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#46
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No optical drives?
nospam wrote:
In article , Mayayana wrote: | If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk. | What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files. | | I do. Ah. Nunca limpia su casa, no? he likely has a lot of large files, such as music, photos and particularly movies, which adds up *very* quickly. Yep, videos are hoggers. For me, VMs too. -- Life's so loco! ..!.. *isms, sins, hates, (d)evil, illnesses (e.g., COVID-19/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2), deaths (RIP), interruptions, stresses, heat waves, fires, out(r)ages, dramas, unlucky #4, 2020, greeds, bugs (e.g., crashes & female mosquitoes), etc. Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly. /\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org / / /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail. | |o o| | \ _ / ( ) |
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#47
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No optical drives?
In article , Ant
wrote: | If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk. | What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files. | | I do. Ah. Nunca limpia su casa, no? he likely has a lot of large files, such as music, photos and particularly movies, which adds up *very* quickly. Yep, videos are hoggers. For me, VMs too. oh yea, i forgot all about vms, and i have a lot of those. |
#48
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No optical drives?
| If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk. | What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files. he likely has a lot of large files, such as music, photos and particularly movies, which adds up *very* quickly. Yep, videos are hoggers. For me, VMs too. Still, a 5 TB drive will hold 2000 movies of 2.5 GB each. That's quite a collection. |
#49
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No optical drives?
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/08/2020 21.21, nospam wrote: that depends on the floppies. like everything, there's a range in quality. Everybody commented the same thing. Brand best quality floppies in the mid 90's, failed a lot. Crap quality bought in large amounts in the mid 80's, worked without a flaw. I still have backups made in that era: tried a decade ago and they worked. Agree, was my experience. Bought a large lot of generic brand when backups were done on floppy, early '90's and just worked. Later buying TDK, Sony, Memorex failed with 0 Sector error. Found floppies would not work reliably with XP. -- Take care, Jonathan ------------------- LITTLE WORKS STUDIO http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com |
#50
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No optical drives?
Ken Blake wrote:
John Doe wrote: micky wrote: Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere else. I haven't even thought about an optical drive for years. I can't imagine any piece of hardware requiring an optical drive nowadays. With a decent or good Internet connection, media can be downloaded by the boatload. That's true, but many people (me, for example) still have CD or DVD installation media and other kinds of files on CDs or DVDs. Those CDs and DVDs may not be needed often For the vast majority of users "may not be needed often" is a gross understatement. They are NEVER needed anymore. They just aren't. They went the way of floppies. Don't mess with something that's just a waste of time. The telltale sign is that new computers do not come with optical media. |
#51
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No optical drives?
John Doe wrote:
For the vast majority of users "may not be needed often" is a gross understatement. They are NEVER needed anymore. They just aren't. They went the way of floppies. Don't mess with something that's just a waste of time. The telltale sign is that new computers do not come with optical media. There are still institutions out there running COBOL programs. Go tell them your story... Technology doesn't disappear as quickly as it arrives. Notice that the core of Intel's x86 instruction set has long been preserved in the interest of backwards compatibility. Even though, from your point of view, it's "a waste of time". |
#52
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No optical drives?
Ant wrote:
Chris wrote: micky wrote: Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere else. You're correct. Since software stopped being distributed on optical media (5-10 years ago), there's been little need/demand. Same for movies, etc. Lots of people are streaming online these days. I haven't bought a CD in many years. I buy blu-rays simply because streaming services are always changing what films are available, it's really annoying. If there was a service that had all films in the same way music services do I'd buy that. |
#53
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No optical drives?
Mayayana wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote | I distrust them because they're magnetic storage. | | Unless I'm lost in translation, they are not magnetic, they are flash media. | Electrical? I can't say that I really understand it, but it makes sense they could be vulnerable to magnetic fields. I also read that SSDs can't be depended on for more than a year or so without power. So I'm guessing sticks are no different. That doesn't make it a good primary backup medium. | Unfortunately, they are ridiculously small. I have a BlueRay writer, | which allows up to 100 GB. They are not cheap, but some are archival | quality. | I guess that depends on what you need. My periodic backup of email, program data, business files, etc, is well under the 4+ GB I can put on a DVD. I also use CDs, mostly for boot media. For example, I use BootIt for booting/partitioning/disk imaging. That's very compact. It used to fit on a floppy. It still might. It certainly fits on a CD. USB stick? Maybe. But that introduces complications. Not all machines can boot from USB. Some quick info on Flash. ******* Fowler–Nordheim tunneling floating-gate transistors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_...heim_tunneling Once the floating-gate transistor has electronics just sitting there on it (like they were on a tiny capacitor plate), the curve tracer curve for the transistor changes. They start conducting at a different voltage. Reading out a bit, is like running a curve tracer. https://flashdba.files.wordpress.com...hresholds1.jpg "Space radiation effects in advanced flash memories" https://web.archive.org/web/20160304.../1/01-2369.pdf Note: Does not take scaling into account, modern flash might well be a lot smaller than the device cells tested here. Modern devices *won't* take these radiation levels. The charge pump will still fail at 8krads, but the read errors number will need to be updated. [ 8krads charge pump failure (needed for write/erase) ] [120krads a thousand read errors] CT scan entire abdomen = 0.0046 Krads Food irradiation 1 to 10 kGy Cobalt 60 source 1 Gy = 100 rad = 100-1000 Krads That means your SSD could be damaged if it goes through a hamburger treatment machine. You may laugh about that, but strange things have happened when goods were shipped, and transports have been driven down the wrong lane at the wrong place. The words "callous disregard" comes to mind. Floating gate electrons stay on the floating gate for around 10 years. A modern drive that props up its act with "TLC rewrite", if it was powered a couple times in that 10 year period, might well be good indefinitely. The "time capsule in the back yard", the 10 years might catch up with it. Maybe at 40 years, you'd have a "can of mush". Like trying to read those old floppies that no longer read out. Cosmic rays, which are much more energetic, could likely do more damage, and the "spray" might extend past a single bit-cell. The error correction, being as powerful as it it, covers this up. The tiling pattern for bitcells means there is unlikely to be a highly correlated damage effect. The modern 3D NAND, maybe a cosmic ray positioned to go down a line of bits, would be worse. Nothing guarantees that all the cosmic rays come in at the same angle. https://techreport.com/review/26269/...-ssd-division/ "Intel’s efforts to safeguard SSDs from cosmic rays... For SSDs, Mielke pointed to cosmic rays as the main source of worry for silent errors. the NAND is loaded with ECC protection The controller and DRAM are more vulnerable, though. Flipped bits in these components can apparently make firmware code execute incorrectly, causing silent errors and other problems." Which means, if you were being silly about it, when flying in an airplane at 40,000 feet, simply keep the SSD unpowered so it can't make any "runtime" errors. The ECC takes care of the rest. There is no magnetic effect. A high enough alternating mag field, could cause sufficient voltage to cause a transistor to avalanche, but then, every bit of electronics within the range of such a device would be destroyed anyway. Maybe when two stars collide there'd be enough field for it to happen. https://serverfault.com/questions/35...-hdds-and-ssds "Magnets have no effect on SSDs except to the extent that a change in magnetic flux induces a current in wires." ******* Magnets are not particularly effective at erasing hard drives. This is why the RCMP here could not certify the usage of magnetic erasers for "top secret" containing hard drives for the government. They have to be run through a "chipper" instead. And Hitachi said, that while PMR spinning drives (perpendicular recording) are potentially more sensitive to external magnetic fields, they had done work to try to raise the resistance to such effects to the same level as the older, less dense hard drives. If you do manage to erase the servo wedges on the platter of a modern drive, the drive cannot be used again. Even though some drives do have an internal servo wedge writer, it's possible whizzy physics lab equipment needed to provide feedback during the operation, would not be available. A lot of the older drives, have "stickers" over various holes. One of the holes is where the *external* servo writer used to plug in. At a certain density point, the mechanical tolerances were such, only an internal servo writing approach would work, but this might be augmented with optical methods, like counting diffraction fringes or the like. The method has not been described in my attempts to find more info on it. It's probably easily located in a patent somewhere, if you have all day to search through dud patents. The servo wedge is written once at the factory, and is never refreshed after that. The magnetic pattern has to last for the entire life of the drive. The server wedge helps tell the arm "a little to the left, a little to the right", the arm has two levels of actuation, with some having a piezo closer to the heads for fine positioning. And riding over the servo every once in a while, the feedback loop for positioning is updated, and the fine positioner makes a correction. Such a drive may "hum" more than its non-enterprise cousins. The latest drive may have three levels of actuator. And so it goes. Now that we no longer have the HGST website with easy to digest articles, we'll lose track of how it all works. When HAMR and MAMR comes out, who will tell us how it works ? And how much "deviation from theory" the new methods will use ? (What they're doing in production, does not exactly match the proposals years ago. They've moved on.) Servo (doesn't really explain it) https://web.archive.org/web/20070622...servowrite.htm Overview https://web.archive.org/web/20071012...hdi/index.html Paul |
#54
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No optical drives?
I wrote:
The telltale sign is that new computers do not come with optical media. I should have looked first... I surely don't need one, not in the slightest, but I can't say the majority of users wouldn't. I suppose what it is used for mostly nowadays is copyrighted movies. |
#55
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No optical drives?
On 09/08/2020 23.15, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R. wrote: But I developed custom software and I needed something to carry and deploy it, and the binaries often did not fit a floppy. I often used rar with multidisk compression. in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet. Certainly not. it was very easy and everyone i knew did it. I was not talking of "ease", just availability. And about ease... I also doubt it, it required having access to an FTP server (in the command line). Sending an email with a 1 MB attachment would have provoked a call from the sysadmin :-D Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies, because it was expensive. maybe where you were, but internet access was widely available in the usa in the early 90s, from a variety of providers. I was in Canada on a college in 1990 and Internet was not even mentioned. Not by teachers, not by the students. Not even in the data transmission courses. The first time I heard the word was several years later. In fact, I had a friend who worked with a Mac something and used floppies. software could also be sent via compuserve and similar services, but normally only within the same service. some of the earliest and largest isps include: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL The WELL was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985, and the name (an acronym for Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is partially a reference to some of Brand's earlier projects, including the Whole Earth Catalog. ... The WELL began as a dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) influenced by EIES, became one of the original dial-up ISPs in the early 1990s when commercial traffic was first allowed, and changed into its current form as the Internet and web technology evolved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Internet_service_provider) The 1World is an Internet service provider originally headquartered in Brookline, Massachusetts. It was the first commercial ISP in the world that provided a direct connection to the internet, with its first customer logging on in November 1989. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcom_(United_States) In 1996 the company called itself the world's largest ISP, with some 500,000 subscribers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panix_(ISP) Panix is the third-oldest ISP in the world after NetCom and the World. Originally running on A/UX on an Apple Macintosh IIfx, Panix has gone through a number of transitions as the Internet has grown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindSpring When it acquired Netcom in February 1999, its subscriber base surpassed 1 million. It announced its first high-speed cable service to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1999 and DSL services to eight cities the following November. In September MindSpring launched its first national advertising campaign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EarthLink EarthLink was co-founded in March 1994 by Sky Dayton, investor Reed Slatkin and Kevin M. O'Donnell. Dayton, then only age 23, reportedly was inspired to start the dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) in Pasadena, CA after spending an entire week trying to configure his own computer for Internet access. Dayton¹s experience convinced him that there was a market for a simple, user-friendly ISP. ... By 1995, EarthLink offered dial-up service in 98 cities, and was one of the first U.S. ISPs to offer unlimited Internet access for a flat rate. ... In 1998, EarthLink entered partnerships with Sprint, Apple, CompUSA, and other companies that helped it reach 1 million members by the end of the year. ... On February 4, 2000, the company, then based in Pasadena, California, merged with Atlanta-founded MindSpring, making it the second-largest ISP in the U.S., after AOL. Later that year, the company launched EarthLink Biz DSL service. EarthLink also acquired OneMain.com, a large, rural ISP, and Rural Connections in 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL AOL was one of the early pioneers of the Internet in the mid-1990s, and the most recognized brand on the web in the United States. It originally provided a dial-up service to millions of Americans, as well as providing a web portal, e-mail, instant messaging and later a web browser following its purchase of Netscape. In 2001, at the height of its popularity, it purchased the media conglomerate Time Warner in the largest merger in U.S. history. AOL rapidly declined thereafter, partly due to the decline of dial-up and rise of broadband. AOL was eventually spun off from Time Warner in 2009, with Tim Armstrong appointed the new CEO. Under his leadership, the company invested in media brands and advertising technologies. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#56
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No optical drives?
On 10/08/2020 04.28, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote: On 09/08/2020 21.21, nospam wrote: that depends on the floppies. like everything, there's a range in quality. Everybody commented the same thing. Brand best quality floppies in the mid 90's, failed a lot. Crap quality bought in large amounts in the mid 80's, worked without a flaw. I still have backups made in that era: tried a decade ago and they worked. Agree, was my experience. Bought a large lot of generic brand when backups were done on floppy, early '90's and just worked. Later buying TDK, Sony, Memorex failed with 0 Sector error. Found floppies would not work reliably with XP. I wonder! Would the new multitasking OS have to do with it? It would be around Win 95 when they started to fail. Hum... No, I also used plain MsDOS and they failed. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#57
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No optical drives?
On 09/08/2020 23.09, Mayayana wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote | If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk. | What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files. | | I do. Ah. Nunca limpia su casa, no? :-D Although I don't think we use the verb "limpiar" with that meaning here. :-) It usually is "hard disk space is cheap, lets keep this just in case". A lot of that are recordings. But there are also things like virtual machines, software repositories... And many photos. There is one 8TB disk which is pretty full with backups of the main machine (not including those recordings). -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#58
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No optical drives?
On 10/08/2020 02.24, kelown wrote:
| Â*Â*Â* If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk. | What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files. he likely has a lot of large files, such as music, photos and particularly movies, which adds up *very* quickly. Yep, videos are hoggers. For me, VMs too. Still, a 5 TB drive will hold 2000 movies of 2.5 GB each. That's quite a collection. Many of mine includes a few minutes before it starts, and many minutes after it stops (they are made automatically and I can't control the start/stop times), plus the commercials in the middle. I have not found suitable cropping software, nor the time to do it. In fact, I have to find the time to delete about half of not wanted things there. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#59
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No optical drives?
"Paul" wrote
| Floating gate electrons stay on the floating gate for | around 10 years. A modern drive that props up its act | with "TLC rewrite", if it was powered a couple times | in that 10 year period, might well be good indefinitely. | The "time capsule in the back yard", the 10 years might | catch up with it. Maybe at 40 years, you'd have a | "can of mush". Like trying to read those old floppies | that no longer read out. Thank you, Paul. Thorough, as usual. So I shouldn't worry about something like an SSD being in proximity to a car alternator. But when I looked around, the retention ability in general didn't sound so promising. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/...data-retention http://www.dell.com/downloads/global...ive-faq-us.pdf On the one hand they're saying your data *could* last 10 years, if the drive was almost new, you store it in a cool, dark place and you put a Maxwell Smart anti-spy bell on top of it. But it can also lose data in as little as 3 months unplugged. And it might not require a great loss to corrupt some kinds of files. It could be debated, but I don't see any reason to depend on storage beyond weeks. Mostly I only use sticks to move data between machines or do an overnight backup when I've been doing a lot of work like coding. I currently have an older SSD sitting in a bay, unplugged, as potential backup, but I wouldn't depend on it. My 20 year old CDs have never failed me. I also keep backup on old hard disks. They've never failed, though I wouldn't depend on them like I do with CDs/DVDs. |
#60
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No optical drives?
"Carlos E.R." wrote
| Ah. Nunca limpia su casa, no? | | :-D | | Although I don't think we use the verb "limpiar" with that meaning here. :-) | Sorry. My high school Spanish training, combined with an aging brain, leaves me with a limited selection of words. |
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