So, recently, I bought an nvme ssd to replace the very old ssd I have on my laptop. I don’t know what the non-nvme is called. It shows as “sda” on the system. Anyway, doubled the storage. The new drive is an nvme WD black SN770. I have the same one running just fine on an optiplex dell mini running endeavourOS. Zero issues. I like to separate home and root partitions and have btrfs on root for snapshots. So, thinking it would behave the same on the laptop, I put the new drive in the laptop and did the same partitioning. Installed Fedora this time, since I like gnome on the laptop and plasma on desktop. Everything went fine. Laptop was responsive and all until I was done and closed the lid. Came back a while later to use it again, black screen and nothing revives it. No key combo or anything works except holding down the power button to shut it off. This kept happening every single time I closed and opened the lid after a while. Thought it might be the distro/DE. Removed fedora and slapped endeavourOS with plasma on it. Same shit happens now. Black screen every time I open the lid after a suspend. So, I decided fuck it, let me juse use ext4 since it happens on every distro. Removed btrfs and used ext4 on all partions, and now this issue never happens. Not even once. Is this a known issue with btrfs and nvmes? Do they not like each other? Just wanted to share this little dilemma I had to deal with the last couple of days.
I’ve not seen this particular issue, but BTRFS is a turd on NVME. It does about 2/3 to 1/2 the IOPS of EXT4 or XFS on several PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 drives I’ve tested on several modern AMD and Intel systems. XFS actually has the upper-hand on NVME performance over EXT4, but not by much.
Just wanted to report back. I’ve nuked the whole install, didn’t partition this time. Set it up on xfs and I have zero wake after suspend issues now. It’s been two days since I did that and still haven’t had a single issue. Thank you for suggesting xfs. Might sound dumb, but never knew about it until you mentioned it. Lol
Well, thank you. That’s reassuring. Is xfs available on all Linux distros? Also, does it support snapshots like btrfs? Also
😂
Yep, XFS is pretty much universally supported and in fact even the default filesystem for Fedora Server and RHEL. No snapshots, unfortunately. XFS’s “claim to fame” is scalability, performance, and stability.
Thank you for that. Then what would one use to back up in xfs
Well, first of all, snapshots are not backups and should not be relied upon as such. They don’t protect you from a gamut of risks such as filesystem corruption, hardware failures, etc.
As far as backups, basically you can take your pick. Personally I use Duplicacy to back up my workstations to my file/media server, then from there my most critical data is backed up off site to secured cloud storage.
Timeshift is another popular tool.
There are many options out there.
While snapshots are not backups, they are very helpful when making backup because they are atomic and can also be transferred to another drive with btrfs send/receive.
You’re right, snapshots don’t save you all the time like an actual back up. Yesterday I backed up the whole system to an external drive via Pika. I feel so much better about it. I do have a nas, so I might throw a copy of the back there, too. Thank you for explaining things, I really appreciate it.