Devuan on SSD

seeker · 2019-02-22 00:43:01

I am planning on putting Devuan Ascii on a used Dell E7450. This machine has 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Does anyone know of the Devuan installer detects SSDs and sets them up with the recommended settings? There are a few threads in this forum that mention not to use discreet. Does that mean that nodiscreet should be in the fstab? How about the other suggestion to set up a initrd? Is 8 GB going to prevent that from being an option?

Panopticon · 2019-02-22 11:12:20

Hi seeker, this thread here might help you.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2631

seeker · 2019-02-26 01:02:31

I have read through that thread, but I don't understand how to tell the installer not to set up a swap partition on the drive. I tried using the Expert Install, and it wants to add a swap partition of 8.5 GB. There is no way to click on that partition and delete it from the settings before it tries writing to the disk.

Last edited by seeker (2019-02-27 01:35:43)

aut0exec · 2019-02-27 03:59:09

Do the manual partitioning and simply don't create a swap partition? It'll complain but should let you continue regardless.

seeker · 2019-03-01 02:57:20

Since I have not done an install for a long time, I searched for videos on it. Rex Kneisley a.k.a. Crypto Dad walks through the process. I can probably figure out what I need from there. Thank you for the suggestions.

F_Sauce · 2019-03-02 17:19:23

Hei!

I don't know why you do not want a SWAP partition, however, SSDs works quite fine with Devuan; just remember to set it, the drive/partition, up with the parameter «discard».
To my knowledge, I would ignore any «discreet» variables if not specifically needed.

Cheers,
Olav

seeker · 2019-03-03 02:13:38

F_Sauce wrote:

Hei!
I don't know why you do not want a SWAP partition, however, SSDs works quite fine with Devuan; just remember to set it, the drive/partition, up with the parameter «discard».
To my knowledge, I would ignore any «discreet» variables if not specifically needed.
Cheers,
Olav

The thread referenced further up in this thread mentions not using a swap partition. The whole thing is rather confusing. I just want to ensure a long life in the drive.

golinux · 2019-03-03 02:25:38

Isn't "long life SSD" an oxymoron?

KatolaZ · 2019-03-03 06:10:45

golinux wrote:

Isn't "long life SSD" an oxymoron?

This is not the case any more. Just have a look on the interweb, as I did before recently buyng a new SSD. I was skeptical about them as well, but as I found out I was totally wrong.

The average write before starting to reallocating sectors seems to never fall below 300TB for SSDs produced in the last 3 years. Some of them can go up to 2.4 PB before the first sectors get reallocated. This means that you can fully write 1TB disk between 300 and 2400 times before it starts to physically wear out. In many cases, this will amount to several lustres (if you write 50GB of data every day, you will need 6000 days to write 300TB, which is slightly more than 16 years). The expected fraction of SDDs having one write failure during the first three years of their lifespan is 0.3%, or 3 over 1000. I know this might look big, but for classical HDDs this percentage is normally much higher (around 3-5%), and HDDs have 50% probability of failing after 6 years.

In conclusion, there is no scientific argument supporting the myth that SSDs fail more often than HDDs, rather the opposite.

Then, if you ask me whether the extra speed provided by the SSD was worth the 120GBP it costed, I would say "probably not entirely, at least in my case". I mostly use lightweight applications, and my laptop has uptimes of several months, which means that almost everything I need is always availalbe either in RAM or in the buffer cache or in the disk cache, and loads pretty fast. There is a noticeable improvement in boot times and start times of heavy applications, but again, those are mostly outside my use case. YMMV.

So the main reason why I actually decided to buy an SSD was basically its expected durability :-)

Please feel free to move this post elsewhere, if it looks OT.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

-- edited "2.4 TB" -> "2.4 PB"

Last edited by KatolaZ (2019-03-03 07:33:39)

rolfie · 2019-03-03 10:20:04

I am using SSDs for 8 or 9 years now with Linux PCs. No failures, no issues. Always used Crucial, starting with M4, later MX100, MX300, now MX500. The two M4s still work fine. All with luks encryption.

Initially I had a complicated setup with /var, /tmp and /swap on HD. Nowadays I have everything on the SSD, and I see no problems.

When you buy a top brand, you won't have issues.

My2cents, Rolf

Panopticon · 2019-03-03 12:54:31

seeker wrote:

F_Sauce wrote:
Hei!
I don't know why you do not want a SWAP partition, however, SSDs works quite fine with Devuan; just remember to set it, the drive/partition, up with the parameter «discard».
To my knowledge, I would ignore any «discreet» variables if not specifically needed.
Cheers,
Olav
The thread referenced further up in this thread mentions not using a swap partition. The whole thing is rather confusing. I just want to ensure a long life in the drive.

I didn't see anything to do with swap in that link i posted?

All it basically boils down to is not using discard and using fstrim, you can set a cron job to take care of fstrim, once a week should be ok. As kotalaz and rolfie pointed out, Modern ssd is much better than in years gone by, which gives me some encouragement to buy one and try it out.

Last edited by Panopticon (2019-03-03 12:58:40)

golinux · 2019-03-03 18:42:06

Yes, a big thank you to KatolaZ and rolfie for sharing their research and experience. I am rather hardware-challenged. Farm out all but the simplest tasks like changing a HD or PCI card. Still mostly on 1 TB WD black spinning drives that go on like the energizer bunny. I'll stay on them as long as they are in good health. I'll cross the SSD bridge when the time comes . . . possibly not this lifetime. LOL!

The-Fly · 2019-03-04 00:31:13

I find running BTRFS on SSD's works well. On my main Devuan server with an M4 SSD as the primary drive, Devuan mounts it automatically with the following options.

rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache

I've seen no unusual amount of write wear on the drive. I do minimize my swapping by setting the "Swappiness" to 1 in sysctl.conf to keep the amount of writes to a minimum.

Devuman · 2019-03-04 08:27:47

golinux wrote:

Isn't "long life SSD" an oxymoron?

SSD Life Expectancy

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2019-02-22 00:43:01

Devuan on SSD

#2 2019-02-22 11:12:20

Re: Devuan on SSD

#3 2019-02-26 01:02:31

Re: Devuan on SSD

#4 2019-02-27 03:59:09

Re: Devuan on SSD

#5 2019-03-01 02:57:20

Re: Devuan on SSD

#6 2019-03-02 17:19:23

Re: Devuan on SSD

#7 2019-03-03 02:13:38

Re: Devuan on SSD

#8 2019-03-03 02:25:38

Re: Devuan on SSD

#9 2019-03-03 06:10:45

Re: Devuan on SSD

#10 2019-03-03 10:20:04

Re: Devuan on SSD

#11 2019-03-03 12:54:31

Re: Devuan on SSD

#12 2019-03-03 18:42:06

Re: Devuan on SSD

#13 2019-03-04 00:31:13

Re: Devuan on SSD

#14 2019-03-04 08:27:47

Re: Devuan on SSD

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