Re: SSD TBW

In comp.misc Don Y <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 8/21/2026 4:01 PM, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
>> repartitioned it using just the upper half of the drive instead of
>> all the space for the system partition, and no more corruption.
>> Obviously the wear leveling done by that SSD controller isn't very
>> sophisticated and had worn out the flash used for the starting
> 
> I think EeePCs aren't intended for much more than email, etc.
> And, running a UNIX on it (BSD in my case) still does writes to
> the / partition (think /var/log).  Perhaps retooling the system
> might cut down on that (mount /var as a tmpfs?)

Yes my Linux install runs in a tmpfs in RAM. The start of the SSD
had been worn out by the time I got the EeePC second-hand, probably
running the factory WinXP install. User files are saved of course,
but excluding things like the Firefox disk cache, so writes are
mainly for OS upgrades, which hopefully won't be enough to wear
the rest of the SSD out too soon.

> Dunno as I don't run Linux.  Maybe start here:
>    <https://www.usbdev.ru/files/smi/smimptool/>
> 
> I rescue "recovery media" for Windows machines (typically 8GB
> thumb drives that have been factory marked as R/O).  These
> tools let me convert them to usable 8G drives -- a nice size
> to emulate a DVD-DL.  Especially as optical drives are becoming
> scarce in machines (or, physically incompatible with the sizes
> of those machines -- e.g., NUCs)

I keep a USB CD/DVD drive for machines like the EeePC that don't
come with one - the BIOSs all seem to support them fine. I guess
the firmware upgrades aren't worth digging into for me - most of
my dead USB drives are just dead. There's only one that started
getting filesystem corruption, but didn't go r/o.

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