[ale] Quiet spinning drives?

[Alex Carver]

On 2017-02-15 21:30, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:15:37 -0800
> Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net> wrote:
> 
>> 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:
>> The current drives in the system have been running for almost 20 years
>> (which is why they're 8 GB drives). 
> 
> What kind of drives, how have you installed them? I've never had
> anything close to that kind of longevity. I think I've had a few go 8
> years.

I can't see them right now but they're either Western Digitals or
Seagates.  They're both 3.5" IDE.  I had a third one of the same kind
that developed some spindle/head issues a year ago.  But all three were
pretty much in continuous use since I got them.


>> At least with spinning drives they
>> tended to run for quite a while before old age would harm them.
> 
> I've had spinning drives blow up in 6 months, and some in 18 months.
> 
>> 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). 
> 
> Yes! That's why you do frequent backups. Whether it's a SSD wear
> problem, a funky spinning disk, or a guy breaks into your house and
> walks off with your computer, your properly made and stored backup
> frees you from that worry.

Well I do that anyway because 15+ year old drives. :)  I currently send
the copies to a TB external drive on the desktop.  Later when I can get
a NAS I'll do the backups to that.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> Given that you're still at only 16G after 20 years, I'm assuming you
> delete almost as much as you send every day. If that's the fact, you
> should probably run fstrim on every partition every night, so that
> deleted space is recovered instantly, and new writes have a lot of
> choice as to where to get written. My understanding is that SSD
> write-wear problems happen when the SSD is mostly full (or has unfreed
> deleted data), so that writes happen within small areas of the
> remaining disk. By running fstrim every night, you make sure that you
> don't have that kind of problem until you really have too much data for
> that SSD.

Actually no, I haven't deleted much at all.  The data compresses well
(being nearly all floating point numbers) so it's just writing records
to the databases.  The web pages are fairly static.  I may update code
to add a feature or two or perhaps some scripts.  The only thing that
does go away is the log files from syslog.  All of the various network
devices log to this machine and logrotate takes care of the space.