Suse can kill HD

Mike13Foxtrot

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So had Peppermint running just fine on a year old HP laptop. Switched out the 500 Gb drive with a 128 Gb SSD. Peppermint installed and has been on for 3 months. Not a laptop I use all the time. Tried OpenSuse the other day.

Opps. Installed from USB, install went just fine, until reboot. Drive no longer usable. Picked it up for 12 bucks on sale Amazon so not a big loss. Had Suse running years ago on an old bookshelf mini PC. Guess I stay away from it now, along with cheap SSD's ;)

It is mostly the drive I guess. But Peppermint installed and was running just fine. Tried Zorin for about a month before Peppermint, also ran fine. Reinstalled the 500 Gb with Win10 and that is running fine.
 


Odds are that the drive failed because of the number of writes and was already going to fail. You just sped up the process while installing the OS. It's not the fault of the OS, but the fault of the drive.

That's probably the case.

It's similar to the folks that claim Linux borked their USB drive they were going to install with. No, the drive failed at that time because of the activity on the drive. The same activity caused by another means would still have caused the drive to fail.

Pressing on the gas pedal didn't ruin your car's engine. Not having engine oil did. It just failed while you were pressing the gas pedal. Something along those lines.
 
The drive was used in a 3 month time frame and only occasionally. So number of writes not an issue. Not with an SSD that I installed peppermint on and used that laptop about 5 times since just updating.

As I said maybe the drive was not the best 12 bucks on Amazon for a 128 Gb SSD. Soooo, maybe cheap drive but not worn out.
 
I buy 120 GB SSD drives don't need nothing bigger cost of these SSDs is $10.00 to $12.00 on sale from newegg various name brands and 2 years later going strong without complaints.

I do this for all my SSD drives from the git go.

I suggest lowering the swappiness from the default 60 to 1 to reduce the writes to the SSD.
Code:
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

sudo sed -i '$ a\vm.swappiness = 1' /etc/sysctl.conf
 
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Thanks Nelson for the info...

I have 6 other SSD's Micro Center usually has the 120's for under 20.00 along with 5 dollar Pi Zero W's. Grab when there. They have worked so far. Difference is all others I have are made in Taiwan. The one that croaked was made in China.

I was kinda being sarcastic on Suse.... had it years ago on a desktop. Still think if I had just used the drive and stuck with Peppermint for as little as I use that HP, it would have worked. But the install was just too much.

Again, I run VM and try a lot of Distro's got 4 laptops, only one I use a lot. Plus my basement has racks of old PC's. Been messing with hardware since 94 ish. The other SSD's get their share of tryouts. Still going, 1 bad one won't stop me. o_O
 
Yeah, while it is possible for poorly written software to kill hardware, a solid OS that has been around a long time won't do that. Most modern SSDs are not as subject to write limitations as they used to be.

Cheap, no name SSDs are likely not properly made. You can find inexpensive, well known SSDs for not much more than the junk ones, and the well known SSDs will last nearly as long as a spinner but with much better speed.

My Kubuntu OS is on a 120GB inexpensive Kingston SSD, and my /home directory is on its own partition on a 500GB WD SSD. Both are responsive and show no ill effects from a couple of years of use.
 
The SSD in this incident is not even hefty enough to be a paperweight. :p

I pick up TB drives all the time. Usually OEM packed. Always have, got 2 empties 1 TB and 1 500 Gb, just sitting. I guess you could call me a file hoarder. Comes from years of running a BBS in the 90's. Threw a 30 gal tub of CD's and DvD's away last month. Haven't spun one of them up for years.

Still have and old 32Mb HD on a controller card, got that in '91....I need some help ;)
 
First thing I do with a drive > 250 GB (arbitrary figure) is convert it to GPT, no extended partitions, and can cram on more Linux :)

Cheers

Wizard
 

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