On Thursday January 22 2015 11:05:02 Brandon Allbery wrote: > I think there are a lot of things one can do that can have the side effect > of pushing the boundaries of hardware (this includes things like > compression).
Compression? Depending on what kind and the application, it can also shift the burden from (mechanical) peripheral hardware to the CPU. > Not to mention things like SSD where you are explicitly > trading lifetime for performance. Indeed. > Searching for reasons to believe it's > just to drive obsolescence isn't particularly fruitful, unless you consider > paranoia an end in itself. Oh, I'm not. But I also don't believe in the contrary, i.e. avoiding things that give debatable (performance) gains at the detriment of longevity. > I've seen too many cases related to both BSD (and later Mach, i.e. NeXT and > OSX) where much of the hardware level "stuff" is completely ignored by any > of the upper-level reporting software. -- one of the main reasons why Drive > manufacturers developed S.M.A.R.T. -- the OS does not do the job. FYI: still doesn't properly, BTW - OS X does not provide SMART status for external drives, unless you install an additional kext: https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver . But SMART status isn't everything: I've already had issues with a drive or 2 where SMART considered the drive to be fine while it most definitely wasn't. William: remember the Quantum harddrives that you had to help spin up when they reached a certain age? Other than that they were virtually indestructible :) R _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users