dep wrote: > It does, as do the comments from everyone else, and as soon as I hit send > on this note I'll push the button to buy the WD blue 500gb ($60 at > amazon). > > From what I've been able to read, the failures are more likely during > writes, which does make me wonder as to the wisdom of putting /swap on the > SSD. I do have 32gb of memory, so swapping isn't as frequent as it used to > be, but with just / on the SSD I'd be writing to it only when I install > new software or there's an update. > I wouldn't care that much, because these are robust devices and can handle 100s of 1000s writes. Note that WD BLUE != WD RED. WD RED is more expensive but apparently much better. But the one of the 500GB SSDs is WD BLUE and no issues so far. The 120GB is WD GREEN and also no issues although I do not keep this machine running all the time. > It does remind me a little of the old PC days with the 640k RAM limit. One > of the tricks for those of us with more memory was at boot to create a > virtual drive -- a ramdisk -- and copy, among other things, command.com to > it, then set COMSPEC to point to that copy. It did speed things up quite a > bit. > > Boot time is interesting, but I don't reboot often enough for that to be > important to me beyond being amazed by a really fast time between the > popup errors from that damned xdg thing when I start TDE. (Was there ever > a way discovered to make that go away? I do not care what xdg thinks of my > menu.) But a significant speed improvement in program execution would be > welcome. I don't game (nor am I impressed with Bell Delphine), and loading > a thousand pictures at a time, which I sometimes have to do, is never > going to be really fast because I'm not putting my photo files on an SSD. > But if programs in general run considerably faster it seems worth it. > > Still trying to figure out a way that apt upgrade would upgrade both an > SSD boot and an installation on a conventional hard drive, because in the > event of an SSD failure I'd like to be able to pop the case, move the > connector, and reboot with no other intervention. (I don't guess I'd even > have to alter the fstab, either, because the one on the hard drive would > be good for boots from it.) Not sure whether this can be done. It depends how you setup grub on both disks ... If I were you, I would clone the one to the other. Actually if you want to put only / and swap on the disk, you could use much smaller device - like 120GB or even 50GB would be more than enough. You could buy two smaller disks for the money for 1x500GB and RAID1 and forget about copies. Still make backups at least before major upgrades. regards PS: Here is smartctl output from the WD BLUE (and don't ask why it is 3Gbps) smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [x86_64-linux-4.19.190eko4] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: WD Blue PC SSD Device Model: WDC WDS500G1B0A-00H9H0 Serial Number: xxxx LU WWN Device Id: 5 001b44 8b49c2a69 Firmware Version: X41100WD User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Rotation Rate: Solid State Device Form Factor: 2.5 inches Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: ACS-2 T13/2015-D revision 3 SATA Version is: SATA 3.2, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Thu Aug 5 20:18:45 2021 CEST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 0) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x11) SMART execute Offline immediate. No Auto Offline data collection support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. No Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. No Conveyance Self-test supported. No Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 10) minutes. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 4 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 33740 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 653 165 Block_Erase_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 47120952 166 Minimum_PE_Cycles_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 2 167 Max_Bad_Blocks_per_Die 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 30 168 Maximum_PE_Cycles_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 22 169 Total_Bad_Blocks 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 517 170 Grown_Bad_Blocks 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 171 Program_Fail_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 172 Erase_Fail_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 173 Average_PE_Cycles_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 6 174 Unexpected_Power_Loss 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 65 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 058 054 --- Old_age Always - 42 (Min/Max 17/54) 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 230 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 0x013e0055013e 232 Available_Reservd_Space 0x0033 100 100 004 Pre-fail Always - 100 233 NAND_GB_Written_TLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 3467 234 NAND_GB_Written_SLC 0x0032 100 100 --- Old_age Always - 6181 241 Total_Host_GB_Written 0x0030 253 253 --- Old_age Offline - 5075 242 Total_Host_GB_Read 0x0030 253 253 --- Old_age Offline - 18988 244 Temp_Throttle_Status 0x0032 000 100 --- Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t] Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx