Some list members might be interested in how I've got on with f2fs (flash-friendly file system).
According to genlop I first installed f2fs on my Atom mini-server box on 1/11/14 (that's November, for the benefit of transpondians), but I'm pretty sure it must have been several months before that. I installed a SanDisk SDSSDP-064G-G25 in late February last year and my admittedly fallible memory says I changed to f2fs not many months after that, as soon as I discovered it. Until two or three weeks ago I had no problems at all. Then while doing a routine backup tar started complaining about files having been moved before it could copy them. It seems I had a copy of an /etc directory from somewhere (perhaps a previous installation) under /root and some files when listed showed question marks in all fields except their names. I couldn't delete them, so I re-created the root partition and restored from a backup. So far so good, but then I started getting strange errors last week. For instance, dovecot started throwing symbol-not-found errors. Finally, after remerging whatever packages failed for a few days, /var/log/messages suddenly appeared as a binary file again, and I'm pretty sure that bug's been fixed. Time to ditch f2fs, I thought, so I created all partitions as ext4 and restored the oldest backup I still had, then ran emerge -e world and resumed normal operations. I didn't zero out the partitions with dd; perhaps I should have. I'll watch what happens, but unless the SSD has failed after only a year I shouldn't have any problems. An interesting experience. Why should f2fs work faultlessly for several months, then suffer repeated failures with no clear pattern? -- Rgds Peter.
