More toys :)

[hutch--]

In the absence of many of the normal entertainments of society, more toys for computers functions as casual amusement and is useful in tweaking exist and future computers.

Yesterday it was 2 x 1tb Samsung 970 Evo plus and as I had a couple of PCIe adapters from China. Plonked one into the latest box, an X99 Huananzhi board with a Xeon in it that already had a small (500 gig) NVMe as the boot drive and it now has an extra 1tb NVMe drive. The other is aimed at a new board that has not arrived yet.

Today a box of 10 blue LED fans turned up, a type that I have used before and they came at some rediculous price, a couple of bucks each.

Sooner or later I will have to build a later CPU box but the X99 CPUs come for peanuts and they have a ton of grunt.

[jack]

Hi hutch :)
I am still reluctant to trust ssd's as my hard drive, I think that the mechanical drives are far more reliable.
I do have a 500 GB ssd with linux installed but it's for occasional use and if it decides to loose it's memory it's of no consequence

[hutch--]

Jack,

I have been using them for years and no failures. My oldest box has an Intel gen one NVMe drive and 6 years down the track, it is still faultless. For an old timer, it writes at just under 1 gig/sec and reads at a bit over 2 gig/sec. The later gen3 and gen4 are faster and as long as you don't fry them, I hve not had a failure there either.

Over time I have lost HDDs and some with low hours on them. The longest lasting HDDs have been WD Green disks as they run cold and at lower RPM. The high RPM slightly faster ones are the ones I have had that have failed.

[daydreamer]

isnt that bigger chance of breaking old physical/magnetic drive for example accidently drop it,-20 c outside while traveling(walking),ooops slid on icy surface?
but I havent so far experienced usb drives lose data due to very cold or drop them
I keep my external 2 tb HD in the padded packing it came in
and use padded bags for computers

[Greenhorn]

I'm using SSDs since the first ones arrived on the consumer market. My first one was a Corsair F240 for an astronomical price compared to HDDs, but I've never regret it. Also I've never experienced any problems or failures in daily use.
As a backup drive for long-term archiving a HDD makes sense for private use, because a SSd must be powered time by time to not loose it's data.

Just my 2 cent.

[hutch--]

I still have one SATA SSD left over, its a 480 gig Sandisk that I bought years ago and it will work OK in a computer with both power and SATA cables but not in an external case with only a USB3 cable. I have in the past used a 1tb SATA SSD in a plugin case but this old one seems to need more power to run.

I would not buy another SATA SSD as the Samsung NVMe drives are far faster, 500-550 meg/sec versus 3.2 - 3.6 gig/sec and this is on gen 3 boards and chipsets. Some of the gen 4 SSDs are faster again if the board and chipset properly support it.

Magnus,

The old IDE (about 1990) HDDs were treacherous things, just a slight bump and they would start to show errors before failing. Back then I use ESDI drives and later SCSI as they were far more reliable. The modern HDDs are a lot better and the price is falling out of them. I have added a number of Seagate 8tb HDDs to handle bulk storage but still maintain being careful handling them, never drop them and don't bump them.

My latest effort to present reliable access to data for everything plugged into the LAN is an Apache server on a Windows network as I have both network and http access. Its behind the NAT of the router and the Windows firewall so its safe enough.

[Greenhorn]

> The old IDE (about 1990) HDDs were treacherous things, just a slight bump and they would start to show errors before failing.

They were also treacherous to me. 
How often did I cut my hand or arm at the PC-case by pulling out the data cable plug ...

[daydreamer]

Nvme drive speed must be close to store in ram,so write a block of data from number crunching in a thread and recover if crash or shutdown/restart?
Hutch I live in very cold -20 c winters and sometimes +sometimes also freezing winds from storm,probably close to below the temperature where hd stops working or loses data,walking or wait at bus stop
I tested my old gaming laptop in a bus stop few -c and it snowed and it worked short while before it hanged

[hutch--]

Well, that sounds like only carry a mobile phone close to your body if you have to go outside. Most computer hardware has a temperature range spec and while you may be able to store it at -20c, you may wreck things if you try and run them at temperatures well below their operating range.