Re: [gentoo-user] SSD recmmendation / input

[Daniel Frey]

On 08/28/2014 09:54 PM, Joseph wrote:
> No, I wouldn't get 1TB SSD too expensive but something like 300GB I
> might consider it.
> Are they worth the investment? What brand do you have and how long?

I have several SSDs. I currently use Kingston, Crucial, and Intel.

A bit of background - I use a mythtv setup with multiple frontends. I
had a SSD in the backend but it failed after about two years with no
warning -- one day I noticed the frontends behaving strangely and found
out I couldn't log into the backend (via ssh or directly.) The server
sustained a lot of writes to the database daily, however, the actual
recordings were on rust disks.

It was a Kingston that failed, a 32GB model.

The Crucial and Intel I have are still relatively new, the Crucial being
a year and a bit old, and the Intel only a few days old. :-)

Speedwise, there's no comparison. Especially running emerge/compiling -
my frontend (equipped with an E8400 and 2GB RAM) with the Kingston SSD
beats my main workstation equipped with a rust raid10 (a QX9650 with 8
GB RAM) every time.

I have two recommendations for a new SSD user - 1) Flash the firmware to
a new version right away if available, and 2) Don't partition the entire
SSD if you can avoid it. Apparently SSDs will use unused space for wear
leveling - as an example I believe I only partitioned 20GB (out of a
64GB SSD) on my frontends. That's a bit excessive and you may not be
able to do that, but you get the idea.

Also make sure to use parted to partition so the partitions themselves
are aligned properly.

(Regarding the firmware update - my Crucial had one and I ignored it.
About 3 months later my laptop was acting weird and complaining about
the disk. I was lucky - I flashed the firmware and it was fine with no
data loss. Others are not so lucky...)

Dan