this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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SSDs are way more reliable than spinning disks, especially in a laptop that gets banged around. HDDs win in only one category: capacity per price.
That's true, with one caveat: if an SSD fails, it's usually catastrophically and without warning. HDDs usually give some warning signs before they fail completely (bad sectors, read/write errors, strange noises).
The SSD memory cell failure mode is to retain the last written contents, so I actually don't think I agree. In the SMART diagnostics, it shows how many of these bad cells are present, which is a reasonable indicator of impending failure from age
One major failure mode of SSDs is that they can corrupt their FTL map. That kills all of the data instantly.
(Now, a major reliability advantage of SSDs is that by being faster, you can also make a backup of them faster. And if backups goes faster, you're more likely to actually do them. Right? Right!?)
The biggest factor in making good, automatic backups for my home server wasn't speed (it's an older machine with a SAS array of spinning discs) but the availability of affordable cloud based backup storage (I use Backblaze and sync my files to a storage bucket once a day). Then it becomes automatic, and no one has to remember to do it, and it's offsite.
Even when external USB discs got cheap you had to remember to do it regularly and many people would forget.