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

[Rich Faulkner]

I would not use a SSD for archival and ALWAYS have a back-up or
fall-back.  But if you feel the "need for speed" these are hard to beat.
(And, "yes", I do use Raptors as well).  Thinking of migrating my
desktop to a hybrid of SSD and Raptor and dual booting RHEL and Ubuntu.
Already running my laptop on a SSD and happy with it so far.  (But I do
keep things simple).

RinL


On Wed, 2012-09-05 at 16:42 -0400, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:

> 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
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