On 04/09/2012 12:56 PM, Brian Jameson wrote:

I am planning on changing/upgrading one of my systems to Centos 6.x with a solid state system drive and conventional 'data' drives. Any suggestions for a good simple tool, or way to give ongoing monitoring of writes to files on what will become the system drive. The I can then move as much as possible of the changeable files to the data drives.

Why bother using a ssd drive then? By moving i.e. the ~/.mozilla directory off the ssd drive because the files change frequently you also loose a lot of the performance.

I have a 128gb ssd system drive and 2 1TB raid-1 disks for data and I've setup my ~/Music and ~/Videos directories as symlinks to that data drive because of volume and not because they change frequently.

Modern drives are quite good at wear leveling so that with regular desktop use you don't have to worry much about the drive going bad. Some vendors are so confident in their current generation controllers that they now offer a 5 year warranty on their drives.

Since it's a single system drive you should also setup a backup from your system disk to your data disk just to be safe.

Also you should keep your firmware updated. I had a interesting experience on Saturday. My ssd drive suddenly "disappeared" and my desktop froze and in a console I could see lots of i/o errors. After a reboot the drive no longer appeared in the bios screen. After a complete off/on cycle of the system the drive was there again and I could boot normaly. Then after about an hour the exact same thing happened again. At that point I feared that the drive had developed a defect and was gone for good.

After a bit of research this turned out to be a firmware problem. This problem hits all Crucial M4 SSD drives after the SMART counter for hours online hits 5184 hours. The drive will then stop responding and only come back after a full power cycle and the same thing will happen once per hour. Luckily you can get a firmware update on Crucials firmware page that fixes this and the data on the drive is not affected.

So as long as you use a current generation drive and keep up with the firmware updates you should be good without any special monitoring of the filesystem/drive.

Regards, Dennis