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

[Kalin KOZHUHAROV <me.kalin@example.com>]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 4:31 PM, Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com> wrote:
> On an unrelated point to David's original query, I was looking at
> portable SSDs recently on a recent visit to Japan.  At Yodobashi
> Camera, they sold 512 GB ones at these prices:
>
> 22990 Lexar
> 37180 Samsung
> 72130 Buffalo
>
> How can Buffalo's be 3 times the price of Lexar?  Is it "3 times more
> reliable"?  The wide range in price (at least in this case with
> portable SSDs) makes me feel there is something I'm still missing
> about SSDs.   I think the Buffalo was "Made in Japan" whereas the
> Lexar is "Made in China".  But triple the price?
>
Every train has its passengers (or they stop it).

Please note that there are currently only 3 manufacturers of
hard-drives and they make/made alliances with SSD/memory
manufacturers: WesternDigital/SanDsik, Seagate/Samsung,
Toshiba/Fujitsu... And buffalo is mostly doing OEM (and doing it
good).

On a(nother) side-note, if anyone is looking to get decent speed out
of their recent machine, do not overlook NVMe on M.2 socket:

# smartctl -d scsi -i /dev/nvme0n1 |grep -P 'Product|Capacity'
Product:              Samsung SSD 950
User Capacity:        512,110,190,592 bytes [512 GB]
# hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1

/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 7368 MB in  3.00 seconds = 2455.46 MB/sec

Write speed is a tad slower but around 2GB/s, so no issues. Ah, yeah
and there is like no seek time for random IO :-)

That pleasure costed me about 5man (so 1$/GB), but hey that is 20-25
times my good 7K RPM SATA drives!

And since USB3 was mentioned, there are external pen-type SSDs that
are relatively fast. I currently use a few of SanDisk's SDCZ88-128G
for about 250MB/s R/W and 1man for 128GB.

Cheers,
Kalin.