Possible SSD issues using as a PVR

SSD drives fail differently to mechanical HDD drives. The management firmware can persistently mark memory areas; so in the current boot cells can go bad causing a cascade of problems, but on reboot those gone-bad areas are marked bad so capacity reduced but problems are avoided .. until more cells go bad. In my experience once cells start failing reliability only heads in a downwards direction.

LE automatically fsck's any filesystems marked dirty on boot, so if a drive (and thus partitions and filesystems had issues) we attempt cleanup and this might keep things working. In this respect our distro packaging into two files (KERNEL and SYSTEM) means as long as those files are intact a reboot often does a "clean" start; but equally if those files are damaged you have a total boot failure.

Kingspec are a budget SSD manufacturer so I would have lower expectations on drive lifespan compared to e.g. Samsung EVO 'pro' drives, and I would expect less-developed firmware which increases the probability of low-level issues where the entire drive behaves bad or has problem interactions with BIOS etc.

To me, the log looks like a dying drive. Make sure you have a backup of any important config.

have you ever checked tha SMART values of the drives?

If there are SMART values, you can go and check the total bytes written. There are plenty of calculators in the www.

In case wear-out is the problem, you might want to chose more reliable drives as chewitt recommended. Samsung PM series or even Evo Pro. I use Micron 5300/5400. Or any other brand where you have the option of overprovisioning. The internal processes of SSDs are made very different depending on the manufacturer. TRIM and garbage collection as well as re-copying data. You might know, that - other than HDDs - SSDs aren't able to rewrite data blocks. A SSDs always has to delete the block before it can be written. This causes write overhead which hurts the overall endurance. Some manufactures are handling this better then others....

However, this might not be the case on streamed data. The more you stream sequentially the better it is in terms of endurance.

What Kingston model do you use? Are there TBW or DWPD (drive writes per day) values available? Quite often the entry level drives don't even mention these values....

e.g. a 128GB drive has 0% overprovisioning - so no room for re-copying data

120GB has around 7% overprovisioning - some room for re-copying data and internal processes.

...the more OP the more reliable is the drive. The more often you write the NAND the earlier it gets weared-out

hope this helps

maybe the kingston drives stucks with internal processes at a certain point and unplugging the power does cause a reset... kind of wild without knowing the wear-out level, but it could be the reason

never use entry level drives for valuable data

TRIM and Garbage collection are usually running in backround when the drive is idling. No manual action necessary.

As the prices are currently on an all-time low level, I'd recommend you to buy Micron 5400 or Samsung PM893.

These are enterprise level drives.

Prices tend to increase the coming quarter...

cheers

In general it's a bad idea to trim on each block free (i.e. using the discard mount option) as that leads to write amplification and will wear out SSDs quickly.

It's better to regularly run "fstrim -a", typically once a week, via a systemd timer.

LE doesn't ship fstrim.service/fstrim.timer systemd files but you can easily add them to /storage/.config/systemd/ and then enable it with "systemctl enable fstrim.timer".

Untested as I don't have any SSDs on my LE devices here, but these should work:

fstrim.service

[Unit]
Description=Discard unused blocks on filesystems

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/fstrim --all --verbose --quiet-unsupported

fstrim.timer:

[Unit]
Description=Discard unused blocks once a week

[Timer]
OnCalendar=weekly
AccuracySec=1h
Persistent=true
RandomizedDelaySec=6000

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

so long,

Hias

thanks for enlighting me HiassofT

Didn't remember correctly. TRIM has to come from the OS - which is kind of obvious