Re: Question regarding hardware choices

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> It works but it is only suitable for occasional or lightweight use.  I
>> wrote a how-to guide for building such a system; it is here:
>> https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/50416.html
>> It is a little dated now but still valid.  It details some
>> optimisations you can do to boost life -- such as using a filesystem
>> without journalling, disabling access-time storage and things. These
>> help but not much.
> I do all of that, plus having logs in memory. I live in hope of
> a long life. 

[ Personally I use `ext4` and I'm not convinced it performs
  significantly more writes than `ext2` in most usage patterns
  (obviously, in theory there's more, but in practice the use of a log
  allows delaying many other writes, many of which can end up cancel'd
  before they've had a chance to be performed).  ]

You may also want to make sure `/tmp` is a tmpfs.

Furthermore, you may want to check what's being written to your disk
by enabling /proc/sys/vm/block_dump and then looking at your log
(obviously, follow the advice above *before*).  You may find specific
applications that write data "needlessly" every once in a while (I used
to symlink some firefox files to /tmp for that reason).


        Stefan