--- End quote ---
I find that my machines run cooler with SSDs than with mechanical drives. More space for air flow?
 

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