3 ms·

(somehow post got cut off, too late to edit) …part of my original point was that Zram will resolve the SSD endurance problems.

_0w8t 5y ago
With modern big SSD endurance is no longer the issue. You would need to write at max speed for many month before hitting the limit. I had a laptop with 512GB SSD that I used heavily for 3 years for development work and then for 2 years as a backup machine with light usage. Its write counter reports only 7% of the max usage. So on a new laptop with 2TB SSD after benchmarking things I just disabled zram/zswap. But then again, it was critical to enable hardware encryption on SSD rather than using LUKS on Linux. The latter is so slow [1] that zram is really a must. [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/rzvhyg/default_luks_encryption_settings_on_fedora_can_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/rzvhyg/default_luks...
- amarshall 5y ago
  Well it all depends on how much writing one does. OP estimates they have 1 year before they use too much of their drive’s endurance. Be aware that on-disk hardware encryption should generally not be trusted. It is not auditable or trivially verifiable. Some years back there were some revelations that some drive firmware encryption was woefully deficient. So much so that whereas Windows previously would treat on-disk encryption as sufficient, Microsoft stopped relying on it entirely.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    I am aware of this. Plus there are constant power attacks when one disconnects the disk while the system is suspended when the key is unlocked on the disk. But this is a development machine and I figured out that surprisingly non-trivial overhead of LUKS encryption in Linux is not worth it. On the plus side wake up from hibernation is very fast and to mitigate the risk of the above I configured the laptop to hibernate shortly after suspend.

3 ms·

(somehow post got cut off, too late to edit) …part of my original point was that Zram will resolve the SSD endurance problems.

by amarshall 5y ago

_0w8t 5y ago
With modern big SSD endurance is no longer the issue. You would need to write at max speed for many month before hitting the limit. I had a laptop with 512GB SSD that I used heavily for 3 years for development work and then for 2 years as a backup machine with light usage. Its write counter reports only 7% of the max usage. So on a new laptop with 2TB SSD after benchmarking things I just disabled zram/zswap. But then again, it was critical to enable hardware encryption on SSD rather than using LUKS on Linux. The latter is so slow [1] that zram is really a must. [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/rzvhyg/default_luks_encryption_settings_on_fedora_can_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/rzvhyg/default_luks...
- amarshall 5y ago
  Well it all depends on how much writing one does. OP estimates they have 1 year before they use too much of their drive’s endurance. Be aware that on-disk hardware encryption should generally not be trusted. It is not auditable or trivially verifiable. Some years back there were some revelations that some drive firmware encryption was woefully deficient. So much so that whereas Windows previously would treat on-disk encryption as sufficient, Microsoft stopped relying on it entirely.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    I am aware of this. Plus there are constant power attacks when one disconnects the disk while the system is suspended when the key is unlocked on the disk. But this is a development machine and I figured out that surprisingly non-trivial overhead of LUKS encryption in Linux is not worth it. On the plus side wake up from hibernation is very fast and to mitigate the risk of the above I configured the laptop to hibernate shortly after suspend.