Have hardware prices gone crazy during Covid?

On 28/06/2020 20:52, tesla sTinker wrote:

bill gates is the corona virus.Â* He made it on purpose.\
He owns the patents, paid the CDC 100 million dollars to lie about it
to the public,Â* bird flu.Â*Â* And then, get rich in the making of it.
Everyone else is copying the bandit.Â* Believe me, if sars is so bad for
you, why is it, they cannot sell the beef, but keep putting chicken and
turkey in those freezers.Â*Â* Why, cause there is no Corona.Â* Its a lie.
The people who have died, have died from something else.Â* And just about
everything, they have lied about, including that.Â* Its the
mark of the beast.Â* 666.Â* And of course, they would cover it up with
the word Crown, for the Crown of Christ.

Fake news **** artist reported to the FBI.

In article , Yousuf Khan
wrote:


I've had 8 SSD's in my life so far, 1 in my laptop, and 7 in my desktop.
Now that's not to say I currently have 7 SSD's inside my desktop, I only
have 3 SSD's attached right now. The other 4 were failures which needed
warranty replacement, all of the same brand (Adata). Each would fail
between 2 weeks and 6 months later and get replaced by another one under
warranty. I probably spent more money in shipping and handling costs
than the drive itself was worth.

stick with reputable brands such as samsung or crucial.

over the past decade or so, i've used about the same number of ssds
with zero failures, some of which are hammered fairly hard.

On 2020-06-28 6:07 p.m., nospam wrote:
In article , Yousuf Khan
wrote:


I've had 8 SSD's in my life so far, 1 in my laptop, and 7 in my desktop.
Now that's not to say I currently have 7 SSD's inside my desktop, I only
have 3 SSD's attached right now. The other 4 were failures which needed
warranty replacement, all of the same brand (Adata). Each would fail
between 2 weeks and 6 months later and get replaced by another one under
warranty. I probably spent more money in shipping and handling costs
than the drive itself was worth.

stick with reputable brands such as samsung or crucial.

over the past decade or so, i've used about the same number of ssds
with zero failures, some of which are hammered fairly hard.


I have used about 10 SSD drives over the last few years,
2 Samsungs, 4 Kingstons. 4 Adata and 1 Corsair, the only failure I
have had was the Corsair, it was about 4 years old.

Rene

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| No, programmers will not eliminate that advantage. On the contrary,
| they will make use of it and expect that everybody has an SSD. Same as
|
| That _is_ eliminating the advantage. If, in a few years' time, softwares
| run no faster even if you are using an SSD than they do now if you're
| not, then the advantage has been eliminated.

I don't think it's really a big factor. The main bloat
is wrappers. When you've got something like Java or
..Net, or javascript posing as software, you're very
far removed from the actual operations. The trouble
is that things are so fast now that people don't care
about doing a good job. They care about easy. An
SSD is really only going to be a factor with intensive
disk operations, like moving a lot of files.


| My main concern over SSDs is still of sudden and complete failure -

That is a problem, but if it goes to read-only then
why isn't that OK? If you know it's done that, isn't there
still time to clone the SSD? I'm not an expert on this.
So far I haven't lost one, and given the cost I probably
won't keep them running for their expected life. I'm not
a person who needs 2-6 TB. An $80 500 GB is ample
for my needs, and I mirror everything except the
actual OS on a second disk.

On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 21:33:26, Mayayana
wrote:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| No, programmers will not eliminate that advantage. On the contrary,
| they will make use of it and expect that everybody has an SSD. Same as
|
| That _is_ eliminating the advantage. If, in a few years' time, softwares
| run no faster even if you are using an SSD than they do now if you're
| not, then the advantage has been eliminated.

I don't think it's really a big factor. The main bloat
is wrappers. When you've got something like Java or
.Net, or javascript posing as software, you're very
far removed from the actual operations. The trouble

As a _user_, I am not really that bothered whether it's real or
"pretend" software. I know enough (just) about concepts, like
assemblers, compilers, linkers, and so on, as well as general
programming, to have some idea what people are talking about: but
really, I just want it to do it. I know enough to appreciate efficient
code like IrfanView.

is that things are so fast now that people don't care
about doing a good job. They care about easy. An

Indeed. They're lazy (or, under pressure to produce results quickly that
are good _enough_).

SSD is really only going to be a factor with intensive
disk operations, like moving a lot of files.

Windows in general seems to do a lot of that - more so with every
version. )-:

| My main concern over SSDs is still of sudden and complete failure -

That is a problem, but if it goes to read-only then
why isn't that OK? If you know it's done that, isn't there
still time to clone the SSD? I'm not an expert on this.

My concern is that if it happens to C: - which is where an SSD's speed
advantage would show best - it's like cutting the power; cloning such a
disc would I fear have at least some chance of not restoring a working
system. Most of the time, I imagine it'd just come up with a "Windows
did not shut down properly" message and fix itself, granted.

So far I haven't lost one, and given the cost I probably
won't keep them running for their expected life. I'm not
a person who needs 2-6 TB. An $80 500 GB is ample
for my needs, and I mirror everything except the
actual OS on a second disk.

I'm managing on a 1 TB (HD); I image the C: part of that, and copy the
D: part.


3
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Actors are fairly modest...A lot of us have quite a lot to be modest about. -
Simon Greenall (voice of Aleksandr the "Simples!" Meerkat), RT 11-17 Dec 2010

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 21:33:26, Mayayana wrote:

SSD is really only going to be a factor with intensive
disk operations, like moving a lot of files.

Windows in general seems to do a lot of that - more so with every
version. )-:

Windows 10 is bottlenecked by NTFS.

As it stands, I'm not convinced that SATA SSDs are
going as fast as they could. And neither is the
owner of an NVMe device getting their moneys worth.

This is why some of the test cases I try to set up here,
take so long to complete. On NTFS on a RAMDisk, I might
create 4000 files a second. On a Linux TMPFS (a RAMDisk),
I can create 186000 files a second (but, the performance
over time can be uneven, and that number is the
value after a reboot). The purpose of showing numbers
like this, is to show the potential for hardware
to do awesome things. Given a chance.

Paul

On 6/28/2020 9:10 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
I have used about 10Â* SSD drives over the last few years,
Â* 2 Samsungs, 4 Kingstons. 4 Adata and 1 Corsair,Â* the only failure I
have had was the Corsair, it was about 4 years old.

My nightmare drive was the newer Adata. I had an older 120 GB Adata
that's in my laptop and it's humming along beautifully for several years
now. I later put a 480 GB Adata into my desktop (which has better
cooling!) and they just kept dying from overheating everytime. The
desktop as a 240 GB primary SSD boot drive, that's been stable for years
now too. After the 4th Adata failure, I sent it out for warranty
replacement yet again, and then bought a totally different brand name
(Western Digital) to replace that. When the warranty replacement Adata
came back, I promptly shuffled that off into an external case and I'll
use it infrequently (it's still storage, and it can't go bad if you
don't turn it on, I hope).

Yousuf Khan

On 6/28/2020 7:07 PM, nospam wrote:
stick with reputable brands such as samsung or crucial.

over the past decade or so, i've used about the same number of ssds
with zero failures, some of which are hammered fairly hard.

Most of the 2nd tier brands are just fine too, slightly lower
performance, but highly reliable. This one batch of Adata were just
unbelievably bad.

Yousuf Khan

On 6/29/2020 12:14 AM, Paul wrote:
Windows 10 is bottlenecked by NTFS.

As it stands, I'm not convinced that SATA SSDs are
going as fast as they could. And neither is the
owner of an NVMe device getting their moneys worth.

This is why some of the test cases I try to set up here,
take so long to complete. On NTFS on a RAMDisk, I might
create 4000 files a second. On a Linux TMPFS (a RAMDisk),
I can create 186000 files a second (but, the performance
over time can be uneven, and that number is the
value after a reboot). The purpose of showing numbers
like this, is to show the potential for hardware
to do awesome things. Given a chance.

Â*Â* Paul

In my old thread about the Thunderbird newsreader creating millions of
useless files that bottlenecked the file system, definitely showed that
off to great effect. That was lazy coding by the Thunderbird developers
which showed the lazy coding of Microsoft's developers. And for years I
was suffering through it, and didn't even realize that those files
weren't actually required by Thunderbird, it just created those files
help Windows Search (another bit of lazy Microsoft coding again, from
yet another thread) index Thunderbird messages, as if I'd ever want that.

What's the solution for Microsoft now? Is ExFAT better than NTFS?

Yousuf Khan

On 6/28/2020 6:50 PM, Paul wrote:
SMART exists in SSD proprietary toolbox softwares.

SMART exists in HDTune, but that's only for HDD and not SSD.

SMART for both HDD & SSD exists on CrystalDiskInfo and HD Sentinel too.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 6/29/2020 12:14 AM, Paul wrote:
Windows 10 is bottlenecked by NTFS.

As it stands, I'm not convinced that SATA SSDs are
going as fast as they could. And neither is the
owner of an NVMe device getting their moneys worth.

This is why some of the test cases I try to set up here,
take so long to complete. On NTFS on a RAMDisk, I might
create 4000 files a second. On a Linux TMPFS (a RAMDisk),
I can create 186000 files a second (but, the performance
over time can be uneven, and that number is the
value after a reboot). The purpose of showing numbers
like this, is to show the potential for hardware
to do awesome things. Given a chance.

Paul

In my old thread about the Thunderbird newsreader creating millions of
useless files that bottlenecked the file system, definitely showed that
off to great effect. That was lazy coding by the Thunderbird developers
which showed the lazy coding of Microsoft's developers. And for years I
was suffering through it, and didn't even realize that those files
weren't actually required by Thunderbird, it just created those files
help Windows Search (another bit of lazy Microsoft coding again, from
yet another thread) index Thunderbird messages, as if I'd ever want that.

What's the solution for Microsoft now? Is ExFAT better than NTFS?

Yousuf Khan

There was the ReFS file system, but it was canceled
(not available on the usual desktop SKUs).

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

ExFAT is good for NAND flash. I don't know if it's good
for the OS feature set.

Paul

On 6/29/2020 1:13 AM, Paul wrote:
There was the ReFS file system, but it was canceled
(not available on the usual desktop SKUs).

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

ExFAT is good for NAND flash. I don't know if it's good
for the OS feature set.

Â*Â* Paul

Microsoft should just adopt one of the Linux filesystems, they seem to
be very happy promoting Linux nowadays. Maybe ZFS? Unless you have an
SMR hard drive that is, SMR kills ZFS file writes.

Yousuf Khan

On 29 Jun 2020, Paul wrote
(in article ):

Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 6/29/2020 12:14 AM, Paul wrote:
Windows 10 is bottlenecked by NTFS.

As it stands, I'm not convinced that SATA SSDs are
going as fast as they could. And neither is the
owner of an NVMe device getting their moneys worth.

This is why some of the test cases I try to set up here,
take so long to complete. On NTFS on a RAMDisk, I might
create 4000 files a second. On a Linux TMPFS (a RAMDisk),
I can create 186000 files a second (but, the performance
over time can be uneven, and that number is the
value after a reboot). The purpose of showing numbers
like this, is to show the potential for hardware
to do awesome things. Given a chance.

Paul

In my old thread about the Thunderbird newsreader creating millions of
useless files that bottlenecked the file system, definitely showed that
off to great effect. That was lazy coding by the Thunderbird developers
which showed the lazy coding of Microsoft's developers. And for years I
was suffering through it, and didn't even realize that those files
weren't actually required by Thunderbird, it just created those files
help Windows Search (another bit of lazy Microsoft coding again, from
yet another thread) index Thunderbird messages, as if I'd ever want that.

What's the solution for Microsoft now? Is ExFAT better than NTFS?

Yousuf Khan

There was the ReFS file system, but it was canceled
(not available on the usual desktop SKUs).

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

ExFAT is good for NAND flash. I don't know if it's good
for the OS feature set.

Paul

EXFAT lacks built-in permissions, security, and compression. Windows versions
after 7 can’t install on any FAT system. (Officially, Vista couldn’t boot
from a FAT file system; unofficially, I was able to install Vista on FAT-32
and have it kinda-sorta boot. It was, how can I put this, not very reliable
on FAT. When I tried installing Win 7 on FAT-32 and Win 8 on EXFAT, the
installers flat refused and wanted to reformat as NTFS. I haven’t tried Win
10, but see no reason to suppose it’d work any differently. YMMV.)

On 29 Jun 2020, Yousuf Khan wrote
(in ):

On 6/29/2020 1:13 AM, Paul wrote:
There was the ReFS file system, but it was canceled
(not available on the usual desktop SKUs).

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

ExFAT is good for NAND flash. I don't know if it's good
for the OS feature set.

Paul

Microsoft should just adopt one of the Linux filesystems, they seem to
be very happy promoting Linux nowadays. Maybe ZFS?

ZFS is run by Oracle, a.k.a. The Enemy; Larry Ellison has performed the
miracle of ****ing off Apple, Google, _and_ Microsoft all at the same time,
something which takes Serious Talent. At one point Apple was sniffing around
ZFS. They stopped, thanks in part to various Ellison shenanigans, and
developed APFS instead. MS started building ReFS at about the same time.
Google is, well, Google. Perhaps MS will unleash ReFS generally, once
they’ve got the bugs out. Right now it’s available for server OSes, for
Enterprise and Pro for Workstation versions of desktop OSes, as of Server
2012/Win 8.1. It’s not available for Home versions, period. Note that
Education versions are basically Pro/Enterprise versions, just for schools,
and so can have ReFS; I usually just put NTFS on my systems, I don’t need
the headaches of dealing with ReFS until it’s been debugged. I’m not
holding my breath waiting for MS to fix it.
Unless you have an
SMR hard drive that is, SMR kills ZFS file writes.

Yousuf Khan

On 29/06/2020 00.50, Paul wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 28/06/2020 22.16, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 21:36:43, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

Maybe. Use SMART.

Hmm. Anyone care to comment on that? Especially when I specify
_reliably_ (including not false positives)?

Sorry, I don't have advice about using SMART under Windows. I use it
on Linux. I know you can, but I don't know exactly how.

Reliably? Somewhat. Sometimes it fails to warn. Most times it does
warn. False positives I have seen none (I suppose you mean warning
about an impending failure that doesn't happen).

SMART exists in SSD proprietary toolbox softwares.

SMART exists in HDTune, but that's only for HDD and not SSD.

SMART exists in SmartMonTools (Linux), but is it ported to
Cygwin or not ? Devices are exposed in Cygwin as /dev/sda
instead of using Windows own namespace for them, so *maybe* it
works. When I use the Cygwin version of disktype.exe, the
output is not exactly the same as a "native" version on another
platform.

It is a shame if there is no native Windows tool to at least show SMART
data on Windows, but the preferred thing would be some type of timer job
and alert.

Cygwin no longer works on WinXP.
Cygwin no longer receives funding.
Volunteers keep it going now.

All my (personal) machines that have Windows also have Linux, so I have
little need to install Cygwin for my personal use. And on the jobs, if
the machine is not administered by me, I can't install it. Result is I
know little about Cygwin.

But you have made me curious to find out how SmartMonTools work in Windows.

What about that new toolset in Windows 10 that allows to run bash?


You don't have to keep the entire Cygwin tree on your disk.
You can grab the runtime DLLs, plus the executable package
and that becomes a "portable Cygwin tool". You can carry those
items to another machine and use the executable.

For example, this is my portable (runs in Windows) version of disktype.

disktype.exe
cygwin1.dll
cyggcc_s-1.dll

And Cygwin keeps web pages about packages.

https://cygwin.com/packages/summary/...tools-src.html

Â*Â* Paul

https://www.smartmontools.org/

There seems to be something called "Windows Choco" download, and Cygwin
download.

https://chocolatey.org/packages/smartmontools

To install smartmontools, run the following command from the command
line or from PowerShell:
choco install smartmontools

This is completely new to me.


https://cygwin.com/packages/summary/smartmontools.html

Installs a Linux like file tree.

--
Cheers, Carlos.