Crucial MX500 500GB 2.5inch SATA SSD

I wrote recently about the very pleasant experience installing a Kingston 240GB SSD in my Mele mini-PC:

https://easyos.org/install/how-to-install-easyos-on-a-new-ssd.html

The speed improvement is so phenomenal compared with HDDs, and the price has dropped, enticing me to move my main midi-tower PC to using a SSD. So, I have now purchased a Crucial MX500 500GB 2.5inch SATA3 SSD, for AU$109:

https://www.austin.net.au/shop-categories/hard-drives-ssd/crucial-mx500-500gb-sata-25-7mm-ssd.html

What has prompted this purchase, is that I have redesigned the layout of my projects for easier backup. Up until recently, my projects over the years have been "all over the place". Also, "build" folders are inside the projects -- for example, a compile for a particular architecture, say x86_64, in oe-qky-src, is inside the project folder. same thing for woof, building a release of EasyOS happens inside the woof project folder.

This makes the project folders enormous. oe-qky-src for example, a compile may occupy a hundred GB or more.

So, I have redesigned all of my projects into one folder, named bk, with all builds taking place outside of bk. Downloaded source packages, however, are kept within bk, as there is no guarantee they will always be available online.

The size of bk is 408GB. This includes old projects, such as t2, as well as recent woof and oe-qky-src. The size is convenient, it will fit nicely into that Crucial 500GB SSD.

At first, I backed up bk to a 1TB USB3 hard drive ...and it took several hours. Hmmm.

I have decided to backup in a crude way, not incremental. No raid either. Just copy the entire master bk folder, or even the entire partition, or even the entire SSD. If I also have an SSD external drive, the internal SSD could be backed up in less than half an hour.

That "500GB" is of course not really true. fdisk shows that it is actually 465.8GB, or 500107862016 bytes. If they were using a KB as 1000 bytes, not 1024, then 500107862016/1000 is 500107862KB, and 500107862/1000 is 500107.862MB, and 500107.862/100 is 500.1GB ...yeah, correct. 

The manufacturer's site:

https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/storage-ssd-mx500

Has this interesting statement:

Integrated Power Loss Immunity: Avoid unintended data loss when the power unexpectedly goes out. This built-in feature of our new NAND protects your data swiftly and efficiently, so if your system suddenly shuts down, you keep all your saved work.

There is also hardware encryption, but only available with certain software on Windows. Anyway, I read somewhere that it is very easy to break. 

Tags: tech