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

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 6:42 PM, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
> On 4 January 2016 at 08:31, Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com> wrote:
> Just to add one more data point, I've had three ThinkPad T4x0(s)
> laptops in the past four years of work (the latest, a T450s, is only
> three months old), all three with SSDs, and had no problems with data
> loss or notable performance degradation after 2 / 1.5 / 0.25 years.


Good to hear!

I guess portable SSD drives (yes, I meant USB) are similar in
technology to flash drives but more reliable.  None of my flash drives
have so far failed -- in fact, their maximum capacity became too small
relative to the files being copied and I actually stopped using them
before they actually failed.


>> I was looking at portable SSDs recently [...]
>
> By portable, do you mean USB? I was going to recommend ensuring that
> the USB bus could transfer data faster than a mechanical drive, but I
> just did a bit of research, and was astounded to see that USB 3.0 can
> transfer data at 5 Gbps! [1] The fastest mechanical drives seen to be
> capable of about 1.6 Gbps sustained read [2], so the bus won't be the
> bottleneck there. However, as USB 2.0 is limited to 480 Mbps, an SSD
> is pointless in that case.
>
> So, unless I'm missing something obvious, buy an external SSD only if
> you have a USB 3.0 port to connect it to, and make sure you don't plug
> it into the wrong port by accident. My last ThinkPad had only one 3.0
> port and three 2.0 ones, and it's a reasonably high-end model, so I
> don't think that all laptops have only 3.0 ports these days.


Thanks for to tip!  I have USB 3.0 ports, so I guess it is worth purchasing.

Actually, I got a portable hard disk and a (smaller) SSD several years
ago and the hard disk recently failed.  Luckily, I didn't lose
anything valuable, but seeing it as a paperweight was making me think
of considering a larger SSD for my backup needs.

And yes, before this thread, I was worried about the reads/writes on
an SSD, but I guess one problem with hard disks (portable or not) is
that they are more sensitive to transport?  The HDD that failed had
far less reads/writes done to it than the SSD.  But it was physically
moved a lot, so I was thinking that was why it failed.

Or maybe it failed because it failed...and I shouldn't look too deeply
into it.  :-)

Ray