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

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Rich,

You've convinced me that I want one.  I did some reading after your message posted.  I think I'm going to save my money for an Intel 520.  (Or maybe a 2nd monitor, but I digress.)  This looks to be one of the most reliable in the industry, and they put a lot of effort into that.  It has top shelf NAND and they overprovision it to allow for potential wear and chip failures.  The drive has a 5 year warranty.  Their media wear chart indicates that, if you really torture the drive, it would last about 5 years.  If you really don't torture it, it could last 75 years.  I'm not really sure what that means in real life, but I guess if you start with the most reliable system, your odds are improved.  Newegg's current price for the 120 GB unit is $ 132, which is a good bit more than the special you mentioned.  Oh well.  By the way, what geek DOESN'T have the need for speed?

Assuming you migrate your desktop and you cannot put both OS's on the SSD, how are you going to structure that?

Sincerely,

Ron


Rich Faulkner <rfaulkner at tux86.org> wrote:

>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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--

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Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com
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