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No optical drives?



 
 
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  #46  
Old August 10th 20, 01:15 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Ant[_3_]
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Default 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.
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  #47  
Old August 10th 20, 01:23 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
nospam
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Posts: 4,718
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 01:24 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
kelown
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Posts: 35
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 03:28 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Jonathan N. Little[_2_]
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Posts: 1,133
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 03:56 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
John Doe[_8_]
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Posts: 2,378
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 08:39 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Bill[_49_]
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Posts: 84
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 08:52 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Chris
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Posts: 832
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 09:02 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 09:09 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
John Doe[_8_]
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Posts: 2,378
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 11:25 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Carlos E.R.[_3_]
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Posts: 1,356
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 11:25 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Carlos E.R.[_3_]
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Posts: 1,356
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 11:31 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Carlos E.R.[_3_]
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Posts: 1,356
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 11:37 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Carlos E.R.[_3_]
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Posts: 1,356
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 01:11 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Mayayana
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Posts: 6,438
Default 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  
Old August 10th 20, 01:13 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Mayayana
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Posts: 6,438
Default 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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