[GTALUG] SSD wear leveling [was Re: Build critique request and the story behind it.]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| swapon, --discard[=policy] Enable swap discards, if the swap backing 
| device supports the discard or trim operation.

Thanks.  Interesting information (that I've trimmed).

"discard" is the SCSI term for what ATA calls "trim".

I have never addressed this.  Apparently the default behaviour looks
OK.

| Black friday happened yesterday on a Monday (go figure)

No, these are the pre-Black-Friday offers.  BF is coming the day after
US Thanksgiving (this Thursday).  "Cyber Monday" is the Monday after that.

I'm getting a lot of ads.

| and my Newegg 
| cart dropped my CPU choice as N/A, also Amazon refunded my 3TB drive 
| choice, also probably N/A.

Carts are usually time-limited.  In fact, until you "buy", they can
disappear.  Or worse, as you've found, they can even back out of a
sale that you have already concluded (but that's not as routine).

Was the drive "sold by amazon" or another party?

Places to look online for CPUs include Mike's, Canada Computers,
Memory Express, Newegg.ca, Amazon.ca.  pcpartpicker probably does that
but doesn't always know about sales right away.  Sometimes you need to
look at the ads to find the deal.

| Sometimes I install three or four times until I'm satisfied with the 
| balance of a partitioning scheme. That's usually on reclaimed or RMA new 
| old stock. I'm not sure that I want to format and reformat a new SSD 
| that way, so I think I'd like to try and get this one up with optimal 
| housekeeping on the first go, if possible, so any comments are most 
| helpful.

blkdiscard(8) looks useful.  You could apply it to the whole disk before 
you start (re-)partitioning.

mkfs.ext4 has a "discard" option that defaults on.

So maybe everything "just works".