Suggestions for things to do with a 16gb internal SSD?

[Kernel_chilli]

My laptop has three internal drives. I have a 128gb SSD which contains only the OS. I also have a 1tb SSD used for storage of files such as documents, music, movies, games etc and that is big enough for all I need to get the most out of this computer. Aside from this storage drive I also have my desktop with multiple drives inside it that includes multiple storage drives that I can access remotely from this laptop. Alongside these two options and a remote option, I also have an M.2 SATA SSD which is 16gb in volume - and here is where the reason for this post comes in.

I have absolutely no idea what to use this 16gb drive for. First, I had it simply to hold my music, but I've now moved that to the 1tb drive. I then considered using it for games, but the space they take up adds up pretty quick, so that went out the window. Now I'm sat with a drive I cant think of a use for so I thought I'd turn to the community here and see what everybody comes up with.

 

[dos2unix]

I tend to do it the other way around. Small disk for OS, big disk for /home and everything else.

 

[Kernel_chilli]

I tend to do it the other way around. Small disk for OS, big disk for /home and everything else.

I do too, but 16gb seemed a bit small for the OS even with it being Arch and besides that, I put this small drive in from a donor laptop after it was all set up if I remember rightly.

 

[MikeWalsh]

I tend to do it the other way around. Small disk for OS, big disk for /home and everything else.

Slightly different here. Big drive - 1TB - for the "kennels" (a dozen or so Puppies, all the external, 'shared' Puppy 'portable' apps and Puppy development stuff).....and a HUGE drive - 3 TB - for all the media stuff.

Mike.

 

[dos2unix]

I do too, but 16gb seemed a bit small for the OS even with it being Arch and besides that, I put this small drive in from a donor laptop after it was all set up if I remember rightly.

I

Slightly different here. Big drive - 1TB - for the "kennels" (a dozen or so Puppies, all the external, 'shared' Puppy 'portable' apps and Puppy development stuff).....and a HUGE drive - 3 TB - for all the media stuff.

I guess context matters for everything My "small" disks at home are 256GB. My "data" disk are usually over 1TB.
I do have a laptop that came with a 32GB drive, I added a second 128GB drive. So in these cases, I use the smaller drive for the OS. We also have a LOT of Azure cloud VMs. The OS drives on these are "usually" 10GB by default. There are cases, where we use larger ones, but none are larger than 64GB for the OS. But we have data disk that are 100s of TBs.

 

[Condobloke]

I do it differently too....

16gb drive
....would likely occupy a spot on the mantelpiece as a curiosity piece.

Just to remind me of times past

 

[Thunderpants]

I would use an external USB case and make a disaster recovery disk out of it by instlaling Ventoy than copy useful tools such as redorescue, boot-repair-disk on it.

 

[bob466]

Are you sure you have a 16GB SSD...as the smallest is 120GB or do you have 16GB of space.

https://www.hp.com/au-en/shop/tech-takes/post/choosing-right-ssd

 

[dos2unix]

You can still get 64GBs

Amazon.com: SSD SATA 2.5" 64GB Dogfish Internal Solid State Drive High Performance Hard Drive for Desktop Laptop SATA III 6Gb/s (64GB 2.5"-SATA3) : Electronics

Amazon.com: SSD SATA 2.5" 64GB Dogfish Internal Solid State Drive High Performance Hard Drive for Desktop Laptop SATA III 6Gb/s (64GB 2.5"-SATA3) : Electronics

www.amazon.com

Or even 32GB

https://www.m4l.com/sandisk-32gb-sata-6-0-gbps-ssd-sdssdp-032g-g25?rid=66&msclkid=5912c6d3579915b0f9f0a13f3ca9a76b

 

[MikeWalsh]

@dos2unix :-

I guess context matters for everything My "small" disks at home are 256GB. My "data" disk are usually over 1TB.
I do have a laptop that came with a 32GB drive, I added a second 128GB drive. So in these cases, I use the smaller drive for the OS. We also have a LOT of Azure cloud VMs. The OS drives on these are "usually" 10GB by default. There are cases, where we use larger ones, but none are larger than 64GB for the OS. But we have data disk that are 100s of TBs.

I had a 32GB KingSpec PATA/IDE SSD for the ancient P4-powered Dell Inspiron 1100 we bought all the way back in 2002. It also had all of 2GB of DDR1 RAM.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/KingSpec-2-5-inch-Solid-SM2236-Controller/dp/B008RVN97A?th=1

.....although I got mine for less than half that a decade ago. They've changed the logo and labelling since I bought mine, but it's essentially the same drive. The Dells of that generation also used a PATA "edge-connector" converter for the internal PCI bus, so that got rescued as well:-

This was an MLC type, and was my first foray into solid-state drives. Puppy has always run entirely in RAM, so she's always been relatively fast even on ancient hardware of that generation.....but it DID speed up boot (and "save") times by an order of magnitude. I was quite happy with that.

Considering that machine originally came with a 20 GB Hitachi TravelStar HDD and just 128 MB of DDR1, this was quite an upgrade at the time!

Even back then, I was using a 500 GB external SeaGate 'Expansion' HDD for my media collection.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

The 32GB drive, I don't remember what happened to it. It got replaced after 18 months or so with a 64GB variant of the same make & model. The 1100 died at least 5 years ago now, so I rescued the drive before taking the old beast down to our local recycling centre. That 64GB SSD now powers a home-made 'external' that I built from an old Compaq floppy-disk case I'd had kicking around for years. I bought a PATA -> SATA "converter" for all of GBP £2.00 off eBay, and a SATA -> USB 3.0 adapter cable.

It runs ChromeOS-Reflex, and gets plugged-in on odd occasions......and runs well from both the Pavilion desktop rig AND the Dell Latitude lappie.

I'm eying up a 10 TB Seagate Barracuda 'Pro' ATM, to replace the 3 TB drive. My media collection just keeps growing and growing...


Mike.

 

[theLegionWithin]

wow thats small! i second the motion to take it out and frame it on the wall

 

[Kernel_chilli]

Are you sure you have a 16GB SSD...as the smallest is 120GB or do you have 16GB of space. View attachment 25040

https://www.hp.com/au-en/shop/tech-takes/post/choosing-right-ssd

Are you sure you have a 16GB SSD...as the smallest is 120GB or do you have 16GB of space. View attachment 25040

https://www.hp.com/au-en/shop/tech-takes/post/choosing-right-ssd

Yup, it is one of these:

CeX

It may not be an SSD actually I think when I was writing the post yesterday I just grouped it in with the others. Whatever it is, its 16gb in capacity and I want to give it a purpose!

 

[Kernel_chilli]

wow thats small! i second the motion to take it out and frame it on the wall

It may be the only thing to do with it at this rate!

 

[MikeWalsh]

Are you sure you have a 16GB SSD...as the smallest is 120GB or do you have 16GB of space. View attachment 25040

https://www.hp.com/au-en/shop/tech-takes/post/choosing-right-ssd

Uhh.....smallest commercially-available for mainstream direct SATA3, yes; you probably are looking at 120GB now.

You can get several of the PATA/IDE-type SSDs in rather smaller sizes, however. Some would be available in regular 2.5" form-factor. Transcend do a range of these:-

PSD330 | 2.5" SATA & PATA SSDs - Transcend Information, Inc.

Transcend's industrial 2.5

www.transcend-info.com

Then there's the CF-card eco-system. Technically, these are not usually described AS SSDs, but it's still NAND flash storage. There's no end of computer-controlled machines used in industry that will still be running embedded Win XP - some, no doubt, even Win 2000/98se; no internet connection; nowt like that - and they often need to be able to swap over different types of app/program, or different data-sets according to the task in hand.

Many industries over the years have had custom software developed just for their use-case. Industry is notoriously reluctant to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading, and with some of these machines costing a small fortune, there has to be a demonstrable cost/operation/return benefit before they'll invest an arm and a leg in new stuff. It's the old saying:- "If it works, where's the point in trying to 'fix' it?" CF cards are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future:-

CompactFlash Cards: Transcend, Sandisk | CF Cards for Sale

Shop our selection of compact flash cards by Transcend, Adata, Sandisk, & more. These high quality CF cards for sale range in capacity from 2GB-64GB.

www.memoryc.com

And that's but a small selection. Now; for the real geeks amongst y'all, who remembers the IBM MicroDrives? This was a tiny, miniature 1" HDD in CompactFlash-II format.....and are what were used by Apple for the very first MP3 iPlayers.

Microdrive - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

These were also successfully used for data storage & retrieval from the later Shuttle missions.

It's all ancient history.....but it gives a wee peek into development of these small form-factor storage units.


Mike.

 

[bob466]

I did read somewhere the old SSDs didn't have Trim, anyway who would want a tiny SSD.

I have Mint Cinnamon running on a 500GB SSD, the used space most times is 170GB which includes a 50GB VM.

It's best to have plenty of unused space than to want it and I never get."low Disk space" either.

 

[MikeRocor]

It's best to have plenty of unused space than to want it and I never get."low Disk space" either.

On MS Windows, I used to try to be "sensible" and make a smallish boot partition, though still with "plenty of room to grow, and a separate partition for data.

Every. Single. Time. I did that, I would end up kicking myself because Windows outbloated its partition. I eventually just gave up and started using almost the entire drive, no matter how big it happened to be, for the boot partition. I would almost always keep a small partition, formatted with something that Linux could easily read and write to for moving files around if I happened to boot Linux from external media. (This was before the kernel had r/w NTFS capability built in).

With a machine that's natively running Linux, you can always play around with mount points and/or symbolic links if space starts getting tight - though that can lead to some fairly "interesting" configurations.

 

[theLegionWithin]

I have Mint Cinnamon running on a 500GB SSD, the used space most times is 170GB which includes a 50GB VM.

same thing here - the OS (Arch) gets its own physical disk, a 256gb nvme, ~23% used atm. everything I care about goes on external media (other than steam, which also gets its own physical disk, but I can always download steam/games again so I dont back up that data).

 

[bob466]

On MS Windows, I used to try to be "sensible" and make a smallish boot partition, though still with "plenty of room to grow, and a separate partition for data.

I think windoze creates 4 partitions when it's installed, this might explain why Linux beginners seem to think you need to do the same when installing a Linux Distro but the Mint installer when you choose...Erase Disk and Install Mint...installs only two.

The Boot Partition and the Root Partition as shown in post 15 that's it...I've been doing the same for 10 years with no problems and because Linux doesn't fill up with crap it never slows down... so you don't have to re-install every 6 mths like windoze.

same thing here - the OS (Arch) gets its own physical disk, a 256gb nvme, ~23% used atm. everything I care about goes on external media (other than steam, which also gets its own physical disk, but I can always download steam/games again so I dont back up that data).

Installing the Distro on the whole works for me...I don't have internal storage Drives either as I did back in the dark days of windoze...I use External Drives...makes it so easy and trouble free.

 

[Mike-BTU]

I did read somewhere the old SSDs didn't have Trim, ...

Trim is a utility. Did you mean wear leveling?

 

[bob466]

Trim is a utility. Did you mean wear leveling?

This will explain what Trim is and why you need it...
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/ssd.html

To see if Trim is enabled run this command...

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep TRIM

To run Trim manually run this command...

sudo fstrim -v /