Have hardware prices gone crazy during Covid?

On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 14:47:14, Paul wrote:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

so: using an SSD, is there anything - either something in the SSD,
or third party software - that will _reliably_ give, say, a month's
warning of failure? (And by "failure" I include go-to-read-only.)

A RAID1 mirror consisting of a multiplicity of
[]
Sorry, I should have specified "in a laptop, or SFF desktop, with room
for only one 'drive'". Something that might persuade me to switch to an
SSD - "an" being the operative word - without my sudden-failure fear.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition." - Woody Allen

On 28/06/2020 20.37, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 07:53:20, Stan Brown
wrote:
On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 13:47:46 +0200, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 28/06/2020 12.17, Yousuf Khan wrote:
[]
The first thing I look at is the disk. If it is rotating rust, I upgrade
to SSD. That alone improves performance a lot.

Second that. In my very limited experience, SSD with slower CPU makes
for a faster experience overall than HDD with faster CPU.

OK you guys. I accept (daft not to) that SSDs are faster than HDDs.
(Though I do have of course the nagging feeling that lazy programmers
will soon have eliminated that advantage - but they're going to rule the
roost for everyone anyway, so that's irrelevant.)

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 today
they expect people to have 16 GB of RAM or more, fast processors and
fast video. Because they have it.

I have seen database code that is slow as molasses when using a hard
disk, almost a decade ago. It was designed for SSD, back then.



My main concern over SSDs is still of sudden and complete failure - more
so than HDDs (which I know - yes, from experience - _can_ go suddenly,
but _tend_ not to). Yes, I know everybody should be backing up their
system, on the hour, every hour, to a remote site, so it - but come on,
some of us want to _use_ our computers.

Backup to hard disk instead of remote.



so: using an SSD, is there anything - either something in the SSD, or
third party software - that will _reliably_ give, say, a month's warning
of failure? (And by "failure" I include go-to-read-only.)

Maybe. Use SMART.




--
Cheers, Carlos.

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:


Backup to hard disk instead of remote.

do both.

bill gates is the corona virus. He made it on purpose.\
He owns the patents, paid the CDC 100 million dollars to lie about it
to the public, bird flu. And then, get rich in the making of it.
Everyone else is copying the bandit. 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. Why, cause there is no Corona. Its a lie.
The people who have died, have died from something else. And just about
everything, they have lied about, including that. Its the
mark of the beast. 666. And of course, they would cover it up with
the word Crown, for the Crown of Christ.

On 6/28/2020 5:48 AM, Mayayana scribbled:
"Yousuf wrote

| So I looked at the prices of some of these parts and my eyes popped out
| of their sockets! Have they gone crazy? WTF?
|

I've noticed that, too, but it started before
coronavirus. I don't know why, especially given that
just about any hardware these days is "good enough".

I built my current system in 2015, with an 8-core
AMD FX-8300. At the time I think it was about $65.
The whole system was only about $400. The motherboard,
Asus M5A78L-M, was also about $65, and the onboard
network/graphics/audio are perfectly fine for me. I don't see
why anyone but a gamer needs a dedicated graphics card.
Later I saw the same CPU for more like $200+. And today
there seems to be a much larger range. It used to be that
the newer ones were expensive, then they quickly
got cheaper. Today I haven't kept up with technology
changes, so I have no idea what another $1,000 buys
you.

Recently, though, I needed a cheap graphics card
for an older Win7 computer so that I could get an HDMI
port to feed to a TV. I think it was something like $39
at Microcenter. Reasonable. They must have had 100 of
them. apparently low-end graphics is a big seller.

I also find things vary more than they used to. Staples
sells an HDMI cord for maybe $22-35 while Microcenter
has it for $10. Similarly, Staples was selling network switches
starting at about $50. I think I paid about $20 from a
company called Provantage. The prices often just seem
arbitrary. I suspect that maybe software is setting the
prices.

I saw an interesting example of that the other day in
Home Depot. A couple were looking at safety glasses.
There's a whole section of them, mostly the same thing.
They were loolking at a pair of plastic glasses for $10, in
a blister pack. I stopped and pointed out that the very
glasses I had on, as part of my coronavirus shopping attire,
were the same thing and came in a plastic bag, 6 pair
for $20. That item was just a couple of feet away. It's nuts.

Recently I decided to set up something new for my brother,
who recently had a stroke, and I decided to do it with a
Raspberry Pi. Microcenter had a monitor on sale for $70.
That was the big expense. The whole Pi setup kit was only
$90, plus about $20 for wireless keyboard/mouse. About
$200 for a complete, serviceable Linux system for Internet,
email, etc. That gets him 25 GB+ storage and 2 GB RAM.
And those Pi's are fast.

On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 21:36:43, Carlos E.R.
wrote:
On 28/06/2020 20.37, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
[]
OK you guys. I accept (daft not to) that SSDs are faster than HDDs.
(Though I do have of course the nagging feeling that lazy programmers
will soon have eliminated that advantage - but they're going to rule
the roost for everyone anyway, so that's irrelevant.)

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.
[]
My main concern over SSDs is still of sudden and complete failure -
more so than HDDs (which I know - yes, from experience - _can_ go
suddenly, but _tend_ not to). Yes, I know everybody should be backing
up their system, on the hour, every hour, to a remote site, so it -
but come on, some of us want to _use_ our computers.

Backup to hard disk instead of remote.

OK, I _was_ exaggerating for comic effect (though remote _is_ advisable
for critical data - a remote hard disk).

so: using an SSD, is there anything - either something in the SSD,
or third party software - that will _reliably_ give, say, a month's
warning of failure? (And by "failure" I include go-to-read-only.)

Maybe. Use SMART.

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



4
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Can a blue man sing the whites?

In article , J. P. Gilliver (John)
wrote:

OK you guys. I accept (daft not to) that SSDs are faster than HDDs.
(Though I do have of course the nagging feeling that lazy programmers
will soon have eliminated that advantage - but they're going to rule
the roost for everyone anyway, so that's irrelevant.)

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.

the advantage is that it does more.



so: using an SSD, is there anything - either something in the SSD,
or third party software - that will _reliably_ give, say, a month's
warning of failure? (And by "failure" I include go-to-read-only.)

Maybe. Use SMART.

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

it will tell you if it's running outside of spec, which could result in
a failure.

HTML enabled newsreader, such as latest Thunderbird https://www.thunderbird.net, is required to view the main message of this post!!

--

With over 1.2 billion devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

On 28/06/2020 21.48, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:


Backup to hard disk instead of remote.

do both.

Yes, if you have the bandwidth and the remote space. I would need
several terabytes of remote storage.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 28/06/2020 22.16, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 21:36:43, Carlos E.R.
wrote:
On 28/06/2020 20.37, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
[]
Â*OK you guys. I accept (daft not to) that SSDs are faster than HDDs.
(Though I do have of course the nagging feeling that lazy programmers
will soon have eliminated that advantage - but they're going to rule
theÂ* roost for everyone anyway, so that's irrelevant.)

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.

No, my point is that in the future the programs will run normally while
using SSD, and terribly slow if using rotating disks.



Â*so: using an SSD, is there anything - either something in the SSD,
orÂ* third party software - that will _reliably_ give, say, a month's
warningÂ* of failure? (And by "failure" I include go-to-read-only.)

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).


--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 28/06/2020 21.52, tesla sTinker wrote:
bill gates is the corona virus.Â* He made it on purpose.\

Kill this subthread.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 6/28/2020 2:05 PM, Paul wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 6/28/2020 8:34 AM, nospam wrote:
how wide is ultrawide?

3440 X 1440

HDMI 2 or 2.1

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

HDMI 2.0 is adequate for displaying 4K at 30 Hz, but you will need HDMI
2.1 for 4K at 60 Hz or higher.

Perhaps DP 1.2 ?

Tables here are less useful.

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

The problem is, the entry level video cards
now are pretty expensive. And even if you
could find an FX5200, it wouldn't have the
output :-)

Nvidia's website lists the maximum resolution of its cards easily. AMD
is less useful.

Yousuf Khan

On 6/28/2020 2:37 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
OK you guys. I accept (daft not to) that SSDs are faster than HDDs.
(Though I do have of course the nagging feeling that lazy programmers
will soon have eliminated that advantage - but they're going to rule the
roost for everyone anyway, so that's irrelevant.)

My main concern over SSDs is still of sudden and complete failure - more
so than HDDs (which I know - yes, from experience - _can_ go suddenly,
but _tend_ not to). Yes, I know everybody should be backing up their
system, on the hour, every hour, to a remote site, so it - but come on,
some of us want to _use_ our computers.

so: using an SSD, is there anything - either something in the SSD, or
third party software - that will _reliably_ give, say, a month's warning
of failure? (And by "failure" I include go-to-read-only.)

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.

Was there any warning they were failing? Yes, they'd start developing
bad sectors at a constant rate. SMART warnings came properly. But they
wouldn't still be readable, they would also become unreadable. The drive
was not my main boot drive, it was my D drive, which had my USERS folder
on it, but I had good backups, so once it failed I'd restore the backups
to another HDD that I had with adequate storage. I'd run it that way for
a few weeks until the replacement SSD got shipped back. I'd restore the
data back to the SSD, and the cycle would happen again for another
couple of months. So finally after the 4th replacement, I replaced it
with another brand, and put the final replacement into an external
storage as a temporary drive, where it won't get used that often.

Yousuf Khan

On 6/28/2020 3:04 PM, nospam wrote:
ssds are significantly more reliable than hard drives, but if they do
fail, they generally give warning (via smart) and often fail read-only,
which means you can still access your data.

In general, I'd agree, except I discovered the world's worst batch of
SSD's which not only fail, they fail so that they can't even be read.
They're from Adata the SU630 through to the SU800 model range of 500 GB
SSD's. Stay away from them. They overheat inside their own cases, even
if there is adequate case cooling for HDD's and other SSD's.

Yousuf Khan

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.

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

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

Paul

On 28 Jun 2020, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote
(in article ):

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

In my experience, SMART may not tell you that a drive has problems, so drives
can fail without any warning from SMART (there may be other things which can
warn you). However, if SMART says that there’s a problem, then there’s a
problem and that drive is walking (spinning?) dead. I’ve had drives hold
out for a month after SMART started issuing warnings. I’ve had drives die
in under a week after SMART stared issuing warnings. Basically, if SMART
issues warnings, get a replacement drive and copy over all data or be
prepared to lose the lot.