Ultrasonic SSD?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Smanci
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Smanci » Tue Jul 26, 2016 8:19 am

xen wrote:So you are saying that basically some SSDs do produce enough sound to be audible, but most (if they do produce this level of sound) end up in the inaudible range?

But my question is: is this volume loud enough to be audible had it been in a lower frequency range? Is this typical of SSDs to have that kind of a volume of (inaudible) sound?
Yes to all questions. I've no statistics but it's rare to find someone whose SSD is making any audible noises - at least compared to GPUs, Motherboards, phone chargers etc. So not really typical whereas with GPUs it's more of a "feature" with some manufacturers and models.
The noise originates from the power delivery components, and varies according to load level. It's roughly the same thing as with cheap phone chargers and every other PC component.
Google coil noise.


Youtube example (might be the adapter though?)

xen
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 12:21 pm

Vicotnik wrote:
xen wrote:No I never said that the SSD shouldn't exist. I am saying that you shouldn't be using it as your OS drive.

You should be using it as a cache drive. That is what it is really meant for. There is a history of caches everywhere. Your CPU has caches that would function in exactly the same way as an SSD cache. Your OS has caches that it calls IO buffers.
So what? In all my systems I should install an extra HDD? And put my OS on that HDD? Using my SSD as "cache"? I don't know what that means. Should I do something similar on the Raspberry Pi?
You could consider the possibility of that being a well enough system that such a thing would be easily achieved yes. That "extra" HDD would not be an "extra" HDD, it would be the *only* HDD (unless of course you require absolute silence and non-rotation). The cache would probably be sitting in an M.2 slot flat on your motherboard. You know I am talking about something that is hardly even possible today. I am just saying people have it wrong when they think SSDs should be OS disks in general.

Or that, in controversy, you go and insult people that they're too stupid to live if they do not opt to use the SSD for that purpose.

See in this thread I was just turning it around, but it is generally the SSD people that insult the non-SSD people, not the other way around.

For most people, what I propose is not even worthy of consideration. You are slightly considering now ;-). I do not mean to offend, but perhaps sometimes I do.

If you now accuse me of being judgemental about SSD using people; it is consistently the SSD lovers that push people around and say stuff like I have quoted earlier. "Just use an SSD". "Why not buy an SSHD instead?" "Why not do as I do?" "Why are you trying to do your own thing when all the world has already agreed what is best?" Basically people treat you as an idiot for even suggesting the thing. But that makes them the idiots, because they have not even thought about it and just let themselves be indoctrinated by greed and common oppression by the common culture, that says it has to be so and no other way.

They are not content with using an SSD themselves, no they also need to proselytize and spread the word.

Not saying you do so strongly here, but others may have.

Also of course if you do not want any moving parts, that is up to you. If you have invested in having those moving parts elsewhere, that is up to you, and I can understand that you don't want to duplicate that decentrally. There is little point in having disks spinning everywhere if you are so centralized. There was once a guy on the Squeezebox forums who had outfitted a house with a central server location and long lines to every Squeezebox Touch and whatnot in his large home. But more than that, he had not just outfitted the server room with the central storage (which is obvious) but also ALL OF THE RECEIVERS AND AMPLIFYERS WERE THERE TOO. You know what I am saying right, there were no volume controls or home stereo or cinema devices in any of the rooms. The speaker cables all came from the central room.

Well if that is what you like, fine. I like more decentralization. I create a bit of a hybrid system, I guess. Or at least, I do today. I have had too many incidences where a central location would be at threat. What if police barges in and walks away with your server room, for instance. Do you have off-site backups?

But sure, that is a model you can use, why not. I am not offending that or trying to offend that.

I can agree that you only want one total set of spinning drives, and having them both there and here, is a bit too much.

The typical person of course may not have such a setup though. What if your harddisks get taken but your client computers remain. What are you left with really?

Don't you have a single point of failure there? I was meaning to write about that earlier but the replies came too fast and I threw away the material.

I am intending to let my clients plug into the server (even at remote distances) and for the server to actually pull from the clients. I have most of the Linux infrastructure set up for that I guess (Using a Mint 18 system as the basis). I still need to work out my complete and utterly necessary backup strategy for now. I hope to be done within a week, but usually these things of course take much longer because a million things go wrong in the meantime.

For your system? It depends on what you want. If e.g. your HTPC currently uses a 60GB SSD, personally. What I would do?

Since it is a dumb client anyway (or supposed to be) I would try to get it to boot off the network. If that is possible at all (I have never tried it). I would probably not give it any persistent local storage at all, unless I could integrate that with OverlayFS. Which would be rather tough, so I wouldn start out with that, but I could.

Your gaming PC of 120GB. I would keep it the way it is, no use changing a winning beast.

Your main PC of 240GB. I would keep it the same but not be happy about it. I would want to create a local storage space to receive some backups from the server. That's just me you know and my life and what I've learned is important.

I would want to have about 600GB available for that backup. Considering your situation. Then I would probably want the OS to boot off a single fast 16GB SSD. Then I would not care about games at first. That would probably imply that I now had at least a 750GB HDD in my system, preferably (for me) 2.5". Likely that would be the WD Scorpio Black I just ordered. I would first want to see if it would be fast enough to load games. If it wasn't fast enough, I would think about having those drives in RAID 0 to see if that would make a difference (just two of them). That is what I would consider prior to considering a caching device.

Implying that you would play games on it, which I assume you aren't (since you have a game PC). Regardless, that is all the same whatever you do really.

So probably I would end up with a very small SSD for the OS and 2 WD Scorpio Blacks (2.5") in RAID 0 for the fun of it. That would be the system I would want for my main computer in your case.

Actually considering that I defaulted here and bought that Scorpio, it might be the thing i am going to go after myself. See I was trying to use caching. I currently *do* have a small 16GB device. My root filesystem uses 22GB. But that's because I haven't put /home off yet. Home is 8GB currently. That leaves 14GB used. /var is not even on there. So everything else is main system. /usr is 11G. A stale backup removes 800M.

So, my minimal system using 2 desktop environments ;-) is now down to some 13.5 GB :p. But I wanted to install Windows on it anyway to at least be able to upgrade this motherboard so that is not going to work :p.

I guess since Linux fails so badly at it (with this drive at least) I wanted to move away from the cache thing personally now here....

The purpose of my cache was to use 8GB for root and 4GB for some data volume and then 4GB scratch space for stuff to do like compilation and then I'd see how it'd go but that failed miserably, as long as I was using the SSD I was experiencing long system hangs regularly.

So I don't know what to do really, I can return the SSD and get another one but I don't want to. The curiously attractive thing about this one is that its write speed is actually less than that of my harddisk, so to get it to work you'd need the balance where it wouldn't take many writes and was just used for random reads. Which I considered fun to achieve and I'd learn about the different cache policies and their settings. But the current IO blocks I am experiencing can't really have anything to do with that. Even a write speed of 14MB/s during normal operation (doing nothing, essentially) should not result in system hangs longer than 2 minutes.

But of course getting anyone in Linux interested then proves to be an almost impossible task.

There are millions of people essentially who experience frequent system breakdowns, as evidenced by the forums of the various distros, in that sense, that is always full of these things. And then everyone pretends that that sort of stuf doesn't happen and that Linux is very very stable.

And if you say "My Linux isn't stable and I experience this and that" they go "Are you sure? Have you reinstalled? Can you attach a serial console? Have you tried a different SSD? And so on...."..

Or you get people who try to derail the discussion and when you make an issue of that you get moderated because you're supposed to "help the volunteers help you" even though all of it is just a waste of time and you have to put up with incessant requests for information that serves no purpose or unwanted advice that is unrelated or people just tell you to stop wanting what you want and do (pursue) something else instead, so they just try to solve the problem by having you not attempt it anymore.

I guess I just have to write the kernel list. But I'm not sure anyone would respond. I make enemies left and right :P. The most important person in kernel development, I had a bit of an argument with him :p.
To be powerful in the cheekbones
Brings misfortune.
The superior man is firmly resolved.
He walks alone and is caught in the rain.
He is bespattered,
And people murmur against him.
No blame.
;-). I usually brag too much and am too full of myself.
I don't write much to my SSDs, I use a RAM disk as a cache. :)
What do you mean? As /tmp? Or do you use it as a real cache device?
Any storage media can die at any time. I don't think SSDs are reliable, I think they are fast. There is no reliable way to store data, as I'm sure you know. So I backup, and backup my backups and so on, until I feel reasonable safe.
Well I was just responding in that sense to a claim by Kingston that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs. A Scorpio Black has 5 years of warranty.

But anyway, I never had a DVD suddenly die on me when handled well. Maybe my usb stick is getting worn out, I don't know. I have had one hard drive failure ever probably within warranty and didn't even return it to the shop (I was very young back then). That was terrible experience, it had cost a lot of money (IBM harddisk back in the day, I may have paid 600 guilders for it (280 euro) I am not sure).

But "Any storage media can die at any time" is just a knock-down argument that is only true if you exaggerate and then throw everything onto one big heap -- the sort of thing others have done in this thread too.

I have used in my life about 18 different harddisks and I have never had anyone fail save for one that was relatively new and started ticking at which point I returned it and got a replacement. Yes and that IBM drive I just mentioned. That suddenly had a load of bad sectors. I thought it had been my fault for installing something that had a virus or something (I was dead scared of trying again, never played that game anymore). I also don't conder that some flash stick or card can die at any one instance just like that in one go, just doesn't happen.

Saying that not any storage medium is reliable is like saying that the sun isn't reliable; after all it might explode some time, but will usually give off some warning signs before that happens. The same is ordinarily true for a harddisk, from what I know. Reliable is a relative term but you are trying to turn it into an absolute and then saying that nothing ever achieves that Holy Status. Harddisks are plenty reliable for the most part -- it is software that mostly isn't. That is not an absolute either, and of course (...) I am aware of the statistics on drive failure, such as that the medium time of failure may be at around 6 years for the average harddisk, but a lot of them fail in the first year and a half, and a lot start failing after about 3-4 years. And that the failure rate after that is about 12% per year, which is rather high.

However that is nothing compared with a drive that you can just cause to die on purpose by just flooding it with data constantly.

I mean, how badly can you be in denial to not acknowledge this. That's just really bad. Logitech has these mice and keyboards with their unified receivers. The mice and keyboards have a maximum of about 40 "pairings" that you can do in succession, meaning that if you move a device between two receivers, each time you move, one of those ~40 pairings are consumed. Apparently a firmware design flaw. After about 40 times your device cannot pair anymore and you can considered it bricked. That's the exact same kind of design strategy.

And people are extremely angry about it, and for good reasons. (With Logitech). I don't see why it should be different for an SSD. It's flawed technology in its essence and only works if you don't do certain stuff with it. Not equipped to actually be fully used. You can brick an ssd in a day if you wanted to. Easy. Peasy. Meat. Like it has some sort of a self-destruct timer. Wear leveling. *Shakes head*.
But seriously, this is my point. I don't care much about systems where the OS doesn't know what hardware it runs on. I'm at the Raspberry Pi level (but still my desktop runs circles around yours ;)).
That's not your desktop. That is someone elses that you just chose to use. And besides, I don't know what Raspberry Pi you use, but version 3 is getting so fast that you can hardly qualify as a minimal resources device anymore. A 1.2 Ghz quad-core is about identical to the CPU I have.

But sure. However I rather doubt your main system is that RaspPi? Your systems are in your sig. An i3 4330 is a helluvalot faster than what I have here. So that's a bit bullshit. You have faster memory and a processor that is probably about 100% faster too. I mean, scant luck you are telling me I am doing something wrong, you are using a lightweight desktop on a system that is at least twice as fast, no wonder you have faster load times. That has nothing to do with the SSD though.

But the point really is this: I cannot ask a technical question about SSDs without getting attacked or my motives questioned, as if any information that could look bad on SSDs is forbidden, as it could turn people away from it.

I mean what's the fucking deal about someone knowing about any environmental characteristics that to his eye could be detrimental? The only reason not to give that information is because you don't want him to make that choice.

In other words, you'd rather not inform him so that he can make his own choices. You don't want to empower this person to make a different choice than you do, or have.

In Linux, or the technical computer world in general

Most of the questions I ask about information on doing something someone else hasn't done before, get met with criticisms or questionings of my motives that come down to "why do you want that?" or "are you sure you wouldn't rather be wanting to do something different?" or anything of the kind. And this is nothing unique to me either; some people start their questions on e.g. Tom's Hardware with disclaimers about the sort of advice they don't want.

"Please spare me the "do you really need this" questions", they say.

xen
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 12:43 pm

Smanci wrote:
xen wrote:So you are saying that basically some SSDs do produce enough sound to be audible, but most (if they do produce this level of sound) end up in the inaudible range?

But my question is: is this volume loud enough to be audible had it been in a lower frequency range? Is this typical of SSDs to have that kind of a volume of (inaudible) sound?
Yes to all questions. I've no statistics but it's rare to find someone whose SSD is making any audible noises - at least compared to GPUs, Motherboards, phone chargers etc. So not really typical whereas with GPUs it's more of a "feature" with some manufacturers and models.
The noise originates from the power delivery components, and varies according to load level. It's roughly the same thing as with cheap phone chargers and every other PC component.
Google coil noise.
Well I am aware of faulty adapters as I have a monitor that I have been staring at for some 8 years now that produces the noise when turned off or in standby. Terrible, terrible experience. Gives me nightmares occasionally if I fall asleep while the "sound" is on.

But those "cheap phone chargers" and many adapters of 5-12V devices only produce this sound when turned off; e.g. no power is drawn from it and it starts vibrating. I have never heard a PC component make this sound except perhaps a GPU, I don't know. Oh, and power supplies. I have a power supply that make the noise when not enough power is being drawn from it, so I have to run something that utilizes the CPU to get rid of it.

If you are saying that SSDs typically make enough noise to be considered audible were it not for the frequency range it is in, then my assumption is basically correct. I would not mind having some sound registration device and just recording various things. Would be as fun as seeing the power consumption of everything or even more so. Knowledge is power, right. But then, I don't have an SSD I can test it on, because I avoid them (instinctively :P).


Thanks for the link.

But basically it means I was quite right in my assessment here. I am absolutely allergic to that sort of sound. (Made a comment on that video). It is one of the most unhealthy sounds there is.

Maybe I should try to shoot a video with the sound my monitor makes ;-). Would perhaps surprise you. But it is very very loud. You don't always hear it if there is a lot of background noise. But in a quiet room it dominates the room.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:12 pm

This guy: video, mentions how harddisks will generally give off warning signs before failing or fail gradually, where as SSDs can fail quite suddenly and data recovery from them in most cases is nearly impossible.

Literal words. So in terms of being unreliable when you say "Any storage media can die at any time." -- no, this applies to SSDs, not harddisks. *Usually* not to harddisks.

It is pretty clear the trustworthiness of SSDs is much more prone to "erratic" behaviour. Generally (I believe) harddisks will fail over time. As such an SSD is going to be more "chaotic". One day it works, the next you are screwed. Your harddrive will probably keep working for long enough for you to be able to do something about it.

Needless, I do need to get my backup working ;-). I still don't have enough storage space for it really. Everything proceeds so slow....

Smanci
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Smanci » Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:29 pm

xen wrote:If you are saying that SSDs typically make enough noise to be considered audible were it not for the frequency range it is in
More like they can, in some cases, make enough noise to be considered audible. Just like with any other device that employs similar circuits, you likely get one that's completely mute, maybe other that's more talkative and sometimes another one that only talks when it's drunk during full moon.

I also hate all kinds of whiny noises no matter whether that's my raspberry pi or scorpio black. Or GPU. Or charger. That's why I'm getting rid of all of those :cry:

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:36 pm

xen wrote:If you now accuse me of being judgemental about SSD using people; it is consistently the SSD lovers that push people around and say stuff like I have quoted earlier. "Just use an SSD". "Why not buy an SSHD instead?" "Why not do as I do?" "Why are you trying to do your own thing when all the world has already agreed what is best?" Basically people treat you as an idiot for even suggesting the thing. But that makes them the idiots, because they have not even thought about it and just let themselves be indoctrinated by greed and common oppression by the common culture, that says it has to be so and no other way.

They are not content with using an SSD themselves, no they also need to proselytize and spread the word.

Not saying you do so strongly here, but others may have.
I don't have to push SSDs down peoples throats. People seem sold on how fast Windows loads. Me and a friend of mine sometimes sell or upgrade computers and replacing the HDD with an SSD is the standard upgrade for cheap laptops and the like. Sure, 128GB might be tight for some, but for the usual web browsing light office work etc its enough.
xen wrote:Also of course if you do not want any moving parts, that is up to you. If you have invested in having those moving parts elsewhere, that is up to you, and I can understand that you don't want to duplicate that decentrally. There is little point in having disks spinning everywhere if you are so centralized. There was once a guy on the Squeezebox forums who had outfitted a house with a central server location and long lines to every Squeezebox Touch and whatnot in his large home. But more than that, he had not just outfitted the server room with the central storage (which is obvious) but also ALL OF THE RECEIVERS AND AMPLIFYERS WERE THERE TOO. You know what I am saying right, there were no volume controls or home stereo or cinema devices in any of the rooms. The speaker cables all came from the central room.

Well if that is what you like, fine. I like more decentralization. I create a bit of a hybrid system, I guess. Or at least, I do today. I have had too many incidences where a central location would be at threat. What if police barges in and walks away with your server room, for instance. Do you have off-site backups?
Only storage is central, amps and the like is not. And I live in a one room apartment, the server is on top of my fridge. And yes, off-site backups, as well as on-site. Everything is encrypted, or most of it anyway. No way to keep the cops from getting at the stuff on my portable mp3 player or ebook reader. ;)
xen wrote:I can agree that you only want one total set of spinning drives, and having them both there and here, is a bit too much.

The typical person of course may not have such a setup though. What if your harddisks get taken but your client computers remain. What are you left with really?

Don't you have a single point of failure there? I was meaning to write about that earlier but the replies came too fast and I threw away the material.
Yes, it's a single point of failure. But not so much difference between main system + server and just a bigger main system. When I take the server down for some reason I must plan ahead, or I will be sitting there without access to any of my data basically.
xen wrote:For your system? It depends on what you want. If e.g. your HTPC currently uses a 60GB SSD, personally. What I would do?

Since it is a dumb client anyway (or supposed to be) I would try to get it to boot off the network. If that is possible at all (I have never tried it). I would probably not give it any persistent local storage at all, unless I could integrate that with OverlayFS. Which would be rather tough, so I wouldn start out with that, but I could.
I did boot of the network once, but it was not worth the hassle. That 60GB SSD is replaced by a 120GB SSD, not because I need the space but because the 60GB mSATA had heat problems. This I don't like as I mentioned before. As it is now the SSD is just for the OS really (Linux Mint on that one too). I use Kodi with a database and storage (thumbnails etc) on the server.
xen wrote:Your gaming PC of 120GB. I would keep it the way it is, no use changing a winning beast.
My gaming PC.. It's slowly getting picked apart. First i5 to i3 and now it doesn't even have a graphics card anymore. New one, probably a GTX 1060 will come later this year, and I think another 120GB SSD I have on the shelf. I don't game much right now and when I do I usually play older games, or less modern. And not that many so 120GB has worked fine so far really. This is not typical, I know.
xen wrote:Your main PC of 240GB. I would keep it the same but not be happy about it. I would want to create a local storage space to receive some backups from the server. That's just me you know and my life and what I've learned is important.

I would want to have about 600GB available for that backup. Considering your situation. Then I would probably want the OS to boot off a single fast 16GB SSD. Then I would not care about games at first. That would probably imply that I now had at least a 750GB HDD in my system, preferably (for me) 2.5". Likely that would be the WD Scorpio Black I just ordered. I would first want to see if it would be fast enough to load games. If it wasn't fast enough, I would think about having those drives in RAID 0 to see if that would make a difference (just two of them). That is what I would consider prior to considering a caching device.

Implying that you would play games on it, which I assume you aren't (since you have a game PC). Regardless, that is all the same whatever you do really.
240GB is overkill for me really. I have 100GB+ free at all times. But it's nice to have a bit of extra space on this system that I use 99% of the time. I have never liked RAID and see little purpose for that in a home environment. Other than for fun perhaps. :)
xen wrote:What do you mean? As /tmp? Or do you use it as a real cache device?
As /tmp
xen wrote:I was just responding in that sense to a claim by Kingston that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs. A Scorpio Black has 5 years of warranty.
So has the Intel 730. And Kingston are crap. They made an SSD (V300 I think) that was first a pretty good low budget device, then they suddenly changed the product to something slower than a HDD. That pissed people off.
xen wrote:But anyway, I never had a DVD suddenly die on me when handled well. Maybe my usb stick is getting worn out, I don't know. I have had one hard drive failure ever probably within warranty and didn't even return it to the shop (I was very young back then). That was terrible experience, it had cost a lot of money (IBM harddisk back in the day, I may have paid 600 guilders for it (280 euro) I am not sure).

But "Any storage media can die at any time" is just a knock-down argument that is only true if you exaggerate and then throw everything onto one big heap -- the sort of thing others have done in this thread too.

I have used in my life about 18 different harddisks and I have never had anyone fail save for one that was relatively new and started ticking at which point I returned it and got a replacement. Yes and that IBM drive I just mentioned. That suddenly had a load of bad sectors. I thought it had been my fault for installing something that had a virus or something (I was dead scared of trying again, never played that game anymore). I also don't conder that some flash stick or card can die at any one instance just like that in one go, just doesn't happen.

Saying that not any storage medium is reliable is like saying that the sun isn't reliable; after all it might explode some time, but will usually give off some warning signs before that happens. The same is ordinarily true for a harddisk, from what I know. Reliable is a relative term but you are trying to turn it into an absolute and then saying that nothing ever achieves that Holy Status. Harddisks are plenty reliable for the most part -- it is software that mostly isn't. That is not an absolute either, and of course (...) I am aware of the statistics on drive failure, such as that the medium time of failure may be at around 6 years for the average harddisk, but a lot of them fail in the first year and a half, and a lot start failing after about 3-4 years. And that the failure rate after that is about 12% per year, which is rather high.

However that is nothing compared with a drive that you can just cause to die on purpose by just flooding it with data constantly.

I mean, how badly can you be in denial to not acknowledge this. That's just really bad. Logitech has these mice and keyboards with their unified receivers. The mice and keyboards have a maximum of about 40 "pairings" that you can do in succession, meaning that if you move a device between two receivers, each time you move, one of those ~40 pairings are consumed. Apparently a firmware design flaw. After about 40 times your device cannot pair anymore and you can considered it bricked. That's the exact same kind of design strategy.

And people are extremely angry about it, and for good reasons. (With Logitech). I don't see why it should be different for an SSD. It's flawed technology in its essence and only works if you don't do certain stuff with it. Not equipped to actually be fully used. You can brick an ssd in a day if you wanted to. Easy. Peasy. Meat. Like it has some sort of a self-destruct timer. Wear leveling. *Shakes head*.
My point is that your worry about the reliability of SSDs is a bit strange. I've had HDDs fail on me, and DVDs and USB sticks. But not SSDs yet. That will happen though, Intel even has a counter that makes failure inevitable, and that sucks. But this is not really a practical problem. This is what I mean when I say that all media is unreliable. If you want to convince me that SSDs (all SSDs, not just the crap) are very much less reliable than other alternatives you need to try harder.
HDDs die more gracefully than flash, I give you that. The HDDs that have failed on me have all died in a way that allowed me to get some data out before total failure. That's not the case with my failing USB sticks. They just simply stop working.
But most of the data I've lost has been due to human error, not a failure of the technology. I like to keep things simple for this reason, less chance to fcuk up.
Maintaining a data collection is always a work in progress. I'm not trying to create a time capsule. I use different types of storage that are roughly all equally unreliable, using redundancy and shifting from one form of storage to another. DVDs replaced CDs and now HDDs replaces HDDs.
xen wrote:However I rather doubt your main system is that RaspPi? Your systems are in your sig. An i3 4330 is a helluvalot faster than what I have here. So that's a bit bullshit. You have faster memory and a processor that is probably about 100% faster too. I mean, scant luck you are telling me I am doing something wrong, you are using a lightweight desktop on a system that is at least twice as fast, no wonder you have faster load times. That has nothing to do with the SSD though.
Never said anything about the way you run your systems. I was pointing out that virtualization and RAID etc is not my cup of tea. I'm a home user and not in the business. Still my e-peen is bigger than yours. I was just teasing.
xen wrote:But the point really is this: I cannot ask a technical question about SSDs without getting attacked or my motives questioned, as if any information that could look bad on SSDs is forbidden, as it could turn people away from it.
People like SSDs. I have not seen the attacks though. The radical stuff seems to come from you, claiming that SSDs should not be used as OS drives at all.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:46 pm

I was meaning to ask you about your Scorpio Black :P.

Since I just ordered one yesterday (today) and it will be delivered tomorrow :P.

Maybe I am going to be interested in a second. But if you are in Finland, sending it off might be a bit too costly, I don't know.

How does it keep up for you? Is it fast enough for a normal computing experience these days?

I was talking to Vicotnik about my setup and for some reason I seem to be gravitating towards a 2x Scorpio RAID 0.

But I cannot possibly use my tiny stupid SSD as a OS disk and hope to install Windows on it too.

I also don't think I can ever get Linux to support AMD raid in a reliable way. If I started out with a single small SSD as root disk, I would need to simply put Windows on its own disk (including Linux partitions) and just boot Windows from that (or using Grub). You can't just turn an installed partition into RAID 0 though. And I have no clue how I can get Windows to use software RAID. But Firmware Raid is going to put markers on the disk and treat it as something special, which might void anything I do in Linux. Using RAID 0 would double my storage capacity. Not all bad.

Actually running RAID over a PCI slot is going to be terrible. Why was I even thinking of this. Actually I was not thinking of that for this system, but for another one (µATX motherboard with no PCIe*2 or *4 available. How on earth can I possibly conceive that anything using a PCI slot is going to be fast). Even PCIe*1 is going to be twice as fast as regular PCI.

Especially having RAID 10 on some PCI addon card is going to be abysmal. Okay Windows software raid (dynamic disks) is impossible for the boot disk anyway. So the next thing that is convenient (for Linux) is striped LVM or whatever you want to do with it. And that is flexible. Creating a striped volume over two disks is apparently nothing more than the command "lvcreate -i 2 <vgname> <pvname1> <pvname2> -L <lvname>". That would mean that you can mirror and stripe devices (logical volumes) at will, but they cannot be regular partitions. Windows will not know about any of that. I wonder what is going to happen if I create a firmware RAID out of two disks and then install Windows on it. I am sure the disks will then not have a partition table in the very beginning because the firmware RAID is reserving some area at the start of the disks for itself, rendering operation impossible with Linux if Linux does not also read and map the firmware RAID.

So either you have a bootable Windows firmware RAID, with a partition table only existing in the (striped) volume which then cannot be read by Linux (or booted from), or you have regular partition tables (or not) for Linux with LVM in it and Linux using LVM to create striped volumes quite randomly but windows being unable to do anything with it..... BUT NOT BOTH. Real fun.

It seems using firmware raid on Linux is possible. It might not be easy but it should work after a few hours of trying. It seems the best solution perhaps. But it does require completely requiring the system after I have the second drive.

Without the second drive, it is merely a matter of creating partitions on the SSD and the Scorpio, Installing Windows on the Scorpio, Linux on the SSD and additional partitions on the scorpio, but the benefit of the 16GB SSD is rather missing and 16GB is a tight fit. Also, the IO blocking issue may very well return.

xen
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:53 pm

Vicotnik wrote:I don't have to push SSDs down peoples throats. People seem sold on how fast Windows loads. Me and a friend of mine sometimes sell or upgrade computers and replacing the HDD with an SSD is the standard upgrade for cheap laptops and the like. Sure, 128GB might be tight for some, but for the usual web browsing light office work etc its enough.
Not saying you were doing so here. And you were the one that winked ;-) in your first post ;-). So I am not blaming you of any sense of closedmindedness here compared to the rest ;-).

But if "people get hooked by themselves" then I wonder how you would explain that most people get defensive when I say anything negative about an SSD.

I had a good friend in WoW from Macedonia I think (not sure). We were having a nice chat and then I mentioned not wanting an SSD. He started bombarding me with reasons why SSDs were so awesome and clearly not content with me thinking or choosing otherwise.

And this was a guy I get along with very well. Other people (e.g. on forums) are less eager to back down off and will usually not give any help until I, according to them, drop the bigotry of not wanting an SSD.
Only storage is central, amps and the like is not. And I live in a one room apartment, the server is on top of my fridge. And yes, off-site backups, as well as on-site. Everything is encrypted, or most of it anyway. No way to keep the cops from getting at the stuff on my portable mp3 player or ebook reader. ;)
How have you arranged off-site backup for the large number of Terabytes, so to speak, I saw you report in your server?
Yes, it's a single point of failure. But not so much difference between main system + server and just a bigger main system. When I take the server down for some reason I must plan ahead, or I will be sitting there without access to any of my data basically.
Granted.
I did boot of the network once, but it was not worth the hassle. That 60GB SSD is replaced by a 120GB SSD, not because I need the space but because the 60GB mSATA had heat problems. This I don't like as I mentioned before. As it is now the SSD is just for the OS really (Linux Mint on that one too). I use Kodi with a database and storage (thumbnails etc) on the server.
It was too slow and too much dependency?
240GB is overkill for me really. I have 100GB+ free at all times. But it's nice to have a bit of extra space on this system that I use 99% of the time. I have never liked RAID and see little purpose for that in a home environment. Other than for fun perhaps. :)
I was the same once. Maybe you are more advanced in your setup (but really, it is not that special I think) but my current computing configuration is just a mess, also due to Linux bugging out when I want it to work.

(Police just stole my disks once and I am still trying to recover, and without help (erm, companionship) it is not going very fast).
As /tmp
Oh I do that too, but mostly because then I don't need to encrypt it. I miss persistent /tmp though. /tmp is rarely getting used though for real stuff unless you create some DVD image. I'd rather not use a RAM disk for creating DVD images though.
My point is that your worry about the reliability of SSDs is a bit strange. I've had HDDs fail on me, and DVDs and USB sticks. But not SSDs yet. That will happen though, Intel even has a counter that makes failure inevitable, and that sucks. But this is not really a practical problem. This is what I mean when I say that all media is unreliable. If you want to convince me that SSDs (all SSDs, not just the crap) are very much less reliable than other alternatives you need to try harder.
Alright, just execute this script on your SSD then:

Code: Select all

for i in `seq 1 450`; do
    dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M
done
Have fun. You may not want to do it on a running system of course, and maybe if you have a free partition you can just do it on the partition, the SSD probably won't care about that, it will die anyway.

This 3 line script will kill your SSD very very fast.

Well it will take a bit of time to run. Maybe a few days even, I don't know, depends on how fast it writes. If it writes at 500MB/s and would be 112GB in size, it only takes 230 seconds for one run, and as such within 29 hours your SSD will probably be nearing collapse.

Some hacker could even freaking kill your SSD when having gained access to your system, as a regular user (not root) by creating a regular file of a certain size:

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/user/file bs=1M seek=$((20 * 1024 - 1)) count=1
And then doing the above process on that file.

This would create a 20 GB file in an instant and write a single 1M block of zeroes to its end to set its size.

Then provided it would not all end up in write buffers, the person could just keep writing over and over again to that file causing the SSD to cause wear leveling to be applied on pretty much all of the free space of the drive.

The SSD killer worm :P.

I mean, if someone is going to be an idiot, and make himself so vulnerable, why not just do it for the heck of it you know ;-).

That's not even evil, that's doing the world a favour :P.
A Linux virus has surfaced that kills SSD drives.

The virus, also known as a worm, penetrates systems by using known and unpatched security vulnerabilities and common password cracking heuristics. Once having gained access to any unprivileged user, it determines whether or not the system is using any SSD drives. If it does, and it can write to it, it will create a simple file in the free space of any partition on the SSD it can write to, of a certain large size, and starts repeatedly filling it with random data. The constant writing causes the sectors to wear out and the wear-leveling algorithm being applied to all of the free space on the drive. Eventually this will destroy the health of the drive, eventually destroying the drive itself.

There is no indication what motivates the behaviour of the worm, other than a seeding hatred of SSDs.
HDDs die more gracefully than flash, I give you that. The HDDs that have failed on me have all died in a way that allowed me to get some data out before total failure. That's not the case with my failing USB sticks. They just simply stop working.
Yes. Point exactly.
But most of the data I've lost has been due to human error, not a failure of the technology. I like to keep things simple for this reason, less chance to fcuk up.
Granted.
Maintaining a data collection is always a work in progress. I'm not trying to create a time capsule. I use different types of storage that are roughly all equally unreliable, using redundancy and shifting from one form of storage to another. DVDs replaced CDs and now HDDs replaces HDDs.
At this point in time? I do not really have a backup of ANYTHING. Well apart from Git projects then. And there is a bunch of archives, but there is not backup of the archives. I hope to have it in a few days.
Never said anything about the way you run your systems. I was pointing out that virtualization and RAID etc is not my cup of tea. I'm a home user and not in the business. Still my e-peen is bigger than yours. I was just teasing.
What is your e-peen? Is it healhty?
People like SSDs. I have not seen the attacks though. The radical stuff seems to come from you, claiming that SSDs should not be used as OS drives at all.
Radical does not mean hostile. It mostly means different by a large degree or offset.

If everyone kills bunnies for lunch every day, and there is one person that doesn't do it, then that one person is going to be the "radical".

And of course I admitted or indicated that I would consider (or choose) to use a small SSD as a boot device coupled with e.g. RAID 0. On HDDs. I am not looking for any kind of fixed solution that is going to work for all cases and all people in every instance.

My point is cost.

It's really the same issue I have with 1080p (back in the day) and 4K now and 3D cinema now.

The issue that I have with it is that there is no point to it. So the question becomes: what do you achieve with all this?

You shaved several seconds off of your application load times. What have you achieved with this? Have you fucked more girls? Have you made more friends? Did the world become a better place? Did it help you ahead in your career? What for, and what did you achieve with it?

What do people achieve with 4K video or 3D cinema?

What does Microsoft achieve with Cortana and Edge and collecting everyone's private data? Is it achieving anything worthwhile with that?

What has Apple really achieved with the iPad? Did people become more productive? Are people better in touch today? Do they have more friends, or are their friendships of a better quality? Do they talk to strangers more easily, or is the gap between strangers and themselves now smaller? Has it brought the world closer together? Has it made people safer?

Do people enjoy music more today than in the past? I can guarantee you they don't. That has nothing to do with SSD, but in a sense, it has everything to do with it (flash media have really destroyed the music experience).

I can guarantee you that people do not like SSDs. They just like the benefits it brings them. For example, do you like NAND technology? Can you tell me what makes it so great? Can you tell me about the design of the firmware? Is there any beauty to it? Can you tell me about the beauty of any of the algorithms? Perhaps you would respond by talking about wear leveling. I have never heard anyone say anything positive about the quality of the firmware in the sense of being inspired by it. There is nothing to like about SSDs.

You will find enthusiasts in every walk of life: car enthusiasts, radio enthusiasts, motorcycle enthusiasts, law enthusiasts, etc. etc. and they would be able to tell you with splendor about their hobby.

The only thing you can say about SSDs is "they are fast" and "it boots the OS really fast". That is nothing pertaining to the technology or the design. I don't see people being enthusiast about the technology in the way of being enthusiast about the design in itself.

Popular people are often liked by a great deal of people. Once you become popular, you have so many friends. But they don't actually like you, they like what you have. If you cease having that, no one will cry a tear for you anymore. If SSDs ceased being fast or whatever, or if other technology would replace it, no one would shed a single tear about the "lost technology". It would be dumped just like that and replaced with something else.

No one is sentimental about SSD technology. Or at least, I suspect there'd be a few, but not that many. In general SSDs are that popular person that has money and friends. People don't really like that person, they just like what he/she has and what hey can acquire from that person.

So to SSDs I would say: they would dump you the moment they can no longer profit from you. You are being exploited ;-).

SSDs are like a free pass to a club. You don't like the pass to the club, but the club itself and gaining entrance to it. It's all about the speed, nothing else. People wouldn't care if they contained the ashes of burned babies, for the most part :P.

----------------
I am just saying that the typical usage pattern for SSDs has brought the cost of computing up and created a bigger divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Do you like SSDs for what they are or only for what they bring you?

SSDs are just the popular kid that has money and candy and lots of toys and everyone wants to play with him.

xen
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Wed Jul 27, 2016 1:14 am

Oh and the fun part about tmpfs is that you can name them any way you like:

Code: Select all

sexybiatch               3957964        4   3957960   1% /tmp
:P. (But it is not really a form of cache).

Vicotnik
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Wed Jul 27, 2016 9:38 am

xen wrote:Not saying you were doing so here. And you were the one that winked ;-) in your first post ;-). So I am not blaming you of any sense of closedmindedness here compared to the rest ;-).

But if "people get hooked by themselves" then I wonder how you would explain that most people get defensive when I say anything negative about an SSD.

I had a good friend in WoW from Macedonia I think (not sure). We were having a nice chat and then I mentioned not wanting an SSD. He started bombarding me with reasons why SSDs were so awesome and clearly not content with me thinking or choosing otherwise.

And this was a guy I get along with very well. Other people (e.g. on forums) are less eager to back down off and will usually not give any help until I, according to them, drop the bigotry of not wanting an SSD.
They get taken aback I think. For many the SSD is the OS drive from heaven and here you come and say it should not be used as that at all. Many people get defensive when confronted with the radical. Then if their minds are closed they are not willing to listen to any arguments.
Many also react to the form. I run into this all the time with my friends. I'm trying to communicate something, but I fail to get the format right and then the message is ignored. Communication is violent in its very nature.
xen wrote:How have you arranged off-site backup for the large number of Terabytes, so to speak, I saw you report in your server?
Sneakernet. And I don't quite back up all of my data.
xen wrote:
Vicotnik wrote:I did boot of the network once, but it was not worth the hassle. That 60GB SSD is replaced by a 120GB SSD, not because I need the space but because the 60GB mSATA had heat problems. This I don't like as I mentioned before. As it is now the SSD is just for the OS really (Linux Mint on that one too). I use Kodi with a database and storage (thumbnails etc) on the server.
It was too slow and too much dependency?
Booting was a bit slow. It was mostly for fun, I might try it again some day. I like the idea, and the server is there anyway so why not.
xen wrote:Alright, just execute this script on your SSD then
That would kill it, as would dropping a HDD to the floor a few times. I don't worry about my SSD wearing out due to writes. I don't write much to them and I think I would notice if very much writing would occur. The faint sounds my motherboard makes during writes would give the virus/hacker away. :)
xen wrote:What is your e-peen? Is it healhty?
It's mostly harmless. It compels me to put funny labels on systems, samba shares and the like.
xen wrote:My point is cost.

It's really the same issue I have with 1080p (back in the day) and 4K now and 3D cinema now.

The issue that I have with it is that there is no point to it. So the question becomes: what do you achieve with all this?

You shaved several seconds off of your application load times. What have you achieved with this? Have you fucked more girls? Have you made more friends? Did the world become a better place? Did it help you ahead in your career? What for, and what did you achieve with it?
All things are meaningless really, and that too is meaningless. I like a responsive system and I like a low energy system and a very quiet system. For a long time the HDD was the one thing difficult to silence and now I don't need one. And my computer hobby is also an extra source of income for me, my day job is only part time. So the cost of my own systems are mostly covered by the money my hobby brings in.
I also like movies. Just like the cool 2.5" are sweetspot for SSDs the sweetspot for movies are 1080p/720p (depending on the source). m.2 is like cinema overkill. :)
xen wrote:Do people enjoy music more today than in the past? I can guarantee you they don't. That has nothing to do with SSD, but in a sense, it has everything to do with it (flash media have really destroyed the music experience).
Dynamic range compression is destroying music. Flash media is the media format of choice for my mobile audio collection. But easy access is not all great, there is a cost. When I have lots of soda at home I stop drinking pure water. Then the soda taste like water.
xen wrote:I can guarantee you that people do not like SSDs. They just like the benefits it brings them. For example, do you like NAND technology? Can you tell me what makes it so great? Can you tell me about the design of the firmware? Is there any beauty to it? Can you tell me about the beauty of any of the algorithms? Perhaps you would respond by talking about wear leveling. I have never heard anyone say anything positive about the quality of the firmware in the sense of being inspired by it. There is nothing to like about SSDs.

You will find enthusiasts in every walk of life: car enthusiasts, radio enthusiasts, motorcycle enthusiasts, law enthusiasts, etc. etc. and they would be able to tell you with splendor about their hobby.

The only thing you can say about SSDs is "they are fast" and "it boots the OS really fast". That is nothing pertaining to the technology or the design. I don't see people being enthusiast about the technology in the way of being enthusiast about the design in itself.

Popular people are often liked by a great deal of people. Once you become popular, you have so many friends. But they don't actually like you, they like what you have. If you cease having that, no one will cry a tear for you anymore. If SSDs ceased being fast or whatever, or if other technology would replace it, no one would shed a single tear about the "lost technology". It would be dumped just like that and replaced with something else.

No one is sentimental about SSD technology. Or at least, I suspect there'd be a few, but not that many. In general SSDs are that popular person that has money and friends. People don't really like that person, they just like what he/she has and what hey can acquire from that person.

So to SSDs I would say: they would dump you the moment they can no longer profit from you. You are being exploited ;-).

SSDs are like a free pass to a club. You don't like the pass to the club, but the club itself and gaining entrance to it. It's all about the speed, nothing else. People wouldn't care if they contained the ashes of burned babies, for the most part :P.
True. We like the use value, and the exchange value. Maybe the sign value? :)
xen wrote:I am just saying that the typical usage pattern for SSDs has brought the cost of computing up and created a bigger divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Do you like SSDs for what they are or only for what they bring you?

SSDs are just the popular kid that has money and candy and lots of toys and everyone wants to play with him.
I wonder if you like the ideas of people like Ivan Illich. Or E. F. Schumacher. :)
https://archive.org/details/TheWorldCri ... OfLife_408

Look, criticize technology all you want. But leave my beloved SSDs out of it. Ok? ;)

Reachable
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Reachable » Wed Jul 27, 2016 2:15 pm

If I may interject just a brief thought here:

The opening post naturally brings to mind that it might be a very good use of someone's time to measure ultrasound being emitted by electronic components. To ignore the possibility is simply to fear finding out something you might not like knowing even though it be important that you know it. Ultrasound causes just as much damage as audible sound at the same levels. Even if the testing determines that little or no ultrasound is emitted, that in itself is worth knowing.

xen
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Location: NH, Netherlands

Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Wed Jul 27, 2016 3:49 pm

Vicotnik wrote:They get taken aback I think. For many the SSD is the OS drive from heaven and here you come and say it should not be used as that at all. Many people get defensive when confronted with the radical. Then if their minds are closed they are not willing to listen to any arguments.
I have never told anyone before that it should not be used as that at all.

I would just say "I don't want it as my OS drive" or "I don't like SSDs" and that is enough to get the flood started ;-).

Apparently, that is radical enough in itself. It's like saying you don't like cars, or you don't want to use YouTube (or anything of that matter of kind; something someone takes for granted).
Many also react to the form. I run into this all the time with my friends. I'm trying to communicate something, but I fail to get the format right and then the message is ignored. Communication is violent in its very nature.
The form can introduce negative emotions in what would otherwise have been a factual or clean message. I'm sure you notice how your mind rewrites the messages that you want to say, before you utter them. I never noticed this in the past so much because it was more fluid and I was not aware of the difference between "before" and "after" the rewrite so much that the first person saying something out me had me wondering what he meant.

Now my own mind does it all the time and very "visibly" for me. And the annoying thing is someone would have said "yes" to the original message and "no" to the twisted form of it.

And the end result is constant rejection from everyone and there is very little you can do about it. In fact, in a sense "doingness" is the problem (of your autonomous mind, influenced by pain and ego and despair and all of that).

But once my mind has rewritten something, I have to go with it. The old is no longer relevant, I missed that moment, I missed that "beat".

And now, the new will express some rage or depression or panic or whatever, letting it go. But also ruining the encounter for me :P. :-/.

I don't know how else to look at it. When I ask what it means, I get the answer "It means you have to be patient with your self and the misery that has accumulated".
Sneakernet. And I don't quite back up all of my data.
You know a lot of terms, my friend. I was seriously looking up what that meant, expecting a networking service :P. Hahahah.

I mean, you say you come from Romania right. Not to say that Romanian people should be stupid. Lots of Dutch folk treat them that way, thinking the Netherlands is oh so much better and treating the people of Romania as victims (poor poor victims) of the government.

But this is condescending. And I have had Romanian friends. One of them also worked in IT and had migrated to Southern Italy. But you know more terms than me, apparently you are better educated.
Booting was a bit slow. It was mostly for fun, I might try it again some day. I like the idea, and the server is there anyway so why not.
That is when the thin client idea becomes a bit relevant ;-) (and you can get rid of a whine-producing (even if you can't hear it) SSD :P).
That would kill it, as would dropping a HDD to the floor a few times. I don't worry about my SSD wearing out due to writes. I don't write much to them and I think I would notice if very much writing would occur. The faint sounds my motherboard makes during writes would give the virus/hacker away. :)
Hehe. You are safe then :P. So you went from rotating disks because you want silence, to a SSD or motherboard that now makes noise, and now you have coil whine noise instead of rotating fixed frequency noise.

I didn't even *know* SSDs would make that sound (or surrounding circuitry). I mean, I didn't start this topic for that. I didn't expect that sort of thing.

But now that other person says that it is rather likely that if they make sound, you will not hear it; which means that given quite a number of them do seem to make audible sound (there are more videos like that on YouTube, and lots of comments too) it would mean that an even larger number of SSDs will make inaudible sounds high enough in the range not to hear it, but of the same detrimental quality as the visible sounds of other SSDs.

I have seriously had the worst nightmare I have ever had (while sleeping/dreaming) due to a phone charger. I had feeling asleep next to it while it was plugged but there was no phone connected.

I mean I am not trying to turn this into a topic for audible sounds, but man. How can you stand such a thing. Currently my monitor is connected to the physical motherboard instead of the graphics card (addon) -- it wouldn't boot from it, I don't know why. I have to reboot to fix it. But the sound is coming from a receiver connected by analog to an addon audio card. However, as you may have experienced yourself before, visual changes (monitor changes, display stuff doing things) now produces a sound on the speakers. So if I open something, I will hear a sound. Terribly annoying.

Even the smallest changes I can hear (like hovering the mouse above a different taskbar tile which changes the colour of it). It's terrible. I have not noticed it for a very long time because I was always using my graphics card. I can "turn it off" by using digital but I can only drive these speakers with analog.

I have been fighting coil whine for so long now.... but usually too chicken shit to confront the vendors, even before when I still have warranty, or after, certainly, when it is no longer so. Try to find the vendor who will still care about you when the warranty period is over. Even though the device was faulty from the beginning. Consumer contracts have very limited terms in which you can complain; you have to complain within 3 months, and make a case out of it in maybe 6 months after that. If you do not go back to the shop because you think you would be considered a whiner ;-), you are screwed.
It's mostly harmless. It compels me to put funny labels on systems, samba shares and the like.
It was another term I did not know, although I realized what it meant.

I do not amount to much, really, today.
All things are meaningless really, and that too is meaningless. I like a responsive system and I like a low energy system and a very quiet system. For a long time the HDD was the one thing difficult to silence and now I don't need one. And my computer hobby is also an extra source of income for me, my day job is only part time. So the cost of my own systems are mostly covered by the money my hobby brings in.
I also like movies. Just like the cool 2.5" are sweetspot for SSDs the sweetspot for movies are 1080p/720p (depending on the source). m.2 is like cinema overkill. :)
You mean m.2 is not actually such a great format for it? You said you had overheating problems before.

But in any case, it feels rather nihilistic what you say. It feels like you content with a world that is going to hell while you try to keep things pleasant for yourself, but you have no real faith in anything changing for the better. I have no issue with 720p/1080p today (but we are already many years later). The sort of attitude I see you reveal (and not only you, I am just hooking onto your feeling) would be the kind that would be sad and really terribly sad actually, but that would hope that the small bubble in which you lived, would survive. On the greater scale, the global scale, the feeling is more of people who have no hope for the future, who have no goals, who have no urgency, instinct, or caring, that their choices will ever make a difference, that such a thing would be folly regardless, and most of those people would also argue that you are powerless as an individual to rationalize or justify their own choices or feelings.

Then the same kind of people would criticise you if you thought you could change things, or would tell you stuff like "the government will win anyway" or "if they really want to, they will have their way". I do not think Romanians have such attitudes, I think Romanians are less government-loving than most people in the West. And yet, there are different segments, or perhaps even challenges, there.

Your feeling is more the feeling of thriving without caring so much about any real hope. Let's call it small hope then.

But now I think I have touched on something ;-).

In any case. Do as you like of course. I am just saying that denial won't get you there.
Dynamic range compression is destroying music. Flash media is the media format of choice for my mobile audio collection. But easy access is not all great, there is a cost. When I have lots of soda at home I stop drinking pure water. Then the soda taste like water.
It's more, like not having physical copies (ever tried replacing your real books with an eReader? You mentioned having one. How does it work for you? If I had an ereader, I would feel depleted, poor. Of course it would work better than having to read at the computer (or laptop) but I would probably prefer a laptop for ease of searching. I had a friend who tried to get rid of all physical copies. I'm not sure it serves him well. I mean physical music, at first. He wanted to minimize his spatial requirements) ----- of books. I have tried looking to acquire an ereader but they were either expensive or low quality. I'm not sure you can search with all of them. Scanning a book in search for some text may be very hard. You also cannot put it in someone's hands for him to read (or her). Music, you cannot give as a gift anymore, so people do not give music.

Unless perhaps if you use Bandcamp or something, and even then. If you lose your bandcamp account you lose your purchases (in that sense).

People don't sit in the couch with a booklet in their hand. You can't really inspect someone's home to find out about music. Without physical media, there are a lot of avenues you can no longer utilize. I send 8cm DVDs to people. I have a bunch of them. If I do not have someone's email address, or an email would get thrown in the trash as spam anyway, I send people little DVDs with the content on it. It is the only format that really works; flash is too expensive (even SD-cards) (and an SD card is too vulnerable, too small, to be sending away) and USB sticks are not meant for changing hands constantly. 12cm DVDs are really too big. Floppy disks do not exist. The Zip drive is long defunct, and would have been too expensive. So the only medium we have left is 8cm dvds.

:).

I use FLAC for mostly anything, if I can get and use it. I have a script that will compare two trees, one with MP3 etc, and one with FLAC, for albums with identical names (save for the FLAC/MP3 tag in the name). It requires you to tag the folder with the format, otherwise I would have to search the contents of the folders for what's in it. It populates a list and then throws out the MP3 albums if a FLAC album of the same name is present. Then it will symlink all of the remaining albums to a single flat directory, that I then feed to my jukebox player (in this case it is just Clementine).

Now I have a preference of FLAC over MP3/MP4/OGG/OPUS while keeping 2 separate trees :). If you want the script, I can send it to you, it is simple (just uses a bunch of command line tools).
True. We like the use value, and the exchange value. Maybe the sign value? :)
Sign value? Oh yes. I think that too yes.

Nobody brags about using rotating disks. Maybe at some point people did so using RAID. Or 10k drives, but I never knew any people that did.

However, people that use SSDs feel superior to people using rotating disks. They think or feel that their "choice" to use an SSD reflects on them as being the superior person, that the superiority of the SSD transfers onto them. This is rather strange because they didn't design it and probably know jack shit about the technology. Every manufacturor uses a different firmware, so it is also hardly possible to know the details of it. What is left is the basic NAND technology that you can know something about. This manufacturer uses this, this one uses that. But I don't see anyone being enthusiast about it, about that knowledge. As such, using an SSD (or choosing it) is absolutely not a sign of being somehow more knowledgeable or having achieved something. It is void, empty. It is free. It is like buying an achievement for money without having had to do the work for it. Or like buying a title. Or a university degree. Some people BUY university degrees.

So just in general, not on you, the "achievement" of using an SSD is not yours. It does not reflect on you, but you think it does. There starts the confusion.

And there start the derogatory remarks towards people who have not bought into it and want to earn it using hard work ;-).

So it's the ego thing, yes. "I am superior because I use a superior device". It's called a shortcut. You skipped the hard work required for utilizing it properly (and so did the rest of the world) and just took all the gains for free. But because you have not actually performed the steps to reach that level, you are now living on a sort of cloud, you are floating above the ground but the steps and the support is missing; I mean. I mean that your throne does not have a foundation in a sense and it could be taken away, and you have built your house on quicksand. You have made a leap forward in technology in a sense that can only come at a cost, like selling your soul to the devil. It is like having had to live on €10 a week for years, and now suddenly you win the lottery. And most people who go from €10 to €1000 or more end up bankrupt in a few years.

I mean, these are just the sentiments I am seeing you know. I don't mean that about you exclusively, or at all. This is what SSD IS. There is a book called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in which a remote planet was threatening the entirety of existence. "With a noise like a hundred thousand people saying 'wop', a steely white spaceship suddenly seemed to create itself out of nothing directly above the cricket pitch and hung there with infinite menace and a slight hum. Then for a while it did nothing, as if it expected everybody to go about their normal business and not mind it just hanging there. Then it did something quite extraordinary. Or rather, it opened up and let something quite extraordinary come out of it, eleven quite extraordinary things. They were robots, white robots. What was most extraordinary about them was that they appeared to have come dressed for the occasion. Not only were they white, but they carried what appeared to be cricket bats, and not only that, but they also carried what appeared to be cricket balls, and not only that but they wore white ribbing pads round the lower parts of their legs. These last were extraordinary because they appeared to contain jets which allowed these curiously civilized robots to fly down from their hovering spaceship and start to kill people, which is what they did.

'Hello,' said Arthur, 'something seems to be happening.'"

;-). The leadership of the planet they were from had started living in the clouds in order to communicate with some higher intelligence. They had lost touch with the people down below, which didn't even know what the fuck the leadership was doing. And they had created robots that went on a rampage of destruction, and even the leaders didn't really know what it was all about.

What I mean is the disconnect between your foundation and what you have today. Is what makes people arrogant and think they are something amazing. They didn't have to work for it, and yet they got it, that must mean they are some kind of extraordinary beings ;-). I mean, in a way, even if you concede that you had to earn money for it, compared to what we had before, the performance per dollar is far far far far far greater than what went before, so for a certain sense of the word, it is basically free, or entirely very cheap.

There is also a line in the I Ching that says:
He lends grace to his toes, leaves the carriage, and walks.

A beginner in subordinate place must take upon himself the labor of
advancing. There might be an opportunity of surreptitiously easing the way-
symbolized by the carriage-but a self-contained man scorns help gained in a
dubious fashion. He thinks it more graceful to go on foot than to drive in a
carriage under false pretenses.
In retrospect of the person who responded before me (thank you!) I will also say that this rapid advance in technology may have resulted in technology and the effects thereof on people that we barely understand, and given such a rapid advance, and such a steep climb, scarcely any attention has gone into the research of whether the technology is actually right or healthy, and we know nothing about detrimental effects, nor do we know how to solve that. We are completely lacking on information on this subject, apparently.
I wonder if you like the ideas of people like Ivan Illich. Or E. F. Schumacher. :)
https://archive.org/details/TheWorldCri ... OfLife_408
Yes, definitely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful

I don't really have time to study it now. You can see some of that reflected in the writings of Herman Daly. And also in a way of Hegel and his hierarchy or system of needs: https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... civils.htm

I don't have time to study it now. I have read some in the past, not much. Also reminds me of Erich Fromm. I may have read a book called Escape from Freedom, but I think I read it in German.
Look, criticize technology all you want. But leave my beloved SSDs out of it. Ok? ;)
I can leave you out of it, but not your beloved SSDs ;-).

Maybe I should leave it to better versed people as me, such as the previous poster.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Wed Jul 27, 2016 4:39 pm

By the way, here is another statement from the I Ching:
Fire over wood:
The image of THE CALDRON.
Thus the superior man consolidates his fate
By making his position correct.
This is what I believe in. Having a correct position means having a foundation that can support your way of life, both in resources and knowledge and accomplishments, in order to further rise starting from that.

And we have skipped a huge distance and are now basically living on a loan that we take from the work we still need to do. Basically, we are living on the benefits of the future work we still have to do, and in the meantime we have just taken a shortcut.

And this distance will need to be covered before a stable and healthy environment arises. And in the meantime. How should I call it.

"All the rest is".

All the rest is trinkets. I can't find the text I mean. My vast and essential email solution today does not have a full text search. My situation is continually improving ;-). Oh yes, here is the text, I remembered the word:
All the Rest Of It is stuff and nonsense. The accoutrement. The flora and fauna. Pretty, perhaps. Shiny and sparkling, perhaps. But having nothing to do with anything.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Fri Jul 29, 2016 3:13 am

xen wrote:The form can introduce negative emotions in what would otherwise have been a factual or clean message. I'm sure you notice how your mind rewrites the messages that you want to say, before you utter them. I never noticed this in the past so much because it was more fluid and I was not aware of the difference between "before" and "after" the rewrite so much that the first person saying something out me had me wondering what he meant.

Now my own mind does it all the time and very "visibly" for me. And the annoying thing is someone would have said "yes" to the original message and "no" to the twisted form of it.

And the end result is constant rejection from everyone and there is very little you can do about it. In fact, in a sense "doingness" is the problem (of your autonomous mind, influenced by pain and ego and despair and all of that).

But once my mind has rewritten something, I have to go with it. The old is no longer relevant, I missed that moment, I missed that "beat".

And now, the new will express some rage or depression or panic or whatever, letting it go. But also ruining the encounter for me :P. :-/.

I don't know how else to look at it. When I ask what it means, I get the answer "It means you have to be patient with your self and the misery that has accumulated".
Yes, I think all I can do is to stop doing. But it's hard. :)
xen wrote:
Vicotnik wrote:Sneakernet. And I don't quite back up all of my data.
You know a lot of terms, my friend. I was seriously looking up what that meant, expecting a networking service :P. Hahahah.

I mean, you say you come from Romania right. Not to say that Romanian people should be stupid. Lots of Dutch folk treat them that way, thinking the Netherlands is oh so much better and treating the people of Romania as victims (poor poor victims) of the government.

But this is condescending. And I have had Romanian friends. One of them also worked in IT and had migrated to Southern Italy. But you know more terms than me, apparently you are better educated.
Better deschooled perhaps. ;)
xen wrote:Hehe. You are safe then :P. So you went from rotating disks because you want silence, to a SSD or motherboard that now makes noise, and now you have coil whine noise instead of rotating fixed frequency noise.

I didn't even *know* SSDs would make that sound (or surrounding circuitry). I mean, I didn't start this topic for that. I didn't expect that sort of thing.

But now that other person says that it is rather likely that if they make sound, you will not hear it; which means that given quite a number of them do seem to make audible sound (there are more videos like that on YouTube, and lots of comments too) it would mean that an even larger number of SSDs will make inaudible sounds high enough in the range not to hear it, but of the same detrimental quality as the visible sounds of other SSDs.
I don't know about sound coming from SSDs. I will have to look into it. None of the ones have made a sound, as far as I know. I thought one was, but it turned out to be the motherboard.
Now this sound does not bother me. I don't want total silence. I cannot get that here in the city, and while it's nice in the country sometimes at night with no light, no sound at all. Only the blood flowing through my ears, or is that tinnitus I hear?
Some people want this kind of silence, I just want to minimize the annoying sounds as far as possible. There's always a compromise. I want that balcony door open because it's hot, so I accept the faint noise coming from a ventilation fan in a nearby building, etc.

I can hear a faint melodic sound coming from my solid state system when the CPU is working hard. It's a faint high pitched whining. This noise doesn't bother me at all. It's faint and I can only hear it at night basically. And only when the CPU is working hard, which is not often. It could be a deal breaker for someone recording audio, I don't know. But for me it's a nice unintrusive audio signal telling me the system is working.
The I/O gives of a different sound, a faint growling. Same thing here. I like this sound.

Now whining is another matter. Some power supplies whine, some AC adapters. HDDs can whine and even when they don't I really don't find the sound they make pleasant. If any of my SSDs whine they do so at a frequency I cannot hear. If I was experiencing headaches while working at the computer I would perhaps look into it. But I would then start looking at AC adapters etc, not SSDs and sticks of RAM. ;)
xen wrote:You mean m.2 is not actually such a great format for it? You said you had overheating problems before.
I have no experience with m.2. But the mSATA SSD I used for a while in my HTPC got really, really hot and caused some problems with instability. I tried to solve it by using heatsinks but it's hard when the thing is small, the hot parts are mostly hidden and there's labels all over it. The SSD made solid state systems possible, but the small ones can overheat in a passive system.
xen wrote:But in any case, it feels rather nihilistic what you say. It feels like you content with a world that is going to hell while you try to keep things pleasant for yourself, but you have no real faith in anything changing for the better. I have no issue with 720p/1080p today (but we are already many years later). The sort of attitude I see you reveal (and not only you, I am just hooking onto your feeling) would be the kind that would be sad and really terribly sad actually, but that would hope that the small bubble in which you lived, would survive. On the greater scale, the global scale, the feeling is more of people who have no hope for the future, who have no goals, who have no urgency, instinct, or caring, that their choices will ever make a difference, that such a thing would be folly regardless, and most of those people would also argue that you are powerless as an individual to rationalize or justify their own choices or feelings.

Then the same kind of people would criticise you if you thought you could change things, or would tell you stuff like "the government will win anyway" or "if they really want to, they will have their way". I do not think Romanians have such attitudes, I think Romanians are less government-loving than most people in the West. And yet, there are different segments, or perhaps even challenges, there.

Your feeling is more the feeling of thriving without caring so much about any real hope. Let's call it small hope then.

But now I think I have touched on something ;-).

In any case. Do as you like of course. I am just saying that denial won't get you there.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. :)

I'm not a cynic. There's hope but also despair. I hope that there will come a time and a place where I can apply my lever and save the world. But for now I feel that the time might be to withdraw for a while. Read some Hegel, or some Zizek at least. :) We need more theory.
xen wrote:It's more, like not having physical copies (ever tried replacing your real books with an eReader? You mentioned having one. How does it work for you? If I had an ereader, I would feel depleted, poor. Of course it would work better than having to read at the computer (or laptop) but I would probably prefer a laptop for ease of searching. I had a friend who tried to get rid of all physical copies. I'm not sure it serves him well. I mean physical music, at first. He wanted to minimize his spatial requirements) ----- of books. I have tried looking to acquire an ereader but they were either expensive or low quality. I'm not sure you can search with all of them. Scanning a book in search for some text may be very hard. You also cannot put it in someone's hands for him to read (or her). Music, you cannot give as a gift anymore, so people do not give music.

Unless perhaps if you use Bandcamp or something, and even then. If you lose your bandcamp account you lose your purchases (in that sense).

People don't sit in the couch with a booklet in their hand. You can't really inspect someone's home to find out about music. Without physical media, there are a lot of avenues you can no longer utilize.
Yes. Form matters. This was a very interesting journey for me. The eReader was awkward in the beginning and I would go to the library to read. The smell of books, you know. The e-Ink display makes it possible to actually read. But searching etc I do in Calibre on the computer.
Minimizing the spatial requirements was part of it. Also much of the books I wanted was easier to get hold on in digital form. But I have paper books as well, just not that many. I fuss over my Calibre library more than I fuss about my book shelf.

And giving away books, yes. Most of the physical books I buy are gifts to others. Myself I prefer the epub. Would it not be very much easier to give someone a 200kB file? I'm in a book circle and another member expressed her joy in getting one of the last remaining copies of the book we was going to read. Perhaps she really wanted the physical book, but I really wanted the words. So I downloaded them.

I have my own data collection, the cloud is not Illich approved. :)

This common "general intellect" is something that the capitalist system will really have to struggle with. They want to own it, but it's so very hard to contain it due to its very nature.
xen wrote:Sign value? Oh yes. I think that too yes.

Nobody brags about using rotating disks. Maybe at some point people did so using RAID. Or 10k drives, but I never knew any people that did.

However, people that use SSDs feel superior to people using rotating disks. They think or feel that their "choice" to use an SSD reflects on them as being the superior person, that the superiority of the SSD transfers onto them. This is rather strange because they didn't design it and probably know jack shit about the technology. Every manufacturor uses a different firmware, so it is also hardly possible to know the details of it. What is left is the basic NAND technology that you can know something about. This manufacturer uses this, this one uses that. But I don't see anyone being enthusiast about it, about that knowledge. As such, using an SSD (or choosing it) is absolutely not a sign of being somehow more knowledgeable or having achieved something. It is void, empty. It is free. It is like buying an achievement for money without having had to do the work for it. Or like buying a title. Or a university degree. Some people BUY university degrees.
What does that tell you about university degrees? I got my education after I left the university.

My friend has no SSD. He doesn't care about responsiveness the way I do. He knows about SSDs but him and me both see little reason for him to get one.

I don't see this as a problem with SSDs as such. Have you seen the boxes the graphics cards come in? Cars are not cool anymore (only if they are electric and "green") so what is left to brag about are our devices. Do we know anything about our devices, mostly no. We don't even control the content. We could, the Raspberry Pi is there for anyone wanting to get their hands dirty. But we want the shiny stuff, and we want it now.

What I wonder about is this focusing on SSDs. We don't know about the underlaying tech, they make noise, even if you might not hear it etc. This is true for most of our devices, why not a general critique. Again, why my beloved SSD? :)

xen
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Fri Jul 29, 2016 4:01 am

Vicotnik wrote:Again, why my beloved SSD? :)
Because I don't critique out of random reasons when it doesn't bother me. What point would there be in critiquing something from which you do not suffer, which does not impede you, which does not concern you?

That's like saying someone who is offended by the noise of his neighbours, and you don't wonder why he doesn't critique all neighbours?

What would be the point in critiquing all neighbours? That would be irrelevant, detached from life.

We don't critique stuff happening on other planets either ;-). Except that we don't know about it when we want to :P.

I critique SSDs because I have a reason to, obviously. I don't critique other stuff because I don't have a reason to, obviously.

The whole point of debating anything is for other people to see those reasons. If you can't see those reasons, you will ask questions such as this.

Because it is incomprehensible to you that there could be reasons (that were specific to SSDs).

I have already explained.

If I used SSDs I would be destroyed.

It would ruin my mind to begin with, not least because I already have a gap to bridge, I have to take things slowly and not skip steps.

My WD Scorpio Black that just came in caused my motherboard to whine :P.

:( :( :(. It stopped when I connected a second harddisk (the old one).

It was a very weird high pitched tone that was rising in pitch as if it was going to explode, and then you'd stop hearing it.

Right now everything is silent (or silent enough).

Why do I critique SSDs? Because I have intuitions and instincts. That's why.

I do not ask why I critique it. I critique it. You don't ask why a toddler starts to walk. It starts to walk. You don't ask why a bird sings. It sings.

And I critique. Because it feels important to me and it's what I do. There is no reason for it. I do it because I do it.

That's the only reason.

I critique SSDs because the Sun emits heat, and the Moon dances around us. That's why ;-). I critique it because my door makes noise when the window is open and I don't close the door.

I critique it because there is a bottle of salt on my desk that I can use.

I critique it for the same reasons that I eat and drink and sleep and cry.

It's my instinct that says that something is not right with that technology and I have had this from the beginning and it is the same with LED lighting and fluorescent lighting. There are no fluorescents in my home. There are no LED lights in my home. Everything is the old, or otherwise some halogen. I *thought* there was a remaining one (fluorescent) but it was actually a 100W bulb I think for long :P.

Oops, didn't know that.

It if had been a fluorescent I would probably have noticed it long ago.

I usually just buy something or form my opinion based on whether it feels right to me. And I have plenty or reasons to criticise SSDs after I have already had my initial impression and instinct. And that will never change, depending on whether my requirements change (and how much I am willing to suffer).

You mentioned "dropping a harddisk a few times on the floor" to be equivalent to running a script on your SSD. That is not equivalent at all. The first is a clear violation of proper usage conditions, it is not a form of normal usage, or what the device should be capable of.

Then again there are harddisks that can withstand drops and are designed for it. My HP 2530p has one of those. They are specially designed for it and are (or were) extremely expensive to replace. "Designed to withstand up to 1,500Gs of non-operating shock, the MK1633GSG ..."

You can't compare dropping a harddisk and running a script on it. That same script would do no harm whatsoever to any HDD.

If you are someone who installs a new system on something every week, or every other week, you already have to be extremely careful not to waste the device. You are basically shackled and cannot do whatever you want, and I don't like that at all.

Furthermore how they could ever get away with warranty refusal based on too many writes is beyond me. You could brick the device and they would have to replace it. I also wonder how businesses could ever use them for busy servers (write servers) but my VPS host uses them exclusively.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Fri Jul 29, 2016 4:57 am

Only LEDs at my place. :) The new LED filament ones are really nice. At the place I work there are two very warm pear bulbs in two lamps with open tops. The plants nearby get burnt by the heat, 25W bulbs get hot. A few days ago I replaced them with 2.1K LED filament bulbs. The same warm light, 1.2W per bulb. The plants are safe! But there is a swiched AC-DC thingy in there, some of these suckers whine. But not the good kind.
So all LEDs at my place, and at least as many more again in a box. To be used perhaps where the color temperature don't have to be just right, or the faint whine will not bother anyone, or where it's ok the light is basically green. Some day.

Do you really write so much to disk that you would kill an SSD? And don't get me wrong, I don't mean to criticize your aversion towards SSDs, I'm just curious. You will leave me out of it but not SSDs. I will not leave you out. ;) I have just never seen this "I own an SSD and therefore I rule" anywhere, nor any reporting about them whining. Searching youtube doesn't seem to give many reports. Do you have a grand example? Some thread somewhere that really illustrate this.
xen wrote:You mentioned "dropping a harddisk a few times on the floor" to be equivalent to running a script on your SSD. That is not equivalent at all. The first is a clear violation of proper usage conditions, it is not a form of normal usage, or what the device should be capable of.

Then again there are harddisks that can withstand drops and are designed for it. My HP 2530p has one of those. They are specially designed for it and are (or were) extremely expensive to replace. "Designed to withstand up to 1,500Gs of non-operating shock, the MK1633GSG ..."

You can't compare dropping a harddisk and running a script on it. That same script would do no harm whatsoever to any HDD.

If you are someone who installs a new system on something every week, or every other week, you already have to be extremely careful not to waste the device. You are basically shackled and cannot do whatever you want, and I don't like that at all.

Furthermore how they could ever get away with warranty refusal based on too many writes is beyond me. You could brick the device and they would have to replace it. I also wonder how businesses could ever use them for busy servers (write servers) but my VPS host uses them exclusively.
Dropping a HDD and writing a lot to an SSD is not the same. It's just that for personal experience I know that when I put an SSD into my netbook long ago (I reused that old very expensive 16GB unit) the main thing for me was "sweet, now I don't have to be very careful with this one." Now maybe this is just how I feel, with no factual basis to it, but I'm really, really careful when I handle HDDs. I've seen them die in the past from a drop and when I put on the sneakers to carry of my backup disks, I thread carefully.
I care much more about the long term safety of the data, not how many writes the media can take. We have these "archive" HDDs now using SMR and they are meant to be written to once basically. I have these and I'm ok with the trade-off. Low price but not to be used for other stuff then archiving data really.
Same with flash. I accept them wearing out eventually. But I don't even have to change my usage pattern to avoid them dying on me. I hate things like this counter Intel has in their SSDs, not even letting the technology fail on its own but killing the drive before that happens. Not really surprised Intel would do this. On the plus side they give 5 years warranty on the SSD I'm using now, and I have never had any problem with Intel SSDs in the past, they have always served me well, for a long, long time. The only exception is that overheating mSATA unit.

LGA socket durability bothered me in the past. Suddenly Intel came with this socket that's not designed to endure CPU changes that well. That sucks, but then I realized I don't to that very much anymore anyway so now I'm still bothered but with a little distance.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Fri Jul 29, 2016 5:25 am

You just write how the LEDs that you love whine, and then you go on to say that you need more evidence of whining.

I mean, how much more can you be in denial?

You want me to tell you the stuff you are already seeing but you deny?

And what if those others are also seeing but they deny?

Because the technology is so holy to them?

I'm sorry, but if you search for it you find like hundreds of threads (if you care to look):

https://hardforum.com/threads/do-all-ss ... h.1571052/

And most of the replies are from idiots who say that it *can't* make a sound because supposedly it doesn't have the required components for doing so. That's like the shrink telling you you can't have a headache because there are no nerves in your brain that could register the pain.

Fucking denial people. While say anything to deny what is so.
SSDs do not make any sound at all.
My guess would be the fan in the laptop, or static from speakers from interference
What the fuck are these people on?
I've had 9 or 10 and none have made a sound.
Yeah, but I've had a number of people in my home that couldn't hear anything, not even the coil whine produced by my monitor, and I could videotape that quite easily. There is a lot of people who are just deaf to mostly anything.

Believing someone who has never heard a thing is like believing someone who can't feel the punches because he's too drunk.
The problem with this theory is I do not think there are any components inside a SSD that can make a sound. NAND chips can not make a sound. Circuit boards don't make a sound. Normal capacitors do not make a sound. Resistors do not make a sound. I am not sure about the super capacitor. And the SSD probably does not have a coil/inductor so no chance for coil whine.

Most likely when accessing your SSD your power supply or some other power circuity makes this sound.
WTF? Theory? That guy puts his ear next to it and hears the sound. WTF theory? You get hit by a train and they call it a theory.

Delusional people.
I removed the SSD from my laptop and plugged it into my desktop PC. I left the side panel removed, stretched the SSD about 2-3 feet outside of the PC to isolate it, and held it up to my ear while I ran a benchmark on it. Sure enough the high pitched screeching noise appeared. Plus it was very easy to pinpoint that the screeching was not coming from anywhere in the PC, it was definitely coming from inside the SSD casing somewhere. I don't know - maybe a little baby spider is in there getting electrocuted and screaming! :p Whatever the reason - it's definitely the SSD.
I spoke with Dell and they said that they can't replace my laptop if the noise is "within the acoustic specifications of the computer", which it probably is. Thanks Dell. How about giving the circuit board designer a slap instead?
I mean, there should be some "resonance" here on SPCR ;-).
Producing circuit boards that even has the ability to cause resonance in the audible range (15 – 20 KHz) from any component under any circumstance should be severely punished. Partly because it's so unnecessary, it's just crappy engineering, if they had just attached the components firmly they couldn't cause resonance, and partly because it's so annoying to deal with RMA people that "don't hear the noise", like they're deaf. Apparently they coil whine has to be on the jet engine level before it's a complainable issue.
I would AGREE :D.
Someone should start a database or wiki where we can report audible circuit boards and drive them out of the market place and out of the production lines! This abomination must be handled ferociously! The CPU Noise Informational Wiki (defunct) is one example of sush a site that I found. But it must be emphasized that it's not the CPU, GPU, SSD or graphics card itself that cause the noise, but poorly designed or poorly attached inductors, often on the PSU circuit board or the PSU equivalent circuitry on a laptop.
Yeah baby!.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Fri Jul 29, 2016 5:50 am

I have just never seen this "I own an SSD and therefore I rule" anywhere
Of course you wouldn't notice it if you had fallen victim to it yourself.

The birds do not find anything out of the ordinary when they are surrounded by birds, nor when they screech really loud.
Do you really write so much to disk that you would kill an SSD?
Why shouldn't I? I don't any disks that can only be used for one purpose. I would constantly have to remember "oh yeah, don't write to it so much". That is no life. You are like taking yourself hostage. You are shackling yourself.

This tiny SSD I have, I already mentioned that I consumed 14% of its lifespan in two days.

For no other reason than that I was doing write tests to debug or troubleshoot the Linux kernel freezes.

I was constantly repeating a certain tar.gz job.

Development often causes many repetitious tasks to be repeated to pinpoint the functioning or to finetune the appearance or workings of a program.

If that development is involved with writing to disk; then yes, you will write that much to a disk that you can easily kill an SSD.
We have these "archive" HDDs now using SMR and they are meant to be written to once basically. I have these and I'm ok with the trade-off. Low price but not to be used for other stuff then archiving data really.
You mean that the writes are slow? I see no indication of them wearing out that much sooner, only that writing involves reading the adjacent tracks and then writing the combined value of that in one go because the write head is larger than the read head. That's not to do with wearing out, really.
Same with flash. I accept them wearing out eventually. But I don't even have to change my usage pattern to avoid them dying on me. I hate things like this counter Intel has in their SSDs, not even letting the technology fail on its own but killing the drive before that happens. Not really surprised Intel would do this. On the plus side they give 5 years warranty on the SSD I'm using now, and I have never had any problem with Intel SSDs in the past, they have always served me well, for a long, long time. The only exception is that overheating mSATA unit.
You will always need to keep a tight reign on yourself. Of course flash is not meant for heavy writing, it never was. I use one as a boot disk / stick / system stick once in a while, and I am dead afraid of writing to it. I'm not comfortable, it could die at any moment you know.
LGA socket durability bothered me in the past. Suddenly Intel came with this socket that's not designed to endure CPU changes that well. That sucks, but then I realized I don't to that very much anymore anyway so now I'm still bothered but with a little distance.
Take care that you don't actually change your habits because of the motherboard. Because I think you will, everyone would. You say "I don't do that as much anymore" but if you already knew this was happening you would be inclined to stop doing it when it was not that important. You would choose to not do something that you otherwise would have.

That's how we are influenced and we loose our freedom. And then you say "It is acceptable to me" but it is still not nice, as you indicate.

Thanks for responding in any case as much as you have. You probably know that the Linux people themselves (that I constantly have to deal with) are usually not really the nicest people to talk to :p.

I will command you to take over my goal of developing the cached-drive-storage-system-with-virtual-disks-on-which-operating-systems-become-mobile-and-you-can-take-them-just-with-you-whereever-you-go and load them on any host system, if I'm no longer around to take care of it ;-).

Just imagine that you take your (USB) stick with you and you plug it into some computer and you have your FULL operating system environment right there.

I mean Windows has PortableApps but this would be Portable Operating Systems.

You'd just carry a small SSD or something or some notebook drive maybe just some 1.8" notebook drive.

You plug it into the host computer, it has a slot for it. The virtualisation environment automatically loads your OS and presents it as a choice, or even better, unloads itself or goes into the background, giving your OS full control of the device, apart from the fact that it won't see the real hardware.

No rebooting required. There is a shortcut that lets you switch between OSes (if multiple are loaded). The basis system is not even an OS itself anymore, but it's main environment is also a guest (could be). (Doesn't have to). Saving your OS to the disk (the host) a virtual harddrive is added that you can take out again whenever you want. Previously my thought had been to have rather homogenous systems and you take a stick with you and it contains the complete configuration of the (host) system you are logging into. The key would equally well be your user credentials; data might be stored on the cloud or some central server somewhere (or multiple) but as you enter your stick and enter a password, the central credentials are accessed and your environment or important details are downloaded or connected.

Moving from system to system means moving your stick with you and you can work anywhere.

Anyway, just a thought I had.

I command you to take on this duty if I am gone ;-) :P. (Not sure that is gonna happen though, but you never know).

Vicotnik
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Vicotnik » Fri Jul 29, 2016 6:24 am

xen wrote:You just write how the LEDs that you love whine, and then you go on to say that you need more evidence of whining.

I mean, how much more can you be in denial?

You want me to tell you the stuff you are already seeing but you deny?

And what if those others are also seeing but they deny?

Because the technology is so holy to them?
My sister uses only incandescents. She's afraid of the mercury in the CFLs and I don't blame her. The cost she pays is in the electricity bill.

I was unaware that some SSDs made sounds. Switched AC adapters do all the time. So I'm still in denial I suppose. ;) Tech has a price, this is universal. Yes, we are limited in our freedom and this is important to realize but at the same time:
Give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Thanks for that link. Yes, people are crazy. We all are. You say that there is a lot of people who are just deaf to mostly anything. And yet you get upset when you find that there is a lot of people who are just deaf to mostly anything. Is this not denial?
xen wrote:
Producing circuit boards that even has the ability to cause resonance in the audible range (15 – 20 KHz) from any component under any circumstance should be severely punished. Partly because it's so unnecessary, it's just crappy engineering, if they had just attached the components firmly they couldn't cause resonance, and partly because it's so annoying to deal with RMA people that "don't hear the noise", like they're deaf. Apparently they coil whine has to be on the jet engine level before it's a complainable issue.
I would AGREE :D.
Yeah, me too. But it's a matter of cost. So it's not really the producer of the boards that is at fault. That's just a small part of it. We want that Dell box to be cheap don't we. Always a cost.
xen wrote:I will command you to take over my goal of developing the cached-drive-storage-system-with-virtual-disks-on-which-operating-systems-become-mobile-and-you-can-take-them-just-with-you-whereever-you-go and load them on any host system, if I'm no longer around to take care of it ;-).

Just imagine that you take your (USB) stick with you and you plug it into some computer and you have your FULL operating system environment right there.

I mean Windows has PortableApps but this would be Portable Operating Systems.

You'd just carry a small SSD or something or some notebook drive maybe just some 1.8" notebook drive.

You plug it into the host computer, it has a slot for it. The virtualisation environment automatically loads your OS and presents it as a choice, or even better, unloads itself or goes into the background, giving your OS full control of the device, apart from the fact that it won't see the real hardware.

No rebooting required. There is a shortcut that lets you switch between OSes (if multiple are loaded). The basis system is not even an OS itself anymore, but it's main environment is also a guest (could be). (Doesn't have to). Saving your OS to the disk (the host) a virtual harddrive is added that you can take out again whenever you want. Previously my thought had been to have rather homogenous systems and you take a stick with you and it contains the complete configuration of the (host) system you are logging into. The key would equally well be your user credentials; data might be stored on the cloud or some central server somewhere (or multiple) but as you enter your stick and enter a password, the central credentials are accessed and your environment or important details are downloaded or connected.

Moving from system to system means moving your stick with you and you can work anywhere.

Anyway, just a thought I had.

I command you to take on this duty if I am gone ;-) :P. (Not sure that is gonna happen though, but you never know).
I will accept this duty. But if you leave the project to me alone it will be reduced to something like the Raspberry Pi. Look, everybody has a Raspberry Pi, or at least one. You have your operating system environment right there. Don't die just yet, master. ;)

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Fri Jul 29, 2016 7:42 am

Vicotnik wrote:My sister uses only incandescents. She's afraid of the mercury in the CFLs and I don't blame her. The cost she pays is in the electricity bill.
Not sure how hot your country is. Here it is only warm during the summer months and for the rest of the time it helps in heating the house ;-).
Give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
The only thing that cannot be changed is my own moronity. The rest is up for debate.
Thanks for that link. Yes, people are crazy. We all are. You say that there is a lot of people who are just deaf to mostly anything. And yet you get upset when you find that there is a lot of people who are just deaf to mostly anything. Is this not denial?
Why would it be? I do not get upset that they are deaf to mostly anything, but that they then still claim that their superior hearing tells the truth about what is so and what is not so, and that they can use their fucking stupid hearing to tell others they have it wrong.

"I don't hear it, so it is not so". THAT is what I have an issue with. Arrogance. I am fine with them not hearing much. I am fine with the truth. I am not fine with people lying and scheming around the truth to get their way known and their choices realized, at the detriment of other people who may have more considerate or important demands of things.
Yeah, me too. But it's a matter of cost. So it's not really the producer of the boards that is at fault. That's just a small part of it. We want that Dell box to be cheap don't we. Always a cost.
No I don't. I have never asked for anything to be cheap. Well, these days I do because I am completely out of money, I guess. And I do it when people ask too high a price (like some restaurants here).

I have always paid more than what was needed, when I could, usually. I have always bought quality stuff. Maybe I choose cheap in the sense of not requiring much (in features etc.) so that means not cheap, but cost-effective. That means not buying the gallon when you can suffice with a Liter.

At the same time what I did buy, I have always tried to pay a premium price on. I have rarely chosen a vendor based purely on price, but other factors were much more important, such as what I could expect, or hope to find, in the measure of customer service and willingness and forgiveness and possibility. I have always taken the route that good relations help me more than cheap prices.

And of course I have never bought dell (except second hand). I hesitate greatly to get a Dell RAID card as well, although they are dirt cheap (because they have been produced and sold in such large numbers). No I have only ever had hand-picked premium components for my computers ;-). I guess so have you?

So I don't subscribe to this, it's not my reality.

I am MORE than willing to pay $5 euro extra if the terrible sound is gone. Wouldn't you?

If that €5 is going to make the difference between endless suffering on the behalf of some computer monitor, and total bliss because you never hear that nightmarish sound, wouldn't you pay it? I would pay it 5 times over, right from the bat.

I would pay €25 extra if I had a guarantee that such things would NEVER happen.

Based on a monitor that may have cost about €180 back then, I don't remember.

And for my standard adapter that comes with an appliance, I would easily pay €2 extra if I had a guarantee that the thing wouldn't make a noise.

I mean that is completely commonsensical if you know how important this is to me. Completely commonsensical.

Not a question about it. So the question is: why don't they do it? Why don't they market it? It is a CHOICE of people mired in the illusion and delusion that the customer won't pay it. Business is about being daring and taking risks and being different, and these people, these companies, do not have the balls, or the faith, to make something unique, and to have a unique identity for themselves that is based on more than just price.

Most companies destroy their own assets by competing purely on price. Most retail shops here anyway.

And then they go bankrupt, one by one. And they have created their own demise, for the most part. By not recognising what people want.

By listening to lies about what people want, and listening to people say stuff that isn't true.
I will accept this duty. But if you leave the project to me alone it will be reduced to something like the Raspberry Pi. Look, everybody has a Raspberry Pi, or at least one. You have your operating system environment right there. Don't die just yet, master. ;)
I don't have one. I failed in my recent attempt to get one.

What did I lose? A great many things I guess. The spiritual teacher says that loss is not real. That everything that seems to go away from you does so for a reason, and if it returns at all, it will do so in a higher form, and this was the reason of its departure.

The spiritual teacher also says that loss is not an act of God, but a thought in the mind of humans. Get rid of the thought (that you have something to lose) and ride your wisdom to victory.

But I don't really know how to live with that, with constant loss.
The great departs; the small approaches.
I think I wanted to get a model A (the original) because it is smallest and nicest in this case but it only has one USB port and I need WiFi for it. So I needed either an USB hub or a client mode AP or a different Pi model.

I did have a USB hub but where did it go? Did I seriously throw it away? I cannot find it anymore.

I also don't remember where I bought it, and I've had to throw away a lot of email at some point, so I cannot really readily find where I could have purchased it. Then I looks a replacement that looks just like it but it is second hand and filthy. Second hand stuff is always so filthy. People do not take care of their stuff and are filthy themselves.

So then I didn't want to use that hub and went looking for other filthy stuff, such as a second hand Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini v2 that actually just took a 3.5" IDE HDD and needed to be installed with Linux.

At which point I bolted because this would replace my Synology NAS in a way and it got really angry (and I got really filthy) and I canceled my "order".

If I had had that hub I would already long since have ordered that Pi A with someone. And I think I have thrown it away. The replacement also doesn't have the same colour led on it :P. The stuff I do.... I still want a Model A. It only needs to receive backups over Wifi.

That either won't be very fast, or it will just take very long :p. And I just want some random 2TB drive connected over USB2 to receive the backup. I guess not being able to encrypt anything very fast would be detrimental, but I'm sure I'll manage. Let me just see if I can find one with someone right now. But first I really have to install Windows 10 to activate it today :P.

HFat
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by HFat » Wed Aug 03, 2016 10:59 pm

Xen, your comments about storage reliability are plain irresponsible. If you have had experience with 18 drives, you don't have much experience. I don't consider myself as having much experience but I have more, enough to know that drives do fail: Flash, HDDs... they all fail. Reliability has increased over the years though (if you don't count cheapo Flash drives anyway).

xen
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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Thu Aug 04, 2016 5:06 am

The point was not that they don't fail.

The point was that SDDs will (I believe) fail erratically and suddenly.

In most cases a HDD will give you warning signs of impending doom.

My computing experience in the past used to be rock stable (ie. Windows XP) and I was using the same system for years. I got the typical Windows problems (couldn't install graphics drivers anymore) that required a reinstall but other than that I had a very stable situation.

These days instability is the norm. Windows 10 has bugs that are just out of the ordinary unacceptable. Linux fails for many people when updates kill things, or on my own system I suddenly got KDE freezes and on this system here Mint just froze for no reason yesterday bringing the system down to a crawl and taking at least a few minutes to open a TTY and a few minutes more to log in to it; a thing that should take about 5 seconds.

I had to reboot. Windows 8 and 10 have update mechanics that are deeply user-hostile and can brick your system just like that.

In Windows 10 you can't even turn it off other than blocking with a firewall the Windows Update servers, I believe.

You talk in the other post about cloud storage, sure. But I was talking here about the OS drive suddenly failing.

Backups are fine and needed -- of course, but any solution that makes them /more needed/ is not going to be a very happy thing for most people, most people do not have radically good backup solutions in place and backup is hard. I use Clonezilla now and I don't like the program but it works well. I may start using their underlying clone commands myself, don't know.

Before CloneZilla for most of the time I had no good backup solution for my system drive (Windows drive at least). Windows (Microsoft) solutions didn't cut it and when I tried to use Paragon software (I believe) to transport one system to another (Windows 10 from a laptop to a desktop) the BOOT ENVIRONMENT WOULDN'T LOAD. So there you have your fancy backup but the WinPE boot environment won't load! What good is your backup then!!!!.

The point of using that software was to transpose the OS of one system onto another; but apparently Windows 10 does that very well and I do not even need that; hence i can use a Linux tool for it now.

So for the first time I now have a reliable but ugly and a bit filthy backup tool that works well and that I can use very rapidly to store full images (not entirely to my liking though) on a backup server in the network.

I want to get rid of that filth but I can't right now so fast. (The program just fails in mysterious ways, concatenates a bunch of tools together, not all of them even work, etc. etc. etc.). It is just a haphazard put-together collection of tools with a GUI in front of it that gives easy to use options.

It also doesn't store the image as files but as directories, which is the main detriment here, in a way (also an advantage that you can throw away the garbage it stores that it doesn't even need).

That tool stores all kinds of "personally identifiable" data about your system that it does not even need to restore the image!!!!.

Anyway.


If you are going to introduce a situation in which your OS drive now has a much larger chance of dying SUDDENLY then that is a main headache and worry for a lot of users, if they knew.

And if they don't know, they are still gonna get hit by it.

And if they did NOT have a good image backup, that is even moderately recent, well you know what happens. Most people also store stuff locally.

DropBox has versioning, I wish I had something like that.

The cloud is very convenient yes. But if you need reliable systems you can't just have a drive fail on you just like that. Most of all, not your OS drive.

I know the failure rates of the Backblaze ongoing project.

There is no such thing for SSDs ?.

I know HDDs have a high change to fail in the first 1.5 years and have a 10-12% failure rate each year after the 4th year.

Perhaps 50% of drives wil have "died" after the 6th year, but what is important to note is that these failures constituted not hard failures but having enough errors to warrant replacement.

In other words this study does not constitute any sense of "immediate sudden" failures.

Alright. I will give you a small comparison to make it clear what I mean.

- previously when electricity went down land lines continued to function
- currently they do not, and require a mobile phone to guarantee reachability.

This is a regression, not an advancement. If your mobile phone runs out of battery, you are screwed.

We are now in a less reliable situation than we were before.

The same is true of SSD. You can compare that mobile phone to the dropbox.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by HFat » Thu Aug 04, 2016 6:07 am

xen wrote:The point was that SDDs will (I believe) fail erratically and suddenly.

In most cases a HDD will give you warning signs of impending doom.
With due respect to your beliefs, HDDs often fail without warning (or give warning but keep working) while SSDs may also give you warning.
The main difference besides failure rates (which vary from model to model) as far as I know is that it seems easier to recover from some of the failure modes of HDDs, for instance by exchanging electronics with another drive.
xen wrote:You talk in the other post about cloud storage, sure. But I was talking here about the OS drive suddenly failing.
I didn't talk about cloud storage.
xen wrote:I know the failure rates of the Backblaze ongoing project.

There is no such thing for SSDs ?.

I know HDDs have a high change to fail in the first 1.5 years and have a 10-12% failure rate each year after the 4th year.

Perhaps 50% of drives wil have "died" after the 6th year, but what is important to note is that these failures constituted not hard failures but having enough errors to warrant replacement.
In most cases, HDDs are much more reliable than that, even if you declare them failed at the first hint of possible impededing failure.
Good SSDs are reliable enough if you used the way they were designed to be used. If there really are no numbers around, it's probably because they aren't needed anymore.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Reachable » Thu Aug 04, 2016 10:23 am

xen wrote: - previously when electricity went down land lines continued to function
- currently they do not, and require a mobile phone to guarantee reachability.
Well, no. You know that. Unless the land line is a portable and requires a base it will still work if the electricity is down and the phone system is still up.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Wed Aug 24, 2016 7:05 am

HFat wrote:
xen wrote:The point was that SDDs will (I believe) fail erratically and suddenly.

In most cases a HDD will give you warning signs of impending doom.
With due respect to your beliefs, HDDs often fail without warning (or give warning but keep working) while SSDs may also give you warning.
The bolded text (that I bolded here) is the whole point.

It's like asking "is the sun hot?" and you say "no, but there's just a lot of heat coming your way and it can fry you".

"may" give you warning. That means nothing.

I want real statements here, not lies or half-truths. If an SSD "may" give you warning, well, how amazing. Can you quantify that?

I mean I am sorry for the belligerence here. First you deny my statement and down below you put a nuance in to say that a drive that may be considered "failing" may still keep working for a while, if you relax your criteria a bit.
The main difference besides failure rates (which vary from model to model) as far as I know is that it seems easier to recover from some of the failure modes of HDDs, for instance by exchanging electronics with another drive.
No, the point was that you will often have a great deal of time to take your data of the HDD. I have no numbers here but the amount of messages I have seen about failing SDDs in the past, coupled with the fact that the general consensus seems to be that this is true (SSDs fail more suddenly) means there IS a characteristic difference between the failure style of HDDs and the failure style of SSDs.

You can say all you want that "There exist HDD that fails suddenly" and "There exist SSD that gives warning" but if the general statistics are, if the general behaviour is, if the general data shows, and the general experience indicates, that on average, these types of drives have different failure modes and SSDs are likely to fail more suddenly and HDDs are likely to fail more slowly, then it means nothing to say that there exist at least 1 device that failed suddenly, or there exist at least 1 device that failed slowly of the other category.

I just wished people would stop doing that you know. Deny statements about general qualities by saying that there exists somewhere in the universe a counter-example and that this then disproves the whole point.

Someone says "Generally swans are white" and you say "No, there exists a black swan", then sorry, but apparently you didn't read the word "generally".

I will stop now.
I didn't talk about cloud storage.
You said you had data online (or someone else did, not gonna read back now). Or someone here said that most people store their data online these days. That means cloud right.
In most cases, HDDs are much more reliable than that, even if you declare them failed at the first hint of possible impededing failure.
I am not sure where you get that Data. The Backblaze experiment and ongoing statistics gathering clearly shows that for 100% uptime drives, the mean time to failure is about 6 years. Sure they use that strict measure, they do. But I'm just not gonna believe any one that makes random statements that completely (or in part) would contradict the huge amount of drives being 'tested' by their server park.

Their data speaks for itself. There is just no going around that. After the fourth year there is about a 12% failure rate per year. That means of all drives in their 5th year, some 12% will fail that year (or at least, according to their criteria).
Good SSDs are reliable enough if you used the way they were designed to be used. If there really are no numbers around, it's probably because they aren't needed anymore.
Which is what, to not write to them? I hardly think that constitutes a "design goal", it is just a limitation of the technology, there is no point in trying to greatly increase the longevity because it will always be hard-capped in a way. It's a technological property. You CANNOT design SSDs that will withstand a great deal of writing, not with this technology, I'm sure, and that hardly constitutes a design goal, the technology is just much more suitable for fast reading (and lots of it).

That's like designing a planet that will invariably have a nuclear missile silo and a red button, and then saying that this planet was designed for people to be smart and not push that button. No, the button just happened to be there because you couldn't avoid it, it's design limitation, not a design goal.

If the end result of that is that you must not use them for greats amount of data writing (high volumes of data) or they will kill themselves, so be it.

Doesn't make it a better technology all of a sudden. It is still a flawed technology, primarily or particularly if you are going to use them in place of previously existing drives that DID! allow such usage patterns as perfectly normal!!!.

My friend here aboves says this would-be hacker won't stand a chance against him because his motherboard will whine because the SSD is getting accessed.

Saved by the bell, so to speak. You're only saved because the technology is so weak that they can't produce silent components.
If there really are no numbers around, it's probably because they aren't needed anymore.
Don't you think that's rather wishful thinking from your part? As in, you first pick the conclusion you like, and then you go and find arguments to match it, even if they are a bit incredulous and quite a bit not much based in common sense.

You can find perfect reasons why such statistics would not exist, why not:...
  • No one uses SSDs for large storage parks
  • They are mostly used for low-volume web hosting and the like
  • The other main use case is home systems.
With low volume I mean low data-size, not necessarily low activity. Out of the above two use cases, only a company with a huge amount of SSDs that it uses to host fast-performing servers, would be a candidate for performing such a study.

I can ask my personal host whether they keep statistics but other than that you would have to look at the performant server space rather than the data storage space, to get your data. For some reason I think that people are not keen on acquiring that data just as you are not keen on hearing it.

If SSD is a technology that people want to believe in then there is a good reason for them not to want to know any negatives, or to obtain any real data on them.

Your statement that " it's probably because they aren't needed anymore" is based on absolutely nothing. It's an assumption and a wild guess. There is not any real data backing that, because you don't want to obtain it!!!.

How can you ever make a statement based on knowledge to argue that there is no need for knowledge? You can only make such a statement if you already HAVE the knowledge, and as such, you cannot base your statement on anything! You must first acquire the data before you can make such assumptions or allusions!!!.

If you say, we don't need the knowledge because it is not needed, then that can only be an empty statement because you have no knowledge to base your statement on.

Any truthful statement would be happy for there to be data, and if that data wasn't there, you would hold back your tongue and inquire or insist or suggest or welcome the idea that some real data would be had and some real knowledge would be gathered (from statistics, in that sense).

But if you say in advance "oh, that's not needed" then you just want to keep yourself in the dark so that you can keep believing those.... they're probably gonna be falsehoods or you wouldn't try to prevent data gathering from taking place.

This whole topic is a reaction of people that do NOT want data gathering to happen.

I say, does anyone have any data? And I only get responses (apart from one guy) that tell me there is no need for data and I should go back to sleep.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by xen » Wed Aug 24, 2016 7:10 am

Reachable wrote:
xen wrote: - previously when electricity went down land lines continued to function
- currently they do not, and require a mobile phone to guarantee reachability.
Well, no. You know that. Unless the land line is a portable and requires a base it will still work if the electricity is down and the phone system is still up.
I mean that where I live, hardly anyone has a real land line anymore and they all use internet based access because it is a lot cheaper than a real land line subscription.

You should have known that, that I would mean that. I mean, why don't you just go looking for the interpretation under which someone could be right and comprehensible? Why always try to make someone wrong?

I mean if you have no knowledge about the European landscape, sure, but I would think that would be everywhere(?). Cable and ADSL subscriptions routinely offer VoIP using a regular phone, but requiring their router/modem.

So it's not because it is a portable and requires a base. There is a different answer to the question here. You've seen it now. Perhaps. :p.

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Re: Ultrasonic SSD?

Post by Reachable » Wed Aug 24, 2016 7:48 am

Yes, we have VoIP here, but I don't think it's anywhere near as popular as where you are. I had puzzled over your earlier statement for a few minutes before commenting. Perhaps I should have expressed it as a question: "What do you mean?" More information would have prevented it.

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