[ale] (OT) Head's-up on cheap SSD: OCZ SATA III 120GB (today only!)

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Rich,

That offer looks pretty enticing. What is it that's ending today? The link you posted says the rebate is $ 20 (as a "reward card") and ends on 09/14/12.

Unfortunately, all my boot hdd's are 500 GB with a Windows, Linux, and Data partition.  I'd have to figure out how to tinker with things so it boots either Windows or Linux and then link over to the spinning hdd for the other system.

Here is some other interesting SSD data.

This podcast, This Week In Computer Hardware, specialized on the topic with lots of info and Q and A.  They had an SSD specialist on and it was very interesting.

http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-computer-hardware/184

Here are some interesting things they said.

This person said he only buys Intel or Samsung drives.

If you clone an OS, you must use an SSD aware cloning tool.  Otherwise, the sector boundaries don't line up properly and performance suffers.  Or, you can install the OS from scratch.  I think he mentioned the name Paragon, but cannot remember for sure.

You definitely want TRIM on.

Sandforce controllers are way cool and maintain performance better than some others.

(From another source)  I read that some drives have built in background garbage collection.  That sounds cool too.

I was looking at some magazines in Frys.  It was either Linux User and Developer or Linux Format that had an article on SSD's.  Apparently, wearing out the memory cells can still be a concern if you keep the drive for extended periods of time.  Unlike magnetic media, which can be refreshed periodically to maintain the data, the SSD memory cells have a finite life.  The article recommends moving things like swap files, /var, /tmp, etc. to a spinning hard drive.  Also, it mentioned a command you can use when you mount the partition, which I don't remember, which will change the way status information is written to the drive.  If I recall, Linux normally writes the date that a file is accessed or modified to the meta data.  For files which are read frequently, that can thrash the drive a lot.  They recommended setting it to only update the date when the file is modified.

Having to worry about such things at all bothers me.  I know that, barring a mechanical failure or controller failure, etc., I can run something like SpinRite on my spinning drives periodically to read and rewrite the magnetic fields of each bit and keep that data there essentially forever.  You cannot do that with the SSD.  The idea that the data could just suddenly start to become unreliable after 5 years is very unnerving.

Having said all that, I may have to buy one of these to try it anyway.  15 second boot times sound very exciting.

Sincerely,

Ron


 


Rich Faulkner <rfaulkner at tux86.org> wrote:

>http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=91218&sku=O261-6380
>
>Got this via Tigerdirect mailer today.  Running a sale today only on
>OCZ
>SATA III 120GB 2.5" HDD's.  There's a $10 rebate per unit and limit
>3-rebates per household.  Limit 5-units per customer.
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Ale mailing list
>Ale at ale.org
>http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo


--

Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
Please excuse my potential brevity.

(To whom it may concern.  My email address has changed.  Replying to former
messages prior to 03/31/12 with my personal address will go to the wrong
address.  Please send all personal correspondence to the new address.)

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120905/17eb27e5/attachment.html