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What about powered SSDs that contain files that are rarely read? My desktop computer is generally powered except when there is a power failure, but among the m
by tzs 11mo ago
What about powered SSDs that contain files that are rarely read?
My desktop computer is generally powered except when there is a power failure, but among the million+ files on its SSD there are certainly some that I do not read or write for years.
Does the SSD controller automatically look for used blocks that need to have their charge refreshed and do so, or do I need to periodically do something like "find / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cat > /dev/null" to make sure every file gets read occasionally?
- JensenTorp 11mo agoI also need an answer to this.
- dboreham 11mo agoIt's fine. But the whole drive can turn to dust at any time, of course.
- danparsonson 11mo agoI stopped buying cursed second-hand drives for exactly this problem.
- formerly_proven 11mo agoThe supply chain got you covered and will randomly hand you inofficially-refurbished drives as new ones ;)
- seg_lol 11mo agoYou should absolutely be doing a full block read of your disk, dd if=/dev/disk of=/dev/null every couple weeks
- topato 11mo agopretty accurate username
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoAmusing profile too. For some reason he calls us here on HN a "congress".
- markhahn 11mo agopointless to do it by the default 512b block size though.
- markhahn 11mo agono, the firmware does any maintenance. good firmware should do gradual scrub whenever it's idle. unfortunately, there's no real way to know whether the firmware is good, or doing anything. I wonder if there's some easy way to measure power consumed by a device - to detect whether it's doing housekeeping.
- mbreese 11mo agoHonestly this is one of my favorite things about ZFS. I know that a disk scan is performed every week/month (whatever schedule). And I also know that it has verified the contents of each block. It is very reassuring in that way.
- ziml77 11mo agoYou've validated that the scrub is actually running, right? I know that the lack of a default schedule for ZFS scrubs caused Linus Media Group to lose a bunch of archived videos to bitrot.
- illusive4080 11mo agoI have zed email me every time a scrub completes. I get weekly emails because I do weekly scrubs. If I don’t see an email I know something is up!
- dotancohen 11mo agoIn threads like this I keep hearing about ZFS. What would be the drawbacks of running ZFS as a home user? I keep my OS on the SSD and my files on spinning rust, if that's relevant.
- mbreese 11mo ago1) you have to have an OS that supports it. 2) even if your OS supports it, you may have difficulty using it for your root volume, so partitioning is probably required. 2a) in your case you may not want to use it on your boot volume which would negate the SSD benefit for you. 3) it is recommended that you have ECC RAM due to the checksums. This isn’t a hard and fast requirement, but it does make you more resilient to bitflips. 4) it isn’t the absolute fastest file system. But it’s not super slow. There are caching options for read and write that benefit from SSDs, but you’re just adding costs here to get speed increases. I only use it on servers or NASs. The extra hassles of using it on a workstation keep me from running it on a laptop. Unless you want to use FreeBSD that is… then you’d be fine (and FreeBSD is pretty usable as a daily driver). Realistically, I’m not sure how practical it is for most home users. But it is an example of what a filesystem can offer when it is well designed.
- poolnoodle 11mo agoMaybe tangentially related to my Pixel phone losing photos [0]? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033131