[Wiltshire] Suspect hard drive infant mortality

[David Fletcher]

On Sat, 2020-11-21 at 12:35 +0000, Simon Iremonger (wiltslug) via
Wiltshire wrote:
> > 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
> 

Sorry Simon, been a little busy.

I set up the laptop again, at the moment it's behaving itself. It's
using ext4 which I've never had a problem with before so I really don't
know what happened to foul it up so badly.

Dave