Using USB 3 to Speed Up A Slow Hard Disk
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I recently learned that while SSDs are very fast as hard disks, they die extremely quickly. I have hard disks that are going strong 20 years later, but this SSD I had installed lasted for less than 5 years.
I recently replaced my SSD with a 5400 rpm drive and the slowdown is stark! Much slower read speeds especially. I was thinking I might be able to use a cheap USB 3 thumb drive to improve speeds of accessing my files.
What is the best way to go about doing this? Do I just move my swap partitiion to an always connected USB 3 drive?
That SSDs die extremely quickly is not true.
I am speaking only from my experience.
What about this? "SSD cache device to a hard disk drive using LVM":
https://ahelpme.com/linux/lvm/ssd-cache-device-to-a-hard-disk-drive-using-lvm/
Use an SSD as cache, how wasteful it is...
Using a computer and living in urban society is also wasteful, but I digress.. I just want to have a faster seek time when I access my files.
SSD life expectancy.
My SanDisk 1TB SATA III SSD died in less than 5 years. I have never had a Hard Disk that failed in that short a time. I have seen this video by Explaing Computers. I guess in my case I am not an average user.
I have had several spinning disks fail on me but no SSD has failed so far. I bought my first SSD Kingston Now! 128 GB nine years ago today, incidentally, 15th August 2011. It's still with me.
I trust SSDs more. The cheapest and smallest solid state drives tend to wear out faster but the small Kingston goes on.
I only use Western Digital drives. Not one has failed in my life unless is was dropped or mishandled. Seagate drives have given me the most trouble, very non-durable. Anyway, I also like how much cheaper disks are. I just want to solve the speed issue. I dont need instant access -- perhaps ill just get a faster disk drive.
The failed conventional mechanic disks were 2.5" hard disks. My 3.5" drives are fine. I have WD and Seagate. An older one is Hitachi, but they have been merged. I think there are only three companies that make disks.
After you brought up that the hard disk companies have largly merged up, I looked into it. Things have changed quite a lot in the last time I bothered with buying a hard disk for installation. I did not realize things have consolidated so much...
USB 3.1 gen2 and nvme.
I've found the answer to my question. I am going to experiment with Bcache: https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/
Here is a nice walkthrough on a bcache setup:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/Bcache
Here is a more detailed guide on getting bcachefs working in ubuntu 18.04... Intimidating.
https://www.rwardrup.com/compiling-and-installing-bcachefs-on-ubuntu-18-04/
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=wQS-IhjkBSA
Archive Tapes were used by Linus Tech Tips for their massive storage needs, you were asking for Trisquel Studio before if I'm not wrong, which leads me to believe that if you are a creative type your storage needs might mean that these tapes are cost efficient for you. I do not think that this format is good for frequent overwrites, but for longterm storage.
I personally use HDDs for most of my personal media/docs/programs because price per storage value that I get is adequate only my main computer has a SSD of 120 gb for installed programs, if it die no biggie. I frequently change and delete and reinstall distros and while having a stable working distro backup. I also encrypt my SSD's so I imagine that the frequent overwrites and subsequent encryptions are destroying the little bits inside it.
My advice is to go low storage SSD if you need to be a lil cheap like me, but get it from a reputable brand! I think I have a Crucial SSD and its lasted me since Sept 2019 when I first got my x200. I would estimate 100+ OS install/reinstalls over the past year.
I have definitely considered more than once about using tape storage, and I think one day I will buckle under this pressure. I have huge storage needs, but I digress. This post is about trying to get faster access. Check this out -- I found this command that can help me quantify how slow things are going:
sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 17184 MB in 1.99 seconds = 8617.86 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 198 MB in 3.02 seconds = 65.65 MB/sec
..Seems darn slow... I do think I may do something like my OS drive is cheap and small like 64GB to 128GB SSD and my file storage will be on a slower hard disk. Right now I actually just have a 8TB RAID1 as my main backup. I was looking at bcache(https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/) or caching using a separate flash storage but it seems a bit fiddly for me. I'm just techy enough to learn this stuff but not techie enough to be living in the command line 24/7.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
... I just saw that video you shared. Its about RAID and archive drives. I think you probably meant to share this video about tape drives(https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=alxqpbSZorA).
After watching that video I realize I am not in the market for tape yet, maybe if I was always shooting lots of video and recording lots of audio. I actually perchased an M-Disc(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC) drive recently that I intend to use for archiving stuff that I want to last forever since M-Disc is actually made of some form of stone instead of the chemical based DVD and Blu-Ray discs, which degrade relatively quickly.
You do actually have the correct link I was referring to, I watched it a while ago and I searched to link without looking at the video LOL. So sorry..
But yeah, I usually do HDD dumps when I'm gonna be away from the computer and just casually like send 20/30 gigs to HDD. I then delete from the SSD, so like the HOME part of the filesystem I try and keep empty.
Best of luck!
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