[Wiltshire] Suspect hard drive infant mortality

[Simon Iremonger (wiltslug)]

> I got it set up with Mint 20, all working beautifully,

> I was so frustrated with frequent crashes, manual fscks, and data loss,
> that I converted the ext4 partition to BTRFS. I suspected the FS driver
> because I have an NTFS partition on the same disk that was running
> mostly smoothly on both Windows and Linux, and because Dell's hardware
> endurance tests, and the on-board SMART statistics reported zero issues.


An IMPORTANT difference here, is that BTRFS checksums data -- that is
it basically does not trust the underlying disk interface/driver.
This may make it slower, certainly I have had weirdness with
balanced trees and all of that.  Even heard of people who have
ended up 'stuck' because not enough space to delete something in
weird obscure circumstances =).

There could be all sorts of weirdness with disk driver, DMA, cache
coherence, and so-on, regardless of ext4 itself!.  In any case
Ext4 and Btrfs will inevitably exercise those underlying layers
differently.

I would also note that mint-20 offers a 5.4 LTS kernel and also a
5.8 kernel (not LTS) kernel series.  If you have had trouble with
the default 5.4 I would go into update-manager and install the 5.8
kernel [which it will then keep updated for sensible period].

That said, in all cases you should have reliable backups and the
possibility of re-installing easily.  I would consider moving
to k5.8 AND going for BTRFS and hoping for the best =).


--Simon