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

Russell rreiter91 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 21 16:41:55 EST 2017


On November 21, 2017 11:23:21 AM EST, "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>| 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've always found it a weird polyglot convention that ATA drives are mounted as /dev/sdx. I know that has to do more with historical convergence of increased ATA transfer rates with scsi parallelism, but it's still kind of confusing.

>
>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?

I can't tell from my order details. I should have read the ad more carefully. The SSD made it from NJ to TO, delivery date tentatively, is tomorrow. The MB is coming via Canada Post, no date yet.

Case, MB & SSD = $625CAD 

>
>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.

Thanks. There is available on Newegg an  i7-8700 Coffee Lake 6-Core 3.2 GHz (4.6 GHz Turbo) LGA 1151 (300 Series) 65W
which comes with cooling, not water tho, for about $75 more than the i5-8600k which came without a heat sink, so I'm waffling between them a bit. 

>
>| 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.

Thanks, I'll have a look. I guess the drive will have some sort of MS file system to deal with firstly. 
>
>mkfs.ext4 has a "discard" option that defaults on.
>
>So maybe everything "just works".

Hope so. I do have a tendency to overthink stuff. I'd hate to have myself as a regular customer, I'd drive myself bonkers.

Thanks for all the pointers.

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-- 
Russell


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