Re: [tlug] Memory upgrade and CPU bit-width question

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2016-01-01 23:52 +0900 (Fri), Raymond Wan wrote:

> I am many years out of date with respect to SSDs, but when they first
> came out, they were known to not be very reliable in terms of the
> number of reads and writes before failure.

Yes, much like HDDs.

> I think they are still not as good as hard disks...

"Oops!" :-)

But you're correct. The consumer models weren't (and almost certainly
still aren't) not as good as HDDs for heavy write loads.

That said, there's two things going on here that you need to think about
as a typical Linux geek (or, indeed, a typical PC user):

1. You do not have a truly heavy read/write load. (But see below.)

2. If you don't have a disaster recovery plan you're insane^H^H^H^H^H^H
asking for it. Note that this is not about having a backup (plenty of
people have those): it's about being able to start working again within
a given period of time. Which leads to the next (sub-)point:

2a: Put your s**t in the cloud. It's not only safer there, but it's
probably more secure. (Though explaining why is a completely different,
and much longer, message.)

"See below" part:

This is mainly of interest to those of us who much around with old PCs
(Thinkpad X61 in the house?!). The two things you do are upgrade the
RAM as best you can, and of course upgrade the disk. (I think that this
might actually have been the main point in the original post, but who
knows by now.) The original upgrade, not "back in the day" but quite
recently, was replacing the crappy 5600 RPM HDD with a (larger) 7200 RPM
HDD. Now it's replacing that crappy 5600 RPM HDD (Oh God, why are they
still there?) with an SSD. Point being, if you've done this once, you
can do it again, and you're already dealing with kinda wonky hardware
anyway.

So, to summarize:

> But if it is true, then you probably want to avoid having the
> SSD store any partition that has a lot of reads and writes.

Nope. Don't worry about it, except to the extent you worry about any
disk being dropped from a two meter hight on to concrete or any other
highly elastic[3] surface.

You're going to be replacing it maybe once between the time you bought
the PC and the time you throw it out, so it hardly matters when, does
it?

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_mechanics

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch