Using an SSD HD as your music Library to replace your USB HD

[Yomanze]

I was told, rightly or wrongly, that SSDs have inbuilt alternative circuits which can come in and substitute, and override the failed transistors, is that right?

Yes, until there are no more left to replace the 'knocked out' ones with. With regard to SSD care best-practice, it's advised to avoid going past 70% capacity usage, this might be part of the reason why.

However, there are still "silent" errors to contend with such as bit rot. Interestingly, cosmic rays are the cause of this, literally "knocking" electrons from their cells in SSDs.

SSDs are not an archival medium, they should be used with an estimated lifespan of 3-5yrs in mind. I've had a few SSDs fail now, and when they go it is 'catastrophic'. I now use several disks with a dedicated boot drive, which helps with long-term reliability. SSDs are more durable in general, but spinny drives can easily last longer if not shocked around frequently.

For archiving, tape is still preferred (even today!), or several HDDs in RAID or ZFS configuration.

Cloud is also an option, I wouldn't rely on USB drives personally.

[eldarvanyar]

Am I right in thinking that if you are using Linux you need to turn the journaling off otherwise it will wear out the SSD quickly?

I have a Vortexbox with a normal 1TB HD that I would like to change to a SSD.

Glad that yours is working out for you.

[PaulBarnett]

Am I right in thinking that if you are using Linux you need to turn the journaling off otherwise it will wear out the SSD quickly?

I have a Vortexbox with a normal 1TB HD that I would like to change to a SSD.

Glad that yours is working out for you.

Almost.

It's not a Linux issue, but a filesystem issue. Any journaling filesystem (ext4, btrfs, both mainly linux, ntfs, mainly windows) uses a journal (log) of changes, to guard against filesystem errors in the event (say) of an unexpected shutdown. And the use of the journal will incur more disk writes, which theoretically can impact SSD lifetimes.

But.

In a music server, most accesses are reads, which don't write to the journal. You will typically write a new album or track once, then play it many times.

And modern SSD have huge lifetime 'total bytes written' (TBW) values - in a music server, you'd be hard-pressed to hit even 1% of this over 5-10 years..

In linux (and maybe windows), the default is to record last-read times of files on the disk as well as last-written times, and this used to be a concern for early SSDs - so an option was added to to the linux mount command (noatime and later nodiratime) to suppress these disk updates. I used to use this option, but don't bother nowadays, as SSD lifetime is so much better. Maybe this is what you might have heard about SSDs and linux.

Added: and as Yomanze said - SSDs are not magical, you still need backups.

[ianlenco]

Am I right in thinking that if you are using Linux you need to turn the journaling off otherwise it will wear out the SSD quickly?

I have a Vortexbox with a normal 1TB HD that I would like to change to a SSD.

Glad that yours is working out for you.

Might be worth contacting Vortexbox. Some time ago I asked them if I could change the HD for an SSD and they said no! Probably depends on the model but in any case you would have to transfer all the files and operating system.

[PaulBarnett]

Might be worth contacting Vortexbox. Some time ago I asked them if I could change the HD for an SSD and they said no! Probably depends on the model but in any case you would have to transfer all the files and operating system.

Under Linux this is trivial - use the dd command to copy from old to new drive - and that's it.

[PaulBarnett]

Might be worth contacting Vortexbox. Some time ago I asked them if I could change the HD for an SSD and they said no! Probably depends on the model but in any case you would have to transfer all the files and operating system.

It would be interesting to know if their 'no' means a) it is not technically possible, or b) we'd prefer you to buy a new unit from us.

if a), they are probably wrong.

[Batty]

I have an 8 year old laptop that was taking a very long time to start, I swapped out the 1TB HDD for a 1TB SSD, all back as new again so now I use it purely for music and have the music backed up on NAS and an External 2TB SSD.

[eldarvanyar]

Under Linux this is trivial - use the dd command to copy from old to new drive - and that's it.

Thanks for the reply’s Paul. It’s good to know that SSDs have improved so much and that the journaling on Linux file systems can be left on.
I built my own Vortexbox server and am one release behind and could do I’m with updating it. It’s built on a Fedora package which is quite away behind the latest release and some update no longer work.
I do struggle with Linux if I am honest and dabbles with it since Suse Linux 9.0 and other flavours but do struggle with the coding aspect.

Can you please layout the DD or transferring the HD disk to a SSD? I would like to be able to have the music in its own directory on a formatted part sheet f the disk to make system updates easier by having them on the other partition.

What commands would I need , so I could copy and paste them into the Vortex box by logging in from the network.

Also how do you turn the compression off for FLAC?

Thanks

Lee


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[PaulBarnett]

Can you please layout the DD or transferring the HD disk to a SSD? I would like to be able to have the music in its own directory on a formatted part sheet f the disk to make system updates easier by having them on the other partition.

What commands would I need , so I could copy and paste them into the Vortex box by logging in from the network.

Also how do you turn the compression off for FLAC?

Thanks

Lee


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Ahh. My comments were general linux-related - I have never used a Vortex box. but here goes.

1) I would completely separate the task of replacing the hdd by an ssd from everything else.

2) You need a machine running linux, and the ability to connect both the old and new disks at the same time. and the ability to issue commands as root. This might, but need not
be, your existing vortexbox server. (can you access it via ssh, and gain root access (via sudo or otherwise)?) Or any old pc or laptop, booted from a usb storage key with a live
linux copied to it.

There may be a 2nd sata connector in your pc or server, or you might use a usb->sata cable (£5-£10 from amazon). Your old and new disks will both appear as files with names
like /dev/sd{x} where x is a letter (a,b,c etc). Issue command 'cat /proc/partitions' to see what drives and partitions you have, and their names.

3) to copy a whole disk (eg hdd to sdd), first check you have the names right (copying in the wrong direction will be catastrophic!)

Then do, as root: (triple-check the names): dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/sdy bs=1M oflag=direct status=progress

This will take some minutes, and make an exact copy of disk sdx (your hdd) on sdy (your ssd) (sufficiently old linuxes might not have the dd status option)

now physically remove the old hdd - switch off the machine, unplug the hdd cable(s), and unscrew its screws. (this is your backup, just in case),
put the new ssd in its place, replacing cables and screws. Switch it on - all should now just work.

After (or before) - to change the partition layout. Yes I too would want the music files in a partition separate from the o/s. Are you sure vortexbox dosn't already
do this? In general you need to

1) remove the music files (make sure you have a backup

2) shrink the o/s partition. This is much easier if the disk is not the one running the o/s at the time - so (say) attached to another pc running linux via a usb key.
use a partition editor such as gparted.

3) in the newly-free space space, create a partition for the music files - maybe use the same tool as in step 2)

4) edit /etc/fstab to mount the new partition at the same place as the old (now empty) music directory.

5) copy the music files back into the new partition.

6) done (but remember, I know nothing of vortexbox :-) )

Re turning off flac compression - not sure you can - why would you want to?

1) when creating flac files from a cd, vortexbox will initially create wav files, then convert to flac (with the flac command). flac command has options for more or less
compression, but no option, I think, for no compression at all

2) if you really want uncompressed music files, maybe vortexbox has an option to copy to wav rather tham flac? (assuming vortexbox even supports wav files)

3) you can manually use the flac command (with -d, decode, option) to convert existing flac files back to wav.

[ianlenco]

Might be worth contacting Vortexbox. Some time ago I asked them if I could change the HD for an SSD and they said no! Probably depends on the model but in any case you would have to transfer all the files and operating system.

Apologies, this of course is nonsense! For some reason I confused Vortexbox with Innuos Zen mini, both of which I've owned in the past. It was the Innuos that I was told I couldn't swap an HDD for an SSD.