The New Machine
New hardware
That's a fairly ominous title for a post that will amount to "I'm getting some new hardware and want to brag", but it did sound pretty cool to me.
Ye Olde
Lets quickly detail what I have:
| Item | Model | Release | Specs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | M4A88T-M | 2010 | |
| Processor | AMD Phenom II x4 B55 | 2013 | OC'd 3.5ghz 4 cores |
| Ram | Corsair Vengeance | 2013 | 16GB 1333MHz |
| Primary Storage | Seagate 2TB Mobile HDD Slim SATA 2.5" ST2000LM007 | 2017 | 2TB 5400RPM |
| Secondary Storage | SAMSUNG Spinpoint M7 HM250HI 250GB | 2009 | 256GB 5400RPM |
| Tertiary Storage | Hitatchi 320 GB Hts54503 | 2010 | 320GB 5400RPM |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia GTX 760 | 2013 | 2GB DDR5 |
While I have 2.5TB of storage available only the Seagate drive is in use, with a single partition storing everything. This was primarily done as part of a failed rescue effort to quickly get me back up and running and restore data from a dead FS a few months ago. The Hitatchi and Samsung drives currently are set entirely as swap devices.
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 15Gi 3.4Gi 6.1Gi 143Mi 6.1Gi 11Gi
Swap: 530Gi 52Mi 530Gi
This is very much a silly "Because I can" decision rather than something sensible and thought out. An unmentioned failing 1.5TB 3.5" drive also exists but is not currently installed
On review I'm moderately surprised that all the hardware is that "new", although the timing works out as it would be around that period I was at the tail end of my time in Yorkshire. I've felt the limitations of my CPU specifically and while I thought I was working with a 9 or 10 year old machine, 7 years is still quite a while.
The New
So I bought new hardware:
| Item | Model | Release | Specs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X570 | Q2 2019 | |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 9 3900x | Q2 2019 | 3.8ghz 12 cores |
| Ram | Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 XMP 2.0 | Q1 2018 | 64GB 3000MHz |
| Primary Storage | WD Green m2 WDS240G2G0B | Q1 2018 | 240GB |
| Secondary Storage | Seagate 2TB Mobile HDD Slim SATA 2.5" ST2000LM007 | 2017 | 2TB 5400RPM |
| Tertiary Storage | SAMSUNG Spinpoint M7 HM250HI 250GB | 2009 | 256GB 5400RPM |
| Quatiary Storage | Hitatchi 320 GB Hts54503 | 2010 | 320GB 5400RPM |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia RTX 2070S | Q3 2019 | 8GB DDR6 |
Quite a sizable difference I hope you can agree.
Lets not dwell too much on this because there are pressing concerns, as mentioned above my filesystem is currently a single btrfs volume but as the new M2 storage is coming in, I thought in the name of performance I ought to layout my filesystem a little more sensibly.
The drive itself is a lower end m2, with an emphasis of power saving rather than speed, I wasn't really aware of this at time of purchase but it fit budget and was bigger than anything else I could get for that price I see why now, the folly of youth (last week) I guess. With that in mind I am coming from a pure HDD build to integrating an SSD, boot time isn't a significant concern as I rarely shutdown, perhaps that will change with this new found speed, doubtful though, as I've grown a custom to the dull whirring of fans while I sleep and never been in that habit of turning my desktop off.
Perhaps if prompted I'll write a review 3 months from now.
Storage
Back on track:
This post will need updating once I've completed with examples but as it stands the plan is:
- Migrate boot, etc, var, usr, bin, lib, srv and so on over to the m2 device
- Remove swap
- Create a single BTRFS partition across the available drives. Raidify it
- Install the failing 1.5TB device, mount /var/lib/docker, ~/.wine & ~/.steam there.
The result of this should be that system related files are quickly accessible, my personal files are secured with lots of space to expand & that games and other things that use a lot of storage (mostly docker images) get a sizable dedicated hard drive, this may fail but nothing too important will be lost (it's been a long while since I've been too upset of the loss of a saved game.). All of these can be re-downloaded and reinstalled without too much hassle.
I'm also in posession of a number of drives which I believe have failed, if boot time is insignificant I might take a look at these to establish if they are truely dead or if perhaps something can be done. A post for another time perhaps.