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#1
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Disc Wear Question
I cant decide the answer to this situation
A Disc SSD or mechanical is divided into partitions The operating system is installed on the first partition the rest of that disc is mostly data - games - etc There for the 1st partition is accessed read and write very often while the rest of the disc infrequently To maximize life span does it make sense to occasionally move that OS partition to another part of that disc - perhaps the end - to spread-even out the wear ? (\__/) (='.'=) (")_(") mouse (Hmm.. a puzzle or a silly question ?) |
#2
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Disc Wear Question
Trimble wrote:
I cant decide the answer to this situation A Disc SSD or mechanical is divided into partitions The operating system is installed on the first partition the rest of that disc is mostly data - games - etc There for the 1st partition is accessed read and write very often while the rest of the disc infrequently To maximize life span does it make sense to occasionally move that OS partition to another part of that disc - perhaps the end - to spread-even out the wear ? (\__/) (='.'=) (")_(") mouse (Hmm.. a puzzle or a silly question ?) For the SSD, the answer is, it definitely does not matter. On write, the SSD uses a common pool of empty sectors for the clusters doing the actual storage of write data. The "heads" are virtual, and there is no wear sustained from moving the heads between SSD partitions. You have no need to move stuff on the SSD. For best results on the SSD, do a TRIM per partition every month or so. The TRIM tells the OS what parts of the partition are not being used, and gives the drive more materials to use for wear leveling. (But this also means, potentially, that using "Undelete" programs on an SSD, may give worse results than on a hard drive. The white space on the disk, no longer belongs to you.) ******* It is less clear on a hard drive, whether we should be moving stuff around all the time. I would say "Move stuff if you detect trouble". I have a hard drive (with an OS on it which I use occasionally), that has 48000 hours of usage. And the drive has no signs at all, of a wear pattern. But not all my drives are like that. And it isn't even one of the more expensive SKUs either. I have had other drives, where the characteristics of the drive were so bad... I would not dare to move the OS partition closer to the hub. The experiment would end in disaster. And this means, each drive family has a "personality", and the five drives I own all with the same flaky behavior near the hub, you don't mess with those. Those drives are best left alone. They have exhibited bad health since the day I bought them. However, none of the drives has failed, and they are in my scratch drive pool, available for experiments. The Reallocated counter hasn't increased materially in the last three years or so, and I don't particularly fear the drives. But I certainly would not use the drives for my "daily driver" OS any more. As for Seagate, they do occasionally make good drives. Not everything they made was rubbish :-) The hard part is predicting when it is safe to buy their stuff. I got a couple 4TB drives of theirs which were excellent. And the 48000 hour drive (500GB) is a Seagate. And the question a customer has to ask, is "why do these things keep happening?". Why is it that the quality of released designs, varies so much ? Don't they detect fatal flaws in design before release ? It's a real puzzle. I know the engineering in these is first-class work, and it's strange that lot testing before a design is released to the public, does not stop the release of "loser" designs. I can tell they know how to test, based on some of the equipment I've seen in pictures. I don't think they have enough factories any more, that we can blame a particular factory for all the flawed products. On a "loser" drive, could you "delay death" forever by moving the partition around ? I doubt it. I think instead, you'd be in for a rude surprise when the Service Area (SA) failed. In the case of my 48,000 hour drive, moving the partition around would have made no difference at all. It never presented symptoms of being a loser, so needs none of that sort of maintenance. Paul |
#3
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Disc Wear Question
On 12/10/2019 3:20 PM, Paul wrote:
Trimble wrote: I cant decide the answer to this situation A Disc SSD or mechanical is divided into partitions The operating system is installed on the first partition the rest of that disc is mostly data - games - etc There for the 1st partition is accessed read and write very often while the rest of the disc infrequently To maximize life span does it make sense to occasionally move that OS partition to another part of that disc - perhaps the end - to spread-even out the wear ? (\__/) (='.'=) (")_(")Â* mouse (Hmm.. a puzzle or a silly question ?) For the SSD, the answer is, it definitely does not matter. On write, the SSD uses a common pool of empty sectors for the clusters doing the actual storage of write data. The "heads" are virtual, and there is no wear sustained from moving the heads between SSD partitions. You have no need to move stuff on the SSD. For best results on the SSD, do a TRIM per partition every month or so. The TRIM tells the OS what parts of the partition are not being used, and gives the drive more materials to use for wear leveling. (But this also means, potentially, that using "Undelete" programs on an SSD, may give worse results than on a hard drive. The white space on the disk, no longer belongs to you.) ******* It is less clear on a hard drive, whether we should be moving stuff around all the time. I would say "Move stuff if you detect trouble". I have a hard drive (with an OS on it which I use occasionally), that has 48000 hours of usage. And the drive has no signs at all, of a wear pattern. But not all my drives are like that. And it isn't even one of the more expensive SKUs either. I have had other drives, where the characteristics of the drive were so bad... I would not dare to move the OS partition closer to the hub. The experiment would end in disaster. And this means, each drive family has a "personality", and the five drives I own all with the same flaky behavior near the hub, you don't mess with those. Those drives are best left alone. They have exhibited bad health since the day I bought them. However, none of the drives has failed, and they are in my scratch drive pool, available for experiments. The Reallocated counter hasn't increased materially in the last three years or so, and I don't particularly fear the drives. But I certainly would not use the drives for my "daily driver" OS any more. As for Seagate, they do occasionally make good drives. Not everything they made was rubbish :-) The hard part is predicting when it is safe to buy their stuff. I got a couple 4TB drives of theirs which were excellent. And the 48000 hour drive (500GB) is a Seagate. And the question a customer has to ask, is "why do these things keep happening?". Why is it that the quality of released designs, varies so much ? Don't they detect fatal flaws in design before release ? It's a real puzzle. I know the engineering in these is first-class work, and it's strange that lot testing before a design is released to the public, does not stop the release of "loser" designs. I can tell they know how to test, based on some of the equipment I've seen in pictures. I don't think they have enough factories any more, that we can blame a particular factory for all the flawed products. On a "loser" drive, could you "delay death" forever by moving the partition around ? I doubt it. I think instead, you'd be in for a rude surprise when the Service Area (SA) failed. In the case of my 48,000 hour drive, moving the partition around would have made no difference at all. It never presented symptoms of being a loser, so needs none of that sort of maintenance. Â*Â* Paul Rotating drives can be a bitch. I went through a "recovery" a few weeks back as an experiment. One of the five 2tB data drives on an old Windows Home Server went bad and I mean _really_ bad. Given the way that the OS "blesses" each of its known drives I decided to try to clone it to a new drive. Well, it took about five days of 24X7 thrashing with two external docking stations connected to my old Linux notebook running Clonezilla but it finally did finish. The server more-or-less accepted the copy, not throwing a fit as it usually does, but there was still so much data loss because the OS spreads data across all drives (but with no allowance for severe failures) that I pretty much had to start fresh backups for everything the server covers. I have Drobo NAS units which have pretty well replaced the function of the old server and it is so much more sane about failures. I could have one or two drives fail out of five and still have use of all the data although a two-drive failure would be pretty much of a total panic situation and if that happens you had better have a spare of proper capacity to plug in immediately. I've never had a drive failure on a Drobo but I know from experience that it is only a matter of time. |
#4
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Disc Wear Question
John McGaw wrote:
Rotating drives can be a bitch. I went through a "recovery" a few weeks back as an experiment. One of the five 2tB data drives on an old Windows Home Server went bad and I mean _really_ bad. Given the way that the OS "blesses" each of its known drives I decided to try to clone it to a new drive. Well, it took about five days of 24X7 thrashing with two external docking stations connected to my old Linux notebook running Clonezilla but it finally did finish. The server more-or-less accepted the copy, not throwing a fit as it usually does, but there was still so much data loss because the OS spreads data across all drives (but with no allowance for severe failures) that I pretty much had to start fresh backups for everything the server covers. I have Drobo NAS units which have pretty well replaced the function of the old server and it is so much more sane about failures. I could have one or two drives fail out of five and still have use of all the data although a two-drive failure would be pretty much of a total panic situation and if that happens you had better have a spare of proper capacity to plug in immediately. I've never had a drive failure on a Drobo but I know from experience that it is only a matter of time. Your Drobo sounds like it has RAID6, while the Windows Home Server was just doing some variant of spanning. Was Clonezilla using ddrescue or something else ? With ddrescue (gddrescue package), you get a .log file when the multiple pass job is finished, and from that (and nfi.exe), you might be able to piece together what files are damaged. Paul |
#5
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Disc Wear Question
On 12/10/2019 5:15 PM, Paul wrote:
John McGaw wrote: Rotating drives can be a bitch. I went through a "recovery" a few weeks back as an experiment. One of the five 2tB data drives on an old Windows Home Server went bad and I mean _really_ bad. Given the way that the OS "blesses" each of its known drives I decided to try to clone it to a new drive. Well, it took about five days of 24X7 thrashing with two external docking stations connected to my old Linux notebook running Clonezilla but it finally did finish. The server more-or-less accepted the copy, not throwing a fit as it usually does, but there was still so much data loss because the OS spreads data across all drives (but with no allowance for severe failures) that I pretty much had to start fresh backups for everything the server covers. I have Drobo NAS units which have pretty well replaced the function of the old server and it is so much more sane about failures. I could have one or two drives fail out of five and still have use of all the data although a two-drive failure would be pretty much of a total panic situation and if that happens you had better have a spare of proper capacity to plug in immediately. I've never had a drive failure on a Drobo but I know from experience that it is only a matter of time. Your Drobo sounds like it has RAID6, while the Windows Home Server was just doing some variant of spanning. Was Clonezilla using ddrescue or something else ? With ddrescue (gddrescue package), you get a .log file when the multiple pass job is finished, and from that (and nfi.exe), you might be able to piece together what files are damaged. Â*Â* Paul The Drobos use some they call "Beyond RAID" IIRC. They are very tight-lipped about what it does internally but it is the most forgiving sort of NAS I've seen. There is really nothing to do when setting it up other than plugging in anywhere from 2 to 5 drives and, when appropriate, how much redundancy you want. No other decisions need be made. If you run short on space you can, without powering down, pull a drive and plug in a larger one and it will populate that drive, re-spread the data, and keep in plugging without any loss of service. Not sure what Clonezilla does internally. It provides a crude sort of graphic interface and offers a few simple options and just does its own thing. Normally it would be quite quick but in my case the source drive was so trashed that a byte-by-byte copy got quite agonizing to watch. The estimated run times in the GUI got so extreme that it overwrote part of the screen with all the extra digits but it just kept on grinding. I still haven't pulled that drive apart but I expect to find one of the platters has been pretty well plowed. |
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