[mythtv-users] Mirroring root partition on SSD to a hard drive -- bad idea?

Eric Sharkey eric at lisaneric.org
Thu Jan 14 21:25:42 UTC 2016


On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Eric Ladner <eric.ladner at gmail.com> wrote:
> FWIW,  SSD's fail much more frequently than traditional hard drives.  I've
> got hard drives that are 6 and 8 years old.  I've never had an SSD last more
> than three years.

That hasn't been my experience.  Anything can fail, but SSDs don't
seem to be any less reliable than hard disks.

>  And be warned, when an SSD fails, it fails hard.  Not
> like a regular hard drive where you can limp along and get some stuff off as
> it's dying.

I've had hard disks fail hard and the only SSD failure I had was soft.
The most common failure mode for SSDs are fail-on-write.  In these
cases, you can usually recover all the data.

In any case, I agree that mirroring with RAID1 or something like that
between an ssd and a hard disk is a terrible idea.  If you want to do
something like that, you're probably better off using dm-cache or
something like that which is aware of the differing speeds of the
devices.

Eric


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