OT: SSD or not to SSD, that is the question

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 09/04/2015 10:56 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
>
> On Sep 4, 2015 3:14 PM, "Richard Shaw" <hobbes1069 at gmail.com
> <mailto:hobbes1069 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>  >
>  > I have two drives in my desktop computer, a 500GB for / and /var
> which is failing, and a 1TB drive for /home and swap.
>  >
>  > Cost is definitely an issue so I have narrowed my options down to a
> 1TB drive for about $53 or a 256MB SSD for about $86.
>  >
>  > Obviously the SSD is about half the size of my current failing drive.
> I think I can squeeze things down a bit to make it fit and I REALLY want
> to get an SSD.

I don't know, if this would be an option to you, but if I were you, I'd 
consider a smaller SSD in combination with a bigger HDD.

Somewhat simplified, my partition scheme is /home on HDD and all the 
rest (including /var) on SDD. From my experience, using this scheme, a 
128GB SSD is way more than sufficient for Fedora. A 64GB SSD would also 
work, but then diskspace on SSD will be tight - Certainly, YMMV ;)

>  > With current reliability of MLC SSD's is it a good idea to put /var
> on an SSD? The major users there would be BackupPC and all the
> chroots/cache for mock packaging builds.
I've been doing this for years with any problems (I don't use BackupPC, 
but am heavily using mock (on SDD)).

> Absolutely get a *quality* SSD.  I've had a Samsung 830 since they were
> new and use mock and got and more on a frequent basis, with no ill
> effects.
I share this experience. I have a Samsung 430, which still is in daily 
use today (32466hrs (3,7yrs) power-on-hours) and so far has not exposed 
any issues (fingers crossed :) ).

> Even if life expectancy were half that of a spinning drive instead of an
> order of magnitude more, I'd still get one for performance reasons.
Fully agreed - I would not want to work on systems without SSD, anymore. 
They provide elderly HW with a performance boost and "liveliness", which 
may easily extend a system's life-time by years.
If you had an SSD on this system before, I wouldn't expect you to be 
satisfied with a HDD-only system.

Ralf