I know of that theoretical threat.
My current daily driver is a 7 year old Galaxy S3 neo, with 1.5GB RAM and 16GB flash.
So I’ll double that, yay!
Flash shows no trace of degradation.
I would hope that the one Purism is using has at least the same quality.
Wear leveling works the better the more cells you have, so 32GB should be at least twice as good as 16GB. [scientific citation needed]
Also note that browsing the web with caching on is basically the same thing. I have always wondered whether surfing actively degrades flash.
One more reason to hate the bloated “free” web with trackers and ads. It degrades your hardware
While size is favorable for longevity, the more voltage levels (SLC, MLS, TLC, QLC) the worse, and smaller cells (smaller manufacturing process) are worse. Not that I actually know any of the parameters.
Assuming the flash is of reasonable quality it’s really not an issue in practice. While there are limited writes available on flash storage, QLC generally has more than 100 writes, which would be 3TB for the phone, TLC jumps to 300-3000 writes. If the flash controller operates with a SLC-mode cache, that also helps, as long as you don’t write so much data in a short time span that it regularly has to drop to TLC mode.
Most of the time, flash storage lasts its rated time and a bit longer, even when in heavy use. Of course, use a bad controller and an unfriendly filesystem, and you can kill it quite quickly.
All that aside, enabling ZRam, with a backing file, is usually the way to go if you want to have swap not absolutely choke. ZRam writes the pages do disk compressed, so reduces the number of pages written by about 60%. It does take a bit more CPU time, but that’s usually worth the tradeoff.
Also worth mentioning is CGroups. You can limit memory per task, so you can pick what gets forced to swap, at what level. And if swap is not an option, you can pick what the OOM-K targets (either via cgroup, or by tweaking the OOM-weight of the process).
I just installed smartctl but it looks like it doesn’t support either of the disks in the Librem 5.
So mmc extcsd read /dev/mmcblk0 | grep LIFE_TIME instead (lower is better). But that won’t work either for the uSD card. (It may work if you remove the uSD from the phone periodically and check it in a computer that has a direct SD drive, but that’s a hassle.)
Can also use tune2fs -l /dev/mmcblk0p2 (or /dev/sda1) to monitor ‘Lifetime writes’ as the next best thing.
Or remember that hardware lies to you, and don’t keep a single copy of anything important. I’ve run frankenstein raid arrays before, with drives up to 10 years old, without issue. The key is you need a minimum of 3 copies of anything important (that way, when they don’t match, you can figure out which is the right version).
For a portable device, this means everything on it should be duplicated elsewhere.
Tape still is the most cost effective way to back up massive amounts of data. It’s just massive amounts is now on the order of hundreds of terabytes to petabytes.
Nice one, hilobekerfulaisien. 2 days visited, 1 topic viewed, 1 topic created, 1 post created
I see you really are immersed in the community by now, trying hard to understand what has been going on here the last couple of years .
adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
I state, changing specs of a late hardware project makes it later. My shipping has just been announced. To be honest, I would rather have my 3GB device now than a 6GB device in another 3.5 years. But you knew that and are only here for the fun of it. So have fun and welcome to our nice and friendly community.
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