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

[Cameron Simpson]

On 05Sep2015 07:13, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 10:32 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>My BackupPC folder is about 190GB (backs up my home from the other drive,
>yes, if the whole system goes I'm screwed but at least the data is on two
>different drives; my HTPC, and my wife's laptop). That's why I'm looking at
>a 256GB SSD. A little bigger would be awesome but not in the budget.

I would argue for putting your backups on an external drive for three reasons.  

First, they're cheap and being your backup, performance is not such a big 
issue. I use a Western Digital 2TB My Passport for this (with a Mac, but that 
is irrelevant); it is cheap, big (lots of backup history) and importantly: bus 
powered USB. So it is just the drive and a short USB cable.

Second, using an external drive avoids making painful decisions about how big 
your internal drives are: they need to be big enough for your data, not for 
your unbounded backup history.

Third, an external drive can be _removed_. Here we live in fear of the day that 
the disaster that takes out the real data also corrupts the backup data. Having 
the drive physically offline in a drawer avoids this risk. It does require you 
to have the discipline to remember to plug it in and do a backup regularly.

Even if you do run internal backups (eg daily or whatever to a much smaller 
internal partition), do some external ones too.

Finally, I also recommend an SSD for your system drive. For /var, not so 
important, but the OS it is fantastic.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>