What do you do with very small SSD or NVMe drives?

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philb2

[H]ard|Gawd
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For all the usual reasons, I have these old SSD drives. I have several 128 GB NVMe drives that came with new laptops, but got replaced with 1 or 2 TB drives. So do i just chuck these?
 
128GB SATA drives are handy for Linux boot or swap drives. NVMe is a little trickier since m.2 slots tend to be a scarce resource; if there's a slot available, then same thing, boot or swap.
 
Certain NAS OS distributions like TrueNAS don't allow you to use your boot drive for storage as well, so overly large SSDs are actually wasted on them - but you also shouldn't use garden variety USB flash drives or SD cards, either, because their write endurance won't hold up.

Those would be perfect as boot drives, or possibly even SLOG or SPECIAL/metadata vdevs if you're using ZFS with a mostly hard drive-based zpool and they still perform like you'd expect an NVMe SSD to.
 
download offerup and tell them to meet you wherever YOU chose that way you minimize any time and gas or shipping. they come to you down the street somewhere and you slang it or a few for a a couple twenties and you're done. if it's even worth it to you. i need to practice what i preach lol.
 
Before you chuck them, at least put them on the free thread here. I grabbed a few 128gb NVME drives off the freebies to use in my truenas boxes.
 
Pretty much all of Linux-dom will fit like in 50-70G or so. I think they are still worthwhile.

For big data things, you could store that sort of stuff on an attached drive.
 
Pool them, assuming you having the ability to mount several in your case. I have several pooled that I use as my download drive.
 
Krispy Kritter said:
Pool them, assuming you having the ability to mount several in your case. I have several pooled that I use as my download drive.
Click to expand...
I sorta have some space in my case to mount SSDs, using special brackets. The issue is that I would need more SATA ports.
 
philb2 said:
For all the usual reasons, I have these old SSD drives. I have several 128 GB NVMe drives that came with new laptops, but got replaced with 1 or 2 TB drives. So do i just chuck these?
Click to expand...
You get one of those 4 NVME drive PCI-E cards and then do a JBOD array, then you store all your important data on said JBOD array. And since it's 4 drives, you don't need to worry about backing any of that data up.
 
Randall Stephens said:
You get one of those 4 NVME drive PCI-E cards and then do a JBOD array, then you store all your important data on said JBOD array. And since it's 4 drives, you don't need to worry about backing any of that data up.
Click to expand...

It's been a while but if you lose a drive in a JBOD array where's the redundancy? Don't you lose everything on that drive?
 
i use them in my esxi, proxmox, truenas, windows server OS drive... especially esxi... why take a 2tb and lose all that space when you can just use a 128gb...
 
If I was wanting a NAS style I'd buy up those 16/32GB Optane drives that are now dirt cheap. Pretty good endurance and low latency.
 
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