Re: [gentoo-user] Qustions re Dell M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drives under Gentoo

[antlists <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 28/05/2021 17:17, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> Anything with spinning disk "is obsolete" they are trying to give it
>> way because nobody is buying them (you can buy them for few dollars),
>> don't expect it to last long.
> 
>    I've never had a hard drive fail on me.  That includes a 2008 core2
> duo that I shut down last autumn.  Web surfing was getting painfully
> slow, and really large spreadsheets were dying in 3 gigabytes of ram,
> but otherwise it still worked.  256 G SSD is not enough for me now.
> That takes us into 512 G SSD territory, which will be "adequate" for
> now, but who knows about my future needs.
> 
I've recovered (or tried to) drives for other people, but again I've 
been lucky in that I've never lost one of my own drives.

And as for nVME, some magazine did a "test to destruction" of 
solid-state drives. They lasted almost for ever - I think the 
computer(s) were configured to hammer the drives 24/7 and they lasted 
over 18 months - that's probably a decade and more in normal usage.

The one thing to watch out for, is that if you DO encounter problems, DO 
NOT shut the machine down. If a drive suffers failure, stage 1 seems to 
be to go read-only. YOU MUST back it up immediately, because stage 2 is 
to commit suicide on reboot. But you're highly unlikely to meet that 
scenario in normal use.

I'm planning to buy one of those shingled horrors - a Seagate BaraCuda 
12TB - for backups. Use btrfs or LVM, and rsync in-place copy. A good 
idea in any case, but probably an even better idea if your main storage 
is SSD.

Cheers,
Wol