Marcus-
When you posted the original point, I went and did some research because
I had not thought much about MTBF of flash memory and SSDs before. I
did not find the article you reference but did find some descriptions of
SSD memory having lifetimes of order 100,000 to 1,000,000 writes which
many claimed implied a lifetime of order 10 years.
I was also surprised that SSDs are (anecdotally?) prone to abrupt
rather than degraded failure? I would assume that the flash memory in
SSDs have roughly the same error correction/detection any memory does
and that the file system/drivers would have the same opportunity to "bad
block" sectons of the SSD, but according to the few descriptions of the
failure modes of these systems I could find, that is apparently not the
case. I have speculations about why that might be but nothing really
very motivating.
I was really interested in the hybrid SSD/HD systems and found even less
about them. When you put a *small* SSD (32G) piggybacked on a
conventional HD, you would expect that the optimization tools would make
sure that your OS, system drivers, regularly used apps would all reside
there and then perhaps swap, giving you a great deal of the performance
a fat SSD provided. Perhaps the drivers for these acknowledge that using
an SSD for swap is just asking for early failure?
As far as I can tell, this hybrid configuration is not all that popular
but I can't tell exactly why. I am guessing that maybe once someone is
willing to make the leap to replace an internal drive they go the whole
way for an SSD on principle?
I'm all for maxing memory, but on some old systems that means 4 or 8G.
As for batteries that won't take a charge... I *do* know this is one of
the most commonly stated reasons I hear for buying a new laptop... I
don't know if Apple was generating planned obselescence when they went
from removable batteries to non-user-replaceable ones. Even while my
charge port was degenerating to a lump of burned
I've never been shy about cracking the case on my own machines and
digging through the guts as needed, but I understand why others can be
shy of that. The MB Pro batteries are laughingly easy to replace,
though somewhat expensive... memory and HD are equally easy (and both
of them are treated as user-replaceable by warranty I think).
I don't know about the rest of you here, but I think warrantys and
especially extended warrantys are tools of the devil... they keep you
from even peeking under the hood, much less being willing (and therefore
interested?) in repairing or upgrading anything yourself. We are
becoming a culture of wimps about our own tech. I like the Maker
slogan that says "if you can't open the case, you don't own it", and a
friend whose first comment when he sees a new tech toy "hey, let's run
that through a bandsaw and see what's inside!".
My performance problems were solved (pushed back) with 8MB of memory so
I'm happy for the moment. I'm expecting that next time I feel like a HD
upgrade (the one in it fails, my data hoarding and sloppy housekeeping
fills it up, or I upgrade to a new machine) that SSDs will be much more
affordable. Today I would have a hard time justifying the expense of
something bigger than 128G which just doesn't hack it with my bad data
habits... I just bumped up from 350 to 700 and the data sets I'm
generating (massive photo collections, 3D point clouds and meshes
generated from them, etc.) are not getting smaller, and while I do back
up and even offload much of this, the "working copies" that I want with
me at all times continue to expand.
- Steve
On 7/6/13 10:45 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
On 7/6/13 9:46 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
I then used it, hard! .. changing from app to app, to finder, etc
and it was really snappy. Before it simply would have hit me with
the beach-ball-of-death. This is seriously extraordinary.
Now you have another excuse for upgrading an otherwise usable laptop
besides gratuitous novelty and that the battery stops taking a
charge: You destroy its flash using it for swap. :-)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ram-endurance,3475.html
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