Is a SSD drive really worth for Suse ? to install the OS there, I’ve read the life of these drives can be short, like 5 years and less if many write operations are done, with Suse, you get to update the OS almost everyday, and in my work, I do write large files everyday, several times a day since it’s graphics. I’ve some blogs here on how to make the SSD drives last longer removing several functions of the OS.
With a modern SSD it doesn’t really matter, your computer will be in the bin before the SSD. My Intel has 20TB+ written data on it and it still shows as 99% life left - in the last test they ran on my drive it had 800TB written before it finally gave in and some drives now last up to 1.5-2PB.
As for is it worth it; yes it is. It is worth it for every OS ever made because it makes using your computer a breeze. System boot in <10s to X with all apps open.
Follow the basic set up to maximize wear. If you are running a spinning rust drive that is +5 years old you are probably on borrowed time.
To my mind the big thing is atime. Ever time a file is opened the access time is written that is a lot of writes. So you need noatime and also nodiratime on the mounts in the fstab. I also sei discard option to do trim operations but you may elect to do trim operations on a timed bases or manually. These thing do extend the expected 5 year life.
It does speed things up greatly.
On Mon, 09 Mar 2015 18:26:01 +0000, mhunt0 wrote:
> Is a SSD drive really worth for Suse ? to install the OS there, I’ve
> read the life of these drives can be short, like 5 years and less if
> many write operations are done, with Suse, you get to update the OS
> almost everyday, and in my work, I do write large files everyday,
> several times a day since it’s graphics. I’ve some blogs here on how to
> make the SSD drives last longer removing several functions of the OS.
Yes, it’s worth it.
I’ve got my root partition running on an SSD, home on a traditional hard
drive.
Works very well here.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
On Mon 09 Mar 2015 07:06:03 PM CDT, gogalthorp wrote:
Follow the basic set up to maximize wear. If you are running a spinning
rust drive that is +5 years old you are probably on borrowed time.
To my mind the big thing is atime. Ever time a file is opened the access
time is written that is a lot of writes. So you need noatime and also
nodiratime on the mounts in the fstab. I also sei discard option to do
trim operations but you may elect to do trim operations on a timed bases
or manually. These thing do extend the expected 5 year life.
It does speed things up greatly.
Hi
I have drives that were made circa 2003 still running… 
36GB
Raptors…they just keep going and are 40K plus power on hours…
As for SSD’s have three and just keep on going as well, no special
treatment and all run btrfs/xfs with the defaults. One also runs
bcache/xfs for feeding rotating drives. The OCZ vertex I have is rated
at 20GB a day writes with a 5 year warranty, I expect it to out live the
hardware.
The only think I change is swappiness since use 8GB of RAM.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.36-38-default
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All sounds good, I plan to keep using Ext4 in the new pc. The brand that I was looking for SSD was Samsung 840, the Intel is also said to be good (the ones with a skull logo).
http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment/5
Note; the larger the drive, the longer it generally has to live. Although 1-2PB is, by any standard, a pretty large amount of data written.
thank you, I’l choose one of those brands.
I have drives from the early to mid-90s still running! 100-meg, 250-meg, 350-meg, 750 meg, 1-GB, etc.
As well as several 10-to-60-Gig Early 2000s drives, all running flawlessly after huge amounts of work.
Well … okay, I am not using those 90s ones anymore, just quit using most of them about 3 or 4 years ago, except for one 250-meg and one 750-meg in a machine still running WFWG 3.11.
Which brings me to a point: The drives they made up to almost 15 years ago were significantly more hardy than the drives they make now. But, they are a lot smaller in capacity, which is one of the reasons they were more robust.
You are going to be very lucky if you buy a mechanical drive that will survive 5 years now, so there probably is going to be very little difference in the lifespan of a modern, new SSD and a new mechanical drive.
There is really only one two-edged reason to make the choice between a mechanical and an SSD drive: An SSD is a lot faster and will make for a huge speed performance boost, but it is also a lot more expensive per Gig, whereas if you are on a limited budget a mechanical will get you more capacity for a much lower price but at the cost of that speed.
I would say that “lifetime” is nearly a moot point.
On Wed 11 Mar 2015 06:06:01 AM CDT, Fraser Bell wrote:
malcolmlewis;2699013 Wrote:
> I have drives that were made circa 2003 still running…
> Raptors…they just keep going and are 40K plus power on hours…
I have drives from the early to mid-90s still running! 100-meg,
250-meg, 350-meg, 750 meg, 1-GB, etc.
As well as several 10-to-60-Gig Early 2000s drives, all running
flawlessly after huge amounts of work.
Well … okay, I am not using those 90s ones anymore, just quit using
most of them about 3 or 4 years ago, except for one 250-meg and one
750-meg in a machine still running WFWG 3.11.
Which brings me to a point: The drives they made up to almost 15 years
ago were significantly more hardy than the drives they make now. But,
they are a lot smaller in capacity, which is one of the reasons they
were more robust.
You are going to be very lucky if you buy a mechanical drive that will
survive 5 years now, so there probably is going to be very little
difference in the lifespan of a modern, new SSD and a new mechanical
drive.
There is really only one two-edged reason to make the choice between a
mechanical and an SSD drive: An SSD is a lot faster and will make for a
huge speed performance boost, but it is also a lot more expensive per
Gig, whereas if you are on a limited budget a mechanical will get you
more capacity for a much lower price but at the cost of that speed.
I would say that “lifetime” is nearly a moot point.
Yup, I fired up a 9GB (90s) I think drive in my sunblade the other
week. Now swapped it out with one of those raptors with a IDE/SATA
convertor, works fine, so should get a few more years out of the
sunblade…
For me laptops SSD’s, the desktop SSD and rotating drives. I’m looking
at getting two WD 1TB drives and a OCZ Vertex 460A Series (20G
per day @ 3yrs) probably the 240GB one, the two rotating drives are a
little bit less that the SSD…
I wonder if that’s why they dropped the rotation speed down to 5400rpm
to extend the life…
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.36-38-default
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I replaced the HD in an old laptop (Toshiba Eqium L40-156) with an SSD. Using OpenSUSE 13.2 there is a huge performance increase. This is particularly noticeable in boot times.
I think so. Though afaik only the WD Green series (1tb and up to 3tb, if i recall right the 4tb is at 7200) run at 5400. Not like it matters if they are only for storage,since you don’t usually need more speed than that if you don’t use them for games.
I have a notebook (4 years old) that is using openSUSE since 13.1 (now upgraded to 13.2 with a new install,not just upgraded) for my mother browsing,facebook,youtube and things like that and is like it got new life going from win 7 to openSUSE (mechanical HDD tho) so i figure it would be even faster with a SSD. It was crawling before (not like it was very powerful from the start) and now is like new and she doesn’t really care if it’s ms or what as long is fast enough (and that made her happy).
On my own desktop i have it on a SSD tho and is like another world, 10 sec’s to full up and about 5 sec’s to shutdown, not even with Asus fastboot and all that on win could get that fast.