Filesystems and Disks

I started with a HP Desktop purchased in 2007 with Vista.
Since then, I put in an Nvidia card, which meant the power supply wasn’t enough for my hard disks - so my newer 500GB drive started clacking.

So a new box, and psu solved this. Later on I ditched nvidia and went with an APU (i3-4130) with no discrete gfx. Very happy.

Now I’m running an ancient WD 2TB (2700 days), a couple of newer Toshibas (3TB and 4TB running 1200 and 1700 days).

Last year I picked up a budget SanDisk which started to look old after only 240 days use. Looking at SMART, I see an incredible 67TB logged there.

My first reaction was to pick up a 960 EVO, now installed and running nicely… but still with EXT4.

I then decided to format the WD disk with ButterFS, and it is now mounted /mnt/W2 Btrfs.

Observations: I run my PC at home, it runs Plex - I watch TV on it a few hours each day, browse net, and run qbittorrent (Media folders on HDD, but download to SSD before moving). How did I get 67TB???

I think I can account for up to 300 GB of fresh stuff downloaded in the last month or so…


But mostly this stuff sits on HDD for Plex to read and feed…

Something I noticed with BTRFS also…

If I open Dolphin and right click to pull up properties on my Toshiba 4TB drive, it grinds a bit scanning and calculating 1.9TB (12000 files/19,367 sub folders). Clicking to explore in Filelight also brings up a scan.

However, if I do the same with my W2 (btrfs) disk, there’s no scan… 1.2TB on there, admittedly with fewer files and sub folders.

Still, with my SanDisk reporting 67TB of writes in around 240 days that would basically mean completely downloading the entire contents of my hard disks (about 6TB data) every 17 days (that’s a ridiculous 280 GB per day) I’m wondering… WHY?

Also I’ve been seeing conflicting comments about ext4 and btrfs having ridiculous overhead with many comments like ‘destroy SSD’s pretty quickly’.

So what’s the story behind this 67TB ?
Why is my SanDisk dying after only 240 days?
Is my SMART data wrong? How is that possible?

I’m not sure when it’ll happen, as I don’t do massive downloads too often (TV Series like TNG and 24 don’t come along every day…) but the next time I see one, I think I’ll be taking a record of my SMART data before and after… maybe I’ll think about keeping a journal.