General :: Do SSDs Really Have A Much Shorter Life Than HDDs
May 3, 2011
HDD vs SSD durability
After reading Jeff Atwood's recent blog post on solid state drives, I'm somewhat deterred in wanting to own one. I basically want to use solid state drives in my home network for the following purposes (all machines running 64bit Linux):
My main (pwn3r) desktop computer. This will be my main workstation for work, video encoding, etc. This will be running an Intel 980x 6-core processor, making it a beast. My hard disk configuration will be:
RAID-0: 2 Crucial 128GB Solid State drives for the main operating system(s), essentially providing 256GB of incredibly fast storage.
RAID-1: 2 WD 2TB Hard Disk drives for media and backup storage.
My network firewall computer. This will be running Untangle on my home network for content filtering and firewalling (if that's a word). It will be running an Intel Atom D525 dual core 1.8GHz processor. The hard disk configuration will consist of a single small 16-32GB solid state drive for the operating system and little, if anything, else.
My home HTTP/SFTP/file/backup server. This will be running a dual-core Intel i3 processor; it will be used for some video encoding, as a local DLNA server, a HTTP server for a few largely static files and perhaps some interactive scripts, a SSH server, possibly OpenVPN, and will be used to back up critical files over the network. It will be running RAID-X (where X > 0), meaning RAID-1 or RAID-5 or 6 for fast, redundant data storage, as well as a small SSD for the operating system.
I'm not exactly made of money, and I can't really count on buying four new SSDs every year or so. I can understand replacing them in computer number 1 once a year... maybe, but for the other computers which won't be utilizing the drive very much (ie: they're not power machines), it seems ridiculous to buy new drives this often.
My question is this: can I actually depend on solid state drives like I would on hard disk drives? Also, is this the best economic option? I'd like to save as much power and heat as I can, and solid state drives seem to be the best option at this point.
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Aug 13, 2010
I have a video file I pulled off of a disc from a camcorder. The file is in .VOB. If I open the file in anything besides VLC, it says that it is 23 seconds long and will either play only the first 23 seconds or play the whole 15 minutes VERY QUICKLY.
So, if I want to put this file into a video editor, I can't do much with it because it either doesn't play at all, or only plays 23 seconds.
I'm guessing there is some metadata in the file that declares how long it is that VLC is just ignoring. How can I access and change that metadata to its actual length? I fired up a hex editor just to see if I could find the number 23 somewhere in the beginning of the file, but I couldn't..
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Nov 10, 2010
Trying to sync a bunch of files to a 5.5-gen iPod with Banshee 1.6, on Lucid. I moved the files from my friend's computer to my Sansa View via UMS transfer; just dragged and dropped. The file lengths are correct on my player. My friend used Banshee to sync the same files, from the same computer, to his iPod. In Banshee and on his iPod, the files are all shorter. The files are supposed to be approximately 30 minutes each. In Totem on my friend's computer, and on my Sansa, the first file is 33:11. In Banshee and on his iPod, it's about 17:00. Some files have been cut down to two minutes long. This has happened across multiple albums in multiple folders. Clearly the problem is Banshee, since Totem recognizes the appropriate file length.
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Aug 21, 2011
Yesterday I got my new workstation featuring:
120 GB - OCZ Vertex3 MAX IOPS
300 GB - Western Digital Velociraptor (10k RPM, about 4ms avg. seek)
2x2TB Samsung Ecogreen F4
The system will be running Ubuntu with the main purpose of doing lots of Java development. Occasionally I have to develop Java in a Windows VM; for this I need fast VMs. I read a lot about SSD wear and maybe it is a bad idea to put the Eclipse workspace on the SSD, because of all the little writes the builds do. Perhaps the workspace (and thus /home) might find a better place on the Velociraptor which is real fast. How should I partition the whole thing to get the most out of it. LVM might be an option, too. Maybe putting a third partition on the SSD for one VirtualBox image. Currently I am thinking:
SSD: 2GB /boot, remaining space for / Velociraptor: LVM spanning the whole drive. 150GB /home Remaining Space for /virtualMachines or something like that Samsung drives (LVM over both or one Volume Group for each? - Latter would be better in terms of data security, because if one drive in a big volume group fails everything is lost)
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Oct 15, 2009
I have the following HDDs in an LVM2 configuration on an F10 box running Mythtv :-
# pvscan
PV /dev/sda2 VG VolGroup00 lvm2 [297.88 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdd1 VG VolGroup00 lvm2 [931.50 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdb1 VG VolGroup00 lvm2 [298.06 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdc1 VG VolGroup00 lvm2 [931.50 GB / 0 free]
Total: 4 [2.40 TB] / in use: 4 [2.40 TB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]
The system never uses more than about 250GB of HDD at any one time, so I would like to remove /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sdc1 from the LV and then from the machine and leave /dev/sda and /dev/sdb alone.
Does anyone know that if I use the command "system-config-lvm" to reduce the total LVM size to say 580GB, whether all data is preserved (I don't have any way at this stage to backup up 250GB of data, unless I buy more HDDs and that is the whole point of this exercise anyway - remove the two terrabyte drives to be used as backup disks).
Once I am happy that the data is safe, I will use "pvmove" and "vgreduce" to remove both terrabyte drives.
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Jun 2, 2010
I would like to know the best way to dual boot an already installed Win7 HDD, with adding a second HDD to which I will install Mint9?
I have attempted this in the past with Mint8, but managed to screw it up some how with Mint 8`s Beta Grub2! So bear with me if I am skittish on repeating a "conventional" Grub bootloader selection approach!
This time I would prefer to install Mint9 to it`s own HDD with Win7 disconnected if possible, and installing Mint`s Grub bootloader directly to the Mint HDD installation, just to insure Win7s MBR isn't affected by the Mint9 installation, by keeping each O.S. and it`s bootloader completely separate and apart. Of course then comes the question of how to access my new Mint 9 installation, since reconnecting my Win7 HDD (with it`s MBR) will become the default, with no knowledge of any Mint installation.
Would a third party bootloader such as "Easy BCD" be the way to go? Or am I over complicating what I would like to accomplish here? The main thing is: NOT having to upset my twice installed Win7 installation again!
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Aug 18, 2009
Does CentOS 5 support the ATA TRIM command for use with SSDs? Is the support automatic by default, or would I need to do something specific in order to enable the TRIM feature be used?
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Feb 14, 2010
I'm running Ubuntu Server 9.10. I have two external USB HDDs. I use them each for different backup reasons. So certain data gets stored on one HDD, and different information gets stored on the other HDD.
I want to make a script that can look at the external HDD can determine which HDD it is, so that it can copy the proper information to it. Is there a way for Linux to determine this? Like if I see one HDD as /dev/sdc1, then unplug it and plug in the other HDD, should Linux see it as /dev/sdd1 or will it be /dev/sdc1?
I don't quite understand how it determines the /dev/sdxx values that it assigns to drives.
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May 26, 2011
Currently running Slackware 13.37 64-bit on a notebook and finally have suspend/hibernate after realizing that USB devices, especially USB HDDs, need to be disconnected before suspend/hibernate can work. Problem is I have 2 USB HDDs that are connected to my notebook whenever the notebook is stationary for the extra storage so I'd like to create a script that would get invoked that would stop the suspend/hibernate process if certain partitions are mounted. I know what I would like to accomplish, but I have basic scripting knowledge so I was hoping to get some assistance.
1. script would basically store a user specified string containing devices that are non-USB, ie: NONUSB="/dev/sda /dev/sdb"
2. possibly use /etc/mtab to get a list of what is currently mounted and then remove lines containing whatever is specified in $NONUSB and store those values in $USB
3. run a for loop that executes 'umount' on each token in $USB
3a. stop suspend/hibernate process if 'umount' fails at any point
3b. if 'umount' passes then suspend/hibernate
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Feb 4, 2010
Does Suse have any software based TRIM support available or that is in the works?I know there is to a degree new firmware becoming available that supports TRIM (although some are pretty rudimentary) but windows 7 does a fairly good job software side and upgrading the firmware occasionally involves the unbridled joy that is wiping the drive and starting again.
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Aug 15, 2010
I'm building a new desktop computer, on which I plan to install Debian Squeeze. I'll have a 1 TB SATA hard drive in the system. I'm also considering using two 500 GB external USB drives, but I'm debating about how I want to use them. Running them all separately for 2 TB of space could be a nightmare, with three potential points of failure, so I was thinking of using the two external drives as a backup system instead.
I'm considering linking the two external drives in a RAID 0 array, then linking that array and the internal drive in a RAID 1 array. I would use mdadm software RAID for all of this so I could use individual partitions in the arrays, avoid hardware dependency, and have greater software control. So now is this feasible to do (having a partial RAID 0+1 setup)? Moreover, what kind of performance could I expect from using potentially slow external drives (one of which I know has a very long spin-up time after idle periods) in a mirroring setup with the internal drive?Would I be far better off using a filesystem backup daemon instead?
EDIT:After some more research and brainstorming, I've decided I might just end up using rsync+cron, lsyncd, or DRBD (assuming it can easily make backups locally). I'd probably have to link up the external drives in RAID 0 (or use some filesystem link trickery). But I suppose such a setup would offer greater control, flexibility in disk capacities (the full system isn't so strictly limited to the capacity of the smallest member of the array), and granularity than RAID 0+1 would.I'm still open to thoughts on the mdadm RAID 0+1 solution, but does anyone have any advice on choosing backup software? For some background on my needs, I'll be using this computer as both an everyday desktop and a personal LAMP server (MySQL database files would be included in the backups).
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Nov 15, 2009
I am extremely green when it comes to puppy but I would like to know how to install the Second Life client in Puppy. There are two Linux clients: [url] and [url]
I have some 2.14 and 2.17 puppys, and maybe some other versions. Can someone tell me whether either of those clients will run, and then
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Feb 15, 2015
I have two SSDs on which I have configured md RAID 0, with a 16 KB chunk size. My understanding is that Wheezy (and later) installations are smart enough to align partitions on block boundaries, even in md RAID configurations, but to satisfy my own natural distrust, how do I go about actually confirming that it has done the right thing? I have a single root logical volume within an LVM partition, but neither the logical volume nor the LVM partition occupy all available space, and the LVM partition is offset from the end of the disk.
My concern arises from the fact that, when I look at the sysfs entry for my root partition:
# cat /sys/devices/virtual/block/md126/md126p4/start
804818048
This number is not evenly divisible by 4096.
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Aug 20, 2015
I would like to make a boot RAID0 LVM on a pair of SSDs (sdc and sdd). The system is already running off of a HDD. I built the RAID0 through the Asus BIOS on the Intel controller. I see:
# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid0]
md124 : active raid0 sdc[1] sdd[0]
59346944 blocks super external:/md126/0 32k chunks
md125 : active raid0 sda[1] sdb[0]
222715904 blocks super external:/md127/0 32k chunks
[code]....
My challenge is that when I open Gparted, it only show one disk at a time. I would like to learn how to use Gparted to partition this RAID0 with a UEFI sector and LVM for the rest.
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Nov 14, 2010
I've been using Ubuntu for the past four years, but I recently bought a Dell Mini 1012, and while Ubuntu 10.04 is wonderful in every way, it is giving me quite poor results in terms of battery life, compared to Windows 7 which is also installed on the device. I have been able to get 4.5 hours out of Ubuntu,compared to the 8 hours I have been able to get with Windows 7 Starter. I have tried everything suggested here in order to get better battery life out of Ubuntu, but without success.I'm wondering if I might have better success with another distribution.Are there any Linux distributions available that can claim longer battery life than others, on netbooks and in general? This question can be answered objectively if it is backed up with hard data from based on benchmarks,
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Jul 6, 2011
i recently purchased my second laptop, primarily for linux. When i chose it, my main concern was battery life. Just to make a side note. When i say battery life, i mean how long the computer takes until the battery goes flat. Not how many years/ect it takes till the battery will no longer hold charge.
My new computer claims to be able to get 10 hours. Although it's a bit off, i get a satisfying little bit over 6 hours, from full charge. This is running Windows 7. I couldn't wait to put Linux on my new computer, i have, but it just isn't satisfying because i only get about 4 hours while running linux, tried three different distros, and all roughly the same.
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Jan 13, 2011
There's probably not too many Linux users how have their desktop Linux distros set to be console only as opposed to using an X server or a GUI. There's plenty of reasons to take this route and many ways to go about it, and I'll attempt to show you a (mostly) unbiased view on this choice, especially centered around the way I do it. Here's my setup: Dell Inspiron 1545, Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM. I have Windows XP, Ubuntu 8.04, and my main OS: Debian Squeeze.
UBUNTU USERS!!!
Debian Squeeze is probably the best option for a Ubuntu convert. Making Ubuntu console based is kinda hard and not recommended by me because it's such a large OS, and living in a text only computer is generally a minimalist idea, so having such a bulky base is both memory intensive and kinda gross. Debian uses apt-get, so people who grew up in a Ubuntu environment should feel at home with the sudo commands and such........
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Jan 12, 2011
I have been thinking about upgrading my RAID setup from a pair of Intel X25s running the software based RAID included with ubuntu to four Intel X25s running off a PCIe based controller. The controller is an HP P400 which I know works great on ubuntu (I have other machines running it with SAS drives). My desktop has an Intel S5000XVNSATAR mainboard and I have an open PCIe v1.0 8x (physical) slot that is wired 4x. The controller is 8x and will fit fine. How much of a performance hit do you think I will see running this 8x controller in the slot wired 4x with four Intel x25s in a RAID 10? Will I have enough bandwidth with the 4x for those SSD's?
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Apr 20, 2010
So I've come across several tips to optimize battery life on Linux. [URLs]. In addition to undervolting, I would like to underclock. Is there a way to control CPU speed outside of the BIOS via some software control in Linux... or some sort of boot manager? I would like to boot to linux using underclocked speeds and have Windows running full blast. Is there a way to run Linux completely in RAM? I have read that saves on power consumption from the hard drive.
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Mar 7, 2010
Sound can play but music can't in the game "second life" and I'm using it on ubuntu. I don't know how to fix the problem or where to begin and I had asked a tech in that game and they said it might have to do with the firewall, but wouldn't help me out because I wasn't premium. The first sentence is the problem.
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Oct 14, 2014
I am currently trying to install Debian Wheezy 7.6 x86_64 on an Intel Server System R2224GZ4GC4, but the Installer doesn’t recognise any of the devices attached to the onboard SATA controller.
Debian Version
Debian Wheezy 7.6 x86_64
Hardware used
Server: Intel Server System R2224GZ4GC4
Motherboard: Intel S2600GZ4
Onboard SATA Controller: Intel Patsburg 4-Port SATA Storage Control Unit (rev 06)
Device on Port 0: Samsung 840 Pro Series SSD
Device on Port 1: Samsung 840 Pro Series SSD
Device on Port 2: Samsung 840 Pro Series SSD
Device on Port 3: Intel 510 Series SSD
While the onboard SATA controller does support so-called “fake RAID,” this ‘feature’ has been disabled (i.e., the BIOS setting “SAS/SATA Capable Controller” is set to “INTEL(R) RSTe”). This is confirmed by the controller during the boot-up URL...Weirdly enough, the Intel 510 Series SSD contains an old system (Debian Squeeze 6.0, Kernel 2.6.35-5-amd64), which can boot and which does recognise all SSDs.
Remedies tried
* I’ve compiled the list of SCSI, SAS and block device related modules that the Squeeze-System, which recognises the SSDs, used and manually loaded these modules during the install process.* I’ve tried to rescan the SCSI bus by:
Code: Select allfor host in /sys/class/scsi_host/*; do echo "- - -" > $host/scan; done* I’ve tried to remove all disks, save for the Intel 510 Serives SSD.* I’ve tried all of the above combined.
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May 28, 2010
change as I salvaged an old old computer and got it back into working order. Windows 7 kills the computer and the media being served is sluggish and slow.
The computer spec are as follows:
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe Bios 1303
Asus Nvidia En210
[code]....
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Jan 1, 2011
I have two HDs, one is a 80gb OS drive(Parallel ATA) and the other is a 1T storage drive (SATA). Well after each reboot they swap between /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, over and over again. One boot the OS is /dev/sda and the next its /dev/sdb, same goes for the second drive. This makes it difficult to setup fstab so it will mount the large storage drive on boot.
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Feb 26, 2011
I'm having a little trouble with a mdadm RAID array at the moment in which the four hard drives in the array change their /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd/ /dev/sde placement on every reboot.
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Aug 4, 2011
Recently installed Ubuntu, I've got 2 * 500GB HDDs, mounted and partitioned, but I don't have read/write access to them, only root does.. How can i get access to save files and create folders etc?
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Nov 22, 2008
I have a site that users upload files on. Its on a dedicated server with 2 HDDs and the first HDD is 97% full, is it possible to use the other HDD for the files users upload? if so how?
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Jun 1, 2011
I am having problems seeing SAS drives using Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-H8IR adapter. The operation system is CentOS 5.6 64bit version. The operation system is installed on a SATA drive and the motherboard is an Intel Board "Classic Series" "Rockfish" G43 - Socket LGA775. From the OS I cannot see the drives. BIOS does see the PCI card and it ends there.
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Feb 28, 2010
I have read others getting Grub error 2, but i cant fix the problem. I have 2 sata HDDs. I suspect the problem is something to do with RAID?
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Oct 4, 2010
My reality distortion field went through a polarity shift today, and nothing's been working like it should. After the 10,000th problem, I decided to just make room for a fresh lucid install and the accompanying stability. It worked well, then I had some sort of a boot error upon reboot. So then I just decided to reinstall. The problem is that neither of my 2 internal HDDs is registering. Currently sda is an 80GB drive with a slackware install, sdb is a 120GB with a 60GB mint partition and (upon previous install) 60GB lucid partition. I've got no important data on any of my partitions yet, but also no net connection. I have install dvds for lucid, mint kde 9, and slackware plus a gparted live. I'm seriously considering making this machine a slack standalone, but then I've got legacy nvidia drivers to deal with.
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Jan 12, 2011
I have my current computer set up with 2 HDDs in it. A 500GB with GRUB and Windows 7 on it and a 160GB HDD with Ubuntu on it.
I would like to someone replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu on the 500GB drive, but I'm not sure how I would be able to do this and still keep GRUB and such .
EDIT: I'd like to do this without re-installing anything.
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