I appreciate the discussion (disagreements?) about file systems. Recently, I have been migrating all my systems from ancient "Redhat/CentOS" to Debian, and pretty much let Debian choose the file system and partitioning.
Along with this, I am moving all systems to 1 TB Samsung 870 EVO 1TB SATA (except for my 12TB Dirvish backup drives). I don't store Big Stuff like music or videos, so even my largest drive, with files dating back 40 years, uses "only" 450 GB in / (including /bin and /usr and /home). ----- MY QUESTION isn't about file systems and partitioning, but about Samsung SSD Magician .... ... which allows me to set aside extra "userspace" SSD storage area for firmware error correction. Should I do so? Background info: SSD storage cells are fast but imperfect - many overwrites (thousands but not millions) will eventually wear out bit cells, in sectors that the drive firmware will replace with spare sectors ... "belonging" to disk firmware and hidden from user view. If the entire "visible" SSD is formatted, there will still be many hidden "firmware" spare sectors for error correction, but perhaps not enough if large areas of the disk are frequently overwritten ... ... which might happen with the swap partition on my ancient 3GB RAM laptops. My guess is that Linux will tend to use the "first sectors" of swap more often than the last sectors, so even if I make a much larger swap, the first sectors might wear out and fail. Perhaps Debian 12 Bookworm is smart enough to spread usage throughout swap, rather than the first sectors. Again, I am VERY unlikely to use an entire terabyte drive, though I worry that Samsung's SSD Magician might do bad voodoo, especially with me mis-operating it. The 870 EVO 1TB drives are only $60, so I can afford to mess one up with an experiment, as long as I learn from the experience. Should I do so? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
