The only problem with SSD is the limited life span of flash storage.
SSD's can be read infinitely, but may only be written a relatively small
number of times, making them very fast, but prone to failure. The best
ways I have found to prolong the life of any flash storage is to disable
filesystem journaling, which brings with it serious data corruption
problems in case of a power failure, and to minimize log writes, for
example by setting the log storage to volatile in
/etc/systemd/journald.conf, which does indeed minimize writes, but will
not allow reading a log after a reboot if you need to determine why
something failed that forced a reboot or caused the kernel to freeze or
reboot the system. Also, never under any circumstances create a
permanent swap partition on SSD media, and use swapfiles only in cases
where you are compiling something extremely large, which will not
compile entirely in RAM, or if for any other reason you need a swapfile
for a very very short time, which you will then disable and delete once
it is no longer needed. With 8GB of RAM, you will likely not need to
worry about this at all, but then just don't create any swapspace unless
you find your OOM killer working overtime due to a running process that
you will only need for a short time. Keep in mind that every write to
your disk, especially to the same file, will shorten the life of your
SSD, even if the internal wear leveling is very good. It's like rubbing
the eraser on a sheet of paper over and over. Eventually you will start
wearing holes in the paper, even if you are careful not to rub the same
spot every time.
That said, I have had the same eMMC chip in both an Odroid XU4 and an
Odroid C2 over the course of about 5 months, and I see no signs of wear
thus far, so it's possible that in many cases, the usable life of flash
storage has indeed improved enough to the point where minimizing writes
to an SSD may cause it to perform much better for a much longer amount
of time. Still, there is usually no sign of actual wear on any flash
media until it is too late, and the filesystem is rendered read-only, so
be very careful when using flash of any kind for your root filesystem.
Even now, it would seem best to use flash to store things that will be
written a very small number of times and read millions of times, mainly
to make backups and store things like music, movies and documents that
change little, and use a magnetic hard disk to do the write intensive
stuff, such as swap, logs, databases, journaled filesystems, etc.
Sent while strollin'
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