Re: [GTALUG] rejuvinating an old machine: inexpensive SSD

[James Knott via talk]

On 2023-01-03 22:11, Anthony de Boer via talk wrote:
BTW, crying over those prices sounds like 21st century first-world 
problems, considering the princely ransoms we paid for wee fractions 
of that much storage back in the day, or being in awe of the first 
sysadmin on Usenet who was running a Terabyte Array in their datacentre.


Back in 1976, I paid about $200 for 4 KB of memory for my IMSAI 8080.  
In the 80s, I paid $500 for a 30 MB drive and controller for my XT 
clone.  Back in those days, when I was a computer technician, I worked 
on core memory boards that cost a heck of a lot more than that for 8 or 
16 KB.


BTW, I still have a 4 Kb core memory plane:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5LapMwk8iPrNkFZUXA4cmd5dTg/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-UaImmIxbC-73mW1SoJYNFA

However, this is not the memory I worked on.  I salvaged it from an 
older system that was being scrapped.  32 of these were stacked to make 
a 16 KB memory module and the computer had 4 modules the size of a 
desktop PC case.

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Re: [GTALUG] rejuvinating an old machine: inexpensive SSD

[Anthony de Boer via talk]

On 2023-01-02 23:45, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

...
If you want a really good SSD, you want one with DRAM.  Unfortunately
they seem to be quite a bit more expensive.  A 500G Crucial MX500 is
$69.99 at Canada Computers (much worse on Amazon.ca).  The 1TB MX500
is 101.50 at Amazon.ca.


Why would they add DRAM to the SSD itself? Buffering writes so it can 
report success sooner? What if you have a crash or shutdown before the 
flash write actually happens? This sounds like a misfeature designed to 
beat benchmarks.


Back in the Unix days the rule of thumb said that adding more RAM to a 
system was the most effective way of improving performance. I believe 
that's still true and maxing out the system DRAM on your Linux box's 
motherboard remains high on the list of things to do to get more out of 
the system.


BTW, crying over those prices sounds like 21st century first-world 
problems, considering the princely ransoms we paid for wee fractions of 
that much storage back in the day, or being in awe of the first sysadmin 
on Usenet who was running a Terabyte Array in their datacentre.


Anthony

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Re: [GTALUG] rejuvinating an old machine: inexpensive SSD

[Stewart Russell via talk]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 11:45 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk 
wrote:

>
> There was one infamous exception:  Amazon (used to) mingle their SD
> cards with other vendors SD cards in their warehouse.  So "sold by
> Amazon" SD cards could actually be supplied by a disreputable vendor.
> All hell broke loose when counterfeits were found.
>

They still do. You can't reliably source storage products on Amazon. If
it's too cheap, you must assume it's a knockoff.


It still blows my mind that there are (expensive) 1 TB micro SD cards. The
equivalent quantity of HD floppies would overfill a half-length (20')
shipping container. I can show my working ...

There are 2.5" HD format PATA enclosures for PCIe SSDs. Seems a little like
overkill, though

 Stewart
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