backups, hardware

New Year, New Drive

My first solid state drive was a Samsung 850 Pro 1TB purchased in 2015. Originally I installed it in my T430s. The following year it migrated to my new X260, where it has served admirably ever since. It still seems healthy, as best as I can tell. Sometime ago I found a script for measuring the health of Samsung SSDs. It reports:

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 SSD Status:   /dev/sda
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 On time:      17,277 hr
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 Data written:
           MB: 47,420,539.560
           GB: 46,309.120
           TB: 45.223
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 Mean write rate:
        MB/hr: 2,744.720
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 Drive health: 98 %
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The 1 terabyte of storage has begun to feel tight over the past couple of years. I’m not sure where it all goes, but I regularly only have about 100GB free, which is not much of a buffer. I’ve had my eye on a Samsung 860 Evo 2TB as a replacement. Last November my price monitoring tool notified me of a significant price drop for this new drive, so I snatched one up. This weekend I finally got around to installing it.

The health script reports that my new drive is, in fact, both new and healthy:

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 SSD Status:   /dev/sda
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 On time:      17 hr
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 Data written:
           MB: 872,835.635
           GB: 852.378
           TB: .832
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 Mean write rate:
        MB/hr: 51,343.272
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 Drive health: 100 %
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When migrating to a new drive, the simple solution is to just copy the complete contents of the old drive. I usually do not take this approach. Instead I prefer to imagine that the old drive is lost, and use the migration as an exercise to ensure that my excessive backup strategies and OS provisioning system are both fully operational. Successfully rebuilding my laptop like this, with a minimum expenditure of time and effort – and no data loss – makes me feel good about my backup and recovery tooling.