[Discuss] reliability of SSDs vs HDDs

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2013-12-27 00:35-0800 Patrick wrote:

> [...]In the long run, some expensive items end up costing less,
> because if they're more durable, your `lease' on them runs
> longer.  Other times, a $20 thrift-shop special is a pretty
> good deal, even if you'll have to replace it sooner than you'd
> like.  Depends what you're shopping for.
>

Hi Patrick:

I used to follow your strategy pretty closely; buy really well-researched
top-dollar, top-level stuff, or buy something really cheap, but avoid
the middle ground where the buyer is often ripped off by
planned obsolescence or stuff that just doesn't work very well.

I still think that strategy is a good one from the individual's point
of view, but I also think that strategy can be improved from the
environmental/political point of view.  The sad fact is many cheap
imports rely on both local environmental degradation and global
environmental degradation (i.e., burning subsidized fossil fuels to
ship the "cheap" crap) and slave labour.  Those issues are important
to me so I try to avoid most of the cheap imports as well as the
middle ground.

The one personal exception I make for this strategy is buying
computers where many of the components are made exclusively in the far
East. But I try to mitigate that issue by buying as few computers as
possible and by always using a recycled/old computer for an X-terminal
to give me excellent X and desktop access to our principal computer
that Barbara is running directly in our office. The net result is for
the ~33 joint person years of our home computer experience with Linux,
we have only needed to buy 3 new computers (a pentium-133, a classical
Athlon-600, and a Intel core 2, 2.4 GHz box) and 2 used computers (a
shuttle box and a nettop). In all cases except the nettop and the core
2, all the mentioned computers started their life as our principal
computers and finished that life as X-terminals to extract essentially
all usefulness from them before we had to throw them out. Currently we
use the core 2 as our principal box, and we have used the nettop as an
X-terminal since we bought it used.  I am hoping to get several more
years out of the core 2 (bought 6 years ago) due to recent RAM and
disk upgrades.  And I hope to get several more years out of the nettop
as well now that I have removed its hard disk and replaced it with a
15GB USB2 memory stick to reduce the heat sources inside that box.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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