Bad luck with SSD's - am I the only one?
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Al little on the slower side but 4gb USB sticks work pretty well. I keep a duplicate for when the active one dies. And at only $5 a pop who cares if it dies.
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The size of the drive also plays an important role in how quickly it wears out. A small ssd like a 16GB has little to no spare area to work with which increases the write amplification considerably. On all enterprise drives they have 20% or more area reserved so the drive doesn't have to reuse areas nearly as often. So a 160GB enterprise SSD might have 200GB of actual flash memory, but only 160GB is accessible by the system.
The 40GB 320 should last a long time especially if it can be trimmed on occasion.
Here is a good question. Does PFSense properly align the drive out of the box?
That can also have a very adverse affect on drive longevity if each write is split up over two block on the drive and requires both of them to be erased to put new data on the block.
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Here is a good question. Does PFSense properly align the drive out of the box?
That can also have a very adverse affect on drive longevity if each write is split up over two block on the drive and requires both of them to be erased to put new data on the block.
Good point indeed!
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Here is a good question. Does PFSense properly align the drive out of the box?
Is that something I could do (or check) manually?
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Paragon Alignment Tool under Windows can show you the exact situation, and can align existing partitions (with data) to be OK for SSDs.
Linux parted creates aligned partitions for sure, but I can't remember now what options you need to enable to actually see if an existing partition is aligned or not.
Checking the first partition can be easy by looking at the numbers, but next partition numbers need to be calculated based on first partition's offsets… -
I don't think the writes are aligned, see the "Non4k_Aligned_Access" from SMART in my post above.
I thought this might be an issue and I bumped up the drive size to give lots of extra space for wear leveling to deal with it. I'm hoping 2.1 offers more SSD support options but I haven't looked at it since I don't have a spare SSD equipped box available right now.
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I don't think the writes are aligned, see the "Non4k_Aligned_Access" from SMART in my post above.
I thought this might be an issue and I bumped up the drive size to give lots of extra space for wear leveling to deal with it. I'm hoping 2.1 offers more SSD support options but I haven't looked at it since I don't have a spare SSD equipped box available right now.
2.1 won't (aside from trim I mentioned above) but 2.2 may.
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Samsung has a new batch Enterprise ready drives for folks that have systems that are going to really beat on it, 3.4 PB of writes.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/23/samsung_s843t_upgrade/
I'm really partial to the Samsung drives, not for any hard reason but because I like the idea that they make their own memory chips and controllers and don't rely on outside vendors for them.
Jimp, 2.2… Waaahhh! I haven't even started whining "are we there yet" over 2.1 and now I'm waiting on 2.2. :-)
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Jimp, 2.2… Waaahhh! I haven't even started whining "are we there yet" over 2.1 and now I'm waiting on 2.2. :-)
;D Had he same thought… who knows how many drives I'll burn through before 2.2 is out !!! ;)
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Jimp, 2.2… Waaahhh! I haven't even started whining "are we there yet" over 2.1 and now I'm waiting on 2.2. :-)
;D Had he same thought… who knows how many drives I'll burn through before 2.2 is out !!! ;)
If you pick a drive from the list I gave, none.
