Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> said:
> On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 11:27:14 -0600
> Chris Murphy wrote:
> > Yeah I agree there's too much nervousness about SSD wear issues.
> 
> And, of course, hard disks just never fail in comparison, right? :-).

Of course they do.  The difference is that traditional hard drives don't
generally have a lifetime measured by number of writes.  Hard drives
have decades of institutional experience, while SSDs (and their failure
modes) are new and different.  And, new (and no experience) is always
"scary".

With traditional hard drives, failure modes are mitigated by RAID (to
keep the system running) and backups (to protect the data from drive and
other types of failure).  With any storage, you should still do backups,
but for a while RAID setups didn't pass through TRIM commands and so
were not recommended for SSDs.  That took away a "warm fuzzy feeling"
for storage administrators, and the fact that some (many?) of the early
consumer SSDs were not terribly reliable didn't help.

Now, I have SSDs in all my home computers (desktop, server, notebook,
and HTPC).  I still have "spinning rust" hard drives in my network disk
server, because I don't want to pay for 3TB of SSD (and hard drives are
plenty fast for that type of storage).

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>