[ale] Quiet spinning drives?

[Alex Carver]

On 2017-02-15 17:49, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 12:39:21 -0800
> Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net> wrote:
> 
>> That's an SSD which I don't think is going to apply in this case to a
>> single-drive system (OS, data and swap).  The concern in this case is
>> the data rewrites (especially swap) that would wear on an SSD.  That's
>> why I feel this machine really needs a spinning disk.
> 
> First of all, you can only expect 3 years from a drive anyway. Anything
> extra is an unexpected goodie. You're using 1GB right now. If you used
> a 512GB SSD (I think those are under $100 now) and ran fstrim on all
> its partitions every couple midnights, I'm pretty sure it would take a
> loooooooong time for the drive to start suffering from rewrite-itis.
> 
> I could be wrong, but if I am, you lost $100. If I'm right, it might
> run perfectly for 10 years.
> 
> LOL, maybe use USB3 thumb drive partitions for swap and for /tmp.

Considering this machine has only USB1.1, I don't think a thumb drive is
going to help me much for swap. :)

The current drives in the system have been running for almost 20 years
(which is why they're 8 GB drives). At least with spinning drives they
tended to run for quite a while before old age would harm them.  Granted
at the volume I'm running I agree that a 512 GB drive (or even just a
128 GB) would take time to achieve several full disk writes and probably
last five to ten years.  The thing is I don't want a situation where
that data is suddenly locked up without access because I went over a
manufacturer's endurance limit (trying to find the endurance report that
showed a couple drives went totally offline after hitting the limit).
This is especially important with write amplification, I don't know how
many writes I would actually be making.  I only know that I'm sending
about 1.5 GB/day to the drive.