I would always recommend a secure erase of an SSD - if you want a "fresh start". That will mark all the NAND cells as clear of data. That will benefit the longevity of your device / wear levelling.
I've been messing about with native exfat over the past few months. I found this to be a pretty decent shared partition file system - for use with MS Windows. The read performance will saturate a 3Gbit SATA link - but write performance is only in the order of 100Mbytes/second. Personally having been burned by btrfs I would not try one of these "experimental" file systems again... That was the same sort of pattern as your experience. I carefully followed the Arch Wiki (large partition size - due to COW issues, etc.) - was using it on my home brew NAS running OpenSUSE as root /. One day it just "blew up" and was really screwed for recovery (I did manage to get the few small bits of data I needed with some Googling) - as none of the btrfs tools for this actually work! Back to ext4 for root / - now running Arch on that box... Ironically the native ZFS port has always been stable on that box (with a very large storage array)! Just my $0.02!! On 24 February 2015 at 00:46, Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> wrote: > Some list members might be interested in how I've got on with f2fs > (flash-friendly file system). > > According to genlop I first installed f2fs on my Atom mini-server box on > 1/11/14 (that's November, for the benefit of transpondians), but I'm > pretty sure it must have been several months before that. I installed a > SanDisk SDSSDP-064G-G25 in late February last year and my admittedly > fallible memory says I changed to f2fs not many months after that, as > soon as I discovered it. > > Until two or three weeks ago I had no problems at all. Then while doing > a routine backup tar started complaining about files having been moved > before it could copy them. It seems I had a copy of an /etc directory > from somewhere (perhaps a previous installation) under /root and some > files when listed showed question marks in all fields except their > names. I couldn't delete them, so I re-created the root partition and > restored from a backup. > > So far so good, but then I started getting strange errors last week. For > instance, dovecot started throwing symbol-not-found errors. Finally, > after remerging whatever packages failed for a few days, > /var/log/messages suddenly appeared as a binary file again, and I'm > pretty sure that bug's been fixed. > > Time to ditch f2fs, I thought, so I created all partitions as ext4 and > restored the oldest backup I still had, then ran emerge -e world and > resumed normal operations. I didn't zero out the partitions with dd; > perhaps I should have. > > I'll watch what happens, but unless the SSD has failed after only a year > I shouldn't have any problems. > > An interesting experience. Why should f2fs work faultlessly for several > months, then suffer repeated failures with no clear pattern? > > -- > Rgds > Peter. > > -- All the best, Robert
