Hello,

I've just got a fresh new Samsung PRO 850 512 SSD for using in current Slack.

Is anybody here using this SSD model for a longer time?
I'm curious about it's potential wear and tear or any other problems during time.

At first I changed swappiness from 60 to 2 and I added noatime to /etc/fstab.
I use LUKS and LVM combined, resulting in the following structure:
/dev/cryptvg/swap swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cryptvg/root / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
/dev/cryptvg/home /home ext4 defaults,noatime 1 2
/dev/sda1 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2

I also limited the firefox and Java write actions as shown in:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd.
I am resistant to use trim because of this warning:
http://techreport.com/news/28473/som...implementation

How are you guys dealing with Samsung PRO ?

SSD wear and tear problems aren't really problems anymore. Drives are typically capable of greatly surpassing most users requirements for writing. And when I say greatly, in a test by techreport, the 840 series wrote 100TB of data before it started reallocating sectors. That's the equivalent of writing your whole drive and erasing it each day for 200 days straight. For a more "normal" usage of 20GB a day (which is still probably quite high for most users), it would take over 13 1/2 years before it would hit the 100TB mark. And once the drive started reallocating sectors, it was able to write 9x that amount of data until it finally croaked. It wrote 900TB of data... almost a petabyte. That's almost 5 years worth of writing your whole drive and erasing it every single day. And if you do only 20GB a day, the cells would last longer than you would (~117 years).

With modern SSDs, the electronics will typically wear out before the NAND cells do.

As for trim issues, there were multiple problems. The one you mention is due to Samsung erroneously reporting the drives support queued trim, when they don't (they only support serial trim). Kernels have bypassed that issue by blacklisting those drives from using queued trim. Other issues that affected all manufacturers were resolved with the 4.2 kernel and beyond. As far as how to call trim, there's still large debates about that, some say that having it enabled in your fstab doesn't do as much as manually running trim. In my minor tests on my ssd, I haven't noticed any difference, so I just have it enabled in my fstab.

Long story short, use the drive normally finding ways to best utilize the extra speed. For trim, do your research and decide if it is better to add trim support to your fstab or to run the command (either manually or semi-automated using something like cron).

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bassmadrigal --

Excellent write-up !

I always learn something when I read your posts.

Thank you.

-- kjh

I have a cheap kingston drive that is nearly 7 years old now. This was back before improvements to wear leveling in firmware and before good trim support was widespread. I've done nothing special with it and used ext4. I have not noticed any problems with it. New drives are supposed to be way better, so I imagine there is not really any concern for every day users.

I buy Micron drives now. Samsung has been performance king for a while, so it is great for many people. Stick to the reputable brands, and you'll be fine.

I agree with bassmadrigal that it's not worth bothering about modern SSD wearing out.

I have SanDisk Extreme Pro 480 GB since the beginning of August 2016, it reports a couple of SMART attributes indicating total writes. One is Total_Writes_GiB and its value is 318 (I believe it's called Host Writes), the other is Total_NAND_Writes_GiB with 628 (it shows how much is actually written due to write amplification). According to the vendor, the device endurance is 80 TB (which is approximately 73 TiB), and with the current rate I'll be writing slightly over 1 TiB in one year (if it's NAND writes that counts, although I'm not sure about that). I hope you can see how many years I'll need to reach the official endurance number. And even reaching it is not the end of SSD, it only means that my warranty has ended (which is also limited to 10 years, whichever happens first).

In my work laptop there's Kingston SSDNow V300 120 GB which I've been using for 3 years now, it only shows a single SMART attribute indicating total writes, and it's not clear if it's Host Writes or NAND Writes (though I suspect it's the former). I do not remember the exact number, but it was over 960. Again, very little wear.

That's why I don't bother doing anything special for my SSDs, except setting noatime for filesystems on them simply because I like it in general. I leave swappiness at its default value. I also set discard in /etc/fstab instead of using fstrim.

BTW, if you want TRIM to actually work for your setup (LUKS+LVM), you need to set "issue_discards = 1" in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf and also add --allow-discards option to a couple of cryptsetup calls in initrd (here's a handy script that does it for you).

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Samsung has made very high quality NAND products. I have a Sandisk flashdrive but my SSD is Samsung. The only thing I have yet to see is how Sandisk SSDs compare to Samsung. My SSD is a Samsung and been running just fine. I do have JFS formatted on it, but no TRIM.

It would be nice for Linux distros however to begin adding the option to format and install on a native flash based FS - such as F2FS , and it looks like even Sandisk has also developed their own flash based FS. F2FS is in the Linux kernel, but I haven't seen any disto offer anything but ext*, btrfs, xfs, jfs - conventional FS, yes you can TRIM though , but I think soon distros should start considering including the option for a strictly flash based drives to install upon once SSDs become more prominent, thats my view.

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