hello all, some questions at last... it's been a while. :) I was able to get some SSD replacements and want to add them to my existing setup, but in previous years I recall that there was some recommendation to leave some part of the SSD unallocated and not formatted as part of a file system so any parts that failed as bad blocks or wore out could be allocated from these unused areas.
When trying to see what current recommendations are for setting up SSDs I see no mentions of this at all? Has this changed? I've been trying to get caught up and seeing nothing specific to EXT4 or Linux for SSDs. I don't do encryption or raid. Pretty much my current plan for one of the SSDs would be to put an efi small partition(as I notice the current ones I have hardly have anything on them even if they were allocated to be 1G) so that I can copy my current setup to that but not waste the space). The existing ones use 5M or even much less so perhaps 50M will be enough allowing for future expansion? The rest of the new drive will just be one large partition. It is not a heavily used machine or setup but I do need more space for working on the website and picture archives. I do have both Grub and Refind installed (for some Grub updates it will change my initial efi boot order so I have a script setup to change it back when needed). Refind works and does exactly what I want. Because I do run Debian testing most of the time I also plan on keeping my other partition where it boots stable going. I've only needed it a few times but I like having it there. I'll leave this on the smaller SSD along with the swap partition (which is not frequently or heavily used). The 2nd new SSD will be for consolidating my backups (that are on a smaller SSD at the moment plus also on an external drive that is not used frequently - I don't trust it as it has been knocked off the table but until it gives up entirely it is a backup that can't be messed with as it is not mounted or powered on often). I don't use the discard options on the mounts or filesystems and also don't run fstrim automatically, I will eventually set this up to run monthly. I ran it recently for the first time after several years of use of the existing SSDs. I've not noticed any decline in the existing SSD speeds, etc. at all but I'm also not running too much that is demanding for performance. I do like having multiple backups on the different SSDs just in case one of them decides to fail on me. No signs of any troubles so far. songbird
