Re: [gentoo-user] Finally got a SSD drive to put my OS on

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

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<SNIP>
>
>
> Oh, please, don't go anywhere.  <begging>  We already lost the long term
Alan.  BTW, I checked on him a while back.  He's still OK.  It's been a
while tho.
>

Dale - I touched - truly. I'm happy to stick around but I no longer
run Gentoo and don't want to cause problems or piss off the
folks who need to be here.

> I read during a google search that some distros handle this sort of thing
automatically, some sort of firmware thing or something.  I figured Gentoo
didn't, it rarely does since that is the point of Gentoo.  So, no harm.
Heck, I just now applied power to the thing.  I don't even have it
partitioned or anything yet.  Just rebooted after rearranging all the
cables, adding power splitter etc etc.

I don't know of any distros that do any of this in firmware. Maybe someone
else can address that. Many distros now install fstrim by default and
update crontab. The Ubuntu family does, which I didn't know before this
thread. However it is on both my Kubuntu machine and my Ubuntu
Server machine.

BTW - Windows does this in Disk Defragmenter but you have to
schedule it yourself according to Bard and ChatGPT. I'll be in
Windows later today to record some new music and plan to look into
that then.

Answering the question from below - weekly is what was set up by
default here. If your drive isn't near full and you're not writing a lot of
new
data on it each week then weekly would seem reasonable to me.
However being that you are running Gentoo and hence compiling
lots and lots and lots of stuff every week it's possible that you
might _possibly_ want to run fstrim more often if your intermediate
files are going to this drive.


>
> I do have one gripe.  Why can't drive makers pick a screw size and stick
to it on ALL drives?  It took some digging to find a screw that would fit.
Some I bought that are supposed to work on SSDs were to short.  It would
likely work on a metal adapter but not a thicker plastic one.  Luckily, I
found 4 screws.  No clue where they came from.  Just in my junk box.
Before this week, never laid eyes on a SSD before.  Anyone know the thread
size and count on those things?  I want to order a few, just in case.

I second your gripe. I've purchased a couple of PC builder screw
sets from Amazon.

>
> Is running fstrim once a week to often?  I update my OS once a week but
given the amount of extra space, I'd think once a month would be often
enough.  After all, it is 500GB and I'll likely only use less than half of
that.  Most of the extra space will be extra boot options like Knoppix or
something.  I'm just thinking it would give it a longer life.  Maybe my
thinking is wrong???
>
> Now to play with this thing.  I got to remember what all has to be copied
over so I can boot the new thing.  :/  Been ages since I moved a OS to
another hard drive.  Maybe a reinstall would work better.  :-\
>

I think you have at least 3 options to play with the drive:

1) It's Gentoo so install from scratch. You'll feel great
if it works. It will only take you a day or two.

2) Possibly dd the old drive to the SSD. If the new
SSD boots as the same /dev/sdX device it should
work, maybe, maybe not.

3) If you have another SATA port then dual boot,
either with Gentoo on both or something simple
like Kubuntu. A base Kubuntu install takes about
15 minutes and will probably give you its own
dual boot grub config. When you're sick of Kubuntu
you can once again install Gentoo.

Good luck no matter what path you take.

Mark

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