On Fri, 2017-12-22 at 08:28 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
On 12/22/17 07:56, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Thu, 2017-12-21 at 11:40 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
On 12/21/2017 04:21 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
And for those of you using SSDs, make sure you have a good backup plan in place. SSDs are fast and a lot more reliable than they used to be. However, when they die, they die suddenly and catastrophically--and typically with no warning. I make it a rule to back up to magnetic media frequently as I've been bitten by that issue often in the past.
I do have a nightly backup to rotating rust, but also I reserve the SSD for the root filesystem. It's only 120GB and I doubt that a larger one would make much of a real-life speed difference if I put /home on it.
I also have had a backup strategy since before using SSD since HDDs can, and have, also died without warning. I backup to a RAID NAS.
Ditto. The Raid has saved me several times from failing Seagate disks (now replaced with Western Digital).
FWIW, my VMs are resident in my $HOME directory and they do benefit from being on the SSD.
I recently replaced my 1TB /home drive with a 2TB unit, and decided to move my QCOW VM drive from /home to a raw Windows partition on the old drive. It made a huge difference and the VM now runs games at close to native speed. Clearly an SSD would also have improved things but on balance I think it was the right decision. A lot depends on what your goals are and where you're starting from.
BTW, most people are probably using Sata-type SSDs, however my son recently built a new machine with a 128GB Samsung PCIe NVMe as the system drive (he's an animator and needs the speed). It's at least twice as fast as a Sata SSD but of course you need a fairly new motherboard to support it.
poc