Veraxis

joined 2 years ago
[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

Sounds reasonable.

The Samsung 870 EVO should be comparable, if not even slightly better than the MX500 (1GB DRAM cache for the 870 vs 512MB for the MX500, and rated for 600TBW instead of 360TBW for the MX500). Samsung had a spate of failures with their 990 NVMe drives a while back, but aside from that they have a good reputation for reliability overall. I used one of the prior-generation 860 EVO drives in a laptop of mine for years and never had an issue.

Team Group is a decent budget brand in my book. Taiwanese-based memory seller who make both SSDs and RAM, even micro SD cards and flash drives. They have an actual product portfolio instead of just one or two models like the no-name drives. I have used their 4TB MP34 pcie gen 3 drives before with good success (now discontinued, but at one time they were one of the cheapest DRAM-cache NVMe drives available), and I have one of their MP44 gen 4 HMB drives in my current laptop.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

The Samsung QVO drives are based on QLC NAND flash (Quad-Level Cell). It has lower write endurance than TLC (Triple-Level Cell) and they slow down to nearly hard drive speeds when close to full. Supposedly, the technology is lower cost, but when manufacturers charge effectively the same price or more for QLC as TLC drives, there is zero benefit for a consumer to buy them and they should probably be avoided.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 6 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I am not aware of any SATA SSDs which use HMB, so I am not sure if it would work correctly through an adapter. I think the choice for 2.5" SSDs is generally between DRAM cache SSDs and ones with SLC caching, which are typically much cheaper. I think both are pretty much able to saturate the ~500MB/s bandwidth of a SATA III connection, but may run into issues with prolonged writes or when getting very close to full.

Looking on Newegg, for DRAM cache units, things like the Samsung 870 evo and Crucial MX500 cost ~$90 or so for the 1TB model.

SLC cache units like the Crucial BX500 or Team Group CX2 are much less, more like $50-60 USD. The Team Group one claims 800TBW endurance for the 1TB model. I do not know if I believe that, but generally speaking I have used their nvme drives before and have not had any fail on me, for what that small data point is worth.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do you know the specs of this laptop off hand? 2007 would place it in sort of a grey area between 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. If it is 32-bit, you are likely going to have major issues and I would recommend using something else.

Even if it is a 64-bit CPU, the performance may not be amazing, and running modern browsers with anything less than, say, 4GB RAM could be an issue.

I would recommend something lightweight, such as Linux Mint with the XFCE Desktop Environment. You may need to get even more aggressive about finding something lightweight for something that old, though.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago

I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I'm the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.

I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I've literally never heard of Bodhi Linux, but apparently it is a fork of Ubuntu LTS, which will have very outdated packages if that is a concern for you.

AntiX is likewise a fork of Debian Stable, so I suspect it will have the same issue. It also does not use the more standard systemd init system, so finding support could be an issue.

I don't think that it make sense to start off on such obscure distros. The advantage of a widely-used distro is that there will be forum threads and a much larger network of support to help you learn and debug issues.

I can't really speak to the security aspects of either X11 or Wayland.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

XFCE is probably a good, lightweight DE. Many distros will support it. I believe Linux Mint has an XFCE version by default. I'm sure they will get to Wayland eventually, but it sounds many of the features will not matter to you beyond just a working desktop.

I have never tried it myself, but maybe Debian with XFCE might be more lightweight than Mint? Probably more involved to set up, though, so I would research that a bit more before taking the advice of a rando who has never done that specific distro/DE combination.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Linux Mint. Easy to set up, reasonably easy to use, and used by enough people that a quick internet search should probably turn up results of people who have run into similar issues if you ever have a problem.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

That is a lot of RAM. Only a quad-core processor, but I imagine should still be fine for general-purpose desktop use.

What would you want it to do? Honestly I would call that over-specced for something like a file server and would probably consume a lot of power if left on all the time. Maybe a media server which can use the discrete GPU for video encoding?

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I am using lftp and mirror. One server functions as the "main" server, which mirrors the backup server to itself once per day at a specific time (they both run 24/7 so I set it to run very early in the morning when it is unlikely to be accessed).

In my crontab I have:

# # * * * /usr/bin/lftp -e "mirror -eRv [folder path on main server] [folder path on backup server]; quit;" sftp://[user]@[address of backup server]:[port number]

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Two old HP thin client PCs configured as 4TB SFTP file servers using vsftpd on Debian. Each one uses software RAID 1 with both an NVMe and SATA SSD internally, and are in two separate locations with a cron job which syncs one to the other every 24 hours.

People who actually know what they are doing will probably find this silly, but I had fun and learned a lot setting it up.

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