We saw it happen with glass CRT monitors. Now mechanical hard drives are heading for the dustbins of history.
As reported earlier, the Thai factories which produce motors and other parts for mechanical hard drives were flooded out back in October. It was expected to catch up to the major computer producers like Dell by this month. Last night, I opened the page for hard drives at TigerDirect and got nothing but solid states drives. It’s restored today, but as prices fall, the writing is on the wall.
Those Thai factories should be in no hurry to reopen. And I happen to know that Santa has gotten me a new Crucial SSD for Xmas. Cause as usual, I’ve been a very good boy.
Even better are the SSDs that don’t have to be shaped like spinning drives. No reason to have a 2.5" rectangle in your notebook, taking away valuable space. That’s the thinking behind the drives in iPhones, iPads, and the MacBook Air, anyway.
ssd’s still take up space, because they need to put in a connector of some sort for the ssd drive to be removed. Of course it’s WAY less space than a 2.5" drive…
SO come up with another connector and screw everyone up. Just did a new FM1 motherboard and discovered a USB 3 connector and only 1 USB 2… so much for a card reader in that unit. Nice if they’d tell you or include an adaptor.
Next one I made was an iTX board… no adapter came with the slim DVD.
Opened today’s delivery. Sales guy forgot to mention the 500GB drive and 4GB RAM special was SODIM and 2.5" drives.
MEh. Normal Christmas around here.
[quote=“herbie_popnecker”]SO come up with another connector and screw everyone up. Just did a new FM1 motherboard and discovered a USB 3 connector and only 1 USB 2… so much for a card reader in that unit. Nice if they’d tell you or include an adaptor.
Next one I made was an iTX board… no adapter came with the slim DVD.
Opened today’s delivery. Sales guy forgot to mention the 500GB drive and 4GB RAM special was SODIM and 2.5" drives.
MEh. Normal Christmas around here.[/quote]
If you have looked in the Mb airs you can see that their ssd drives are a long narrow hard drive, takes up hardly any space, but costs about $1000000000 because apple makes them ( not really though )
I stuffed a 120gig ssd drive into my macbook 13" 2 months ago, LOVE IT. swapped back to the hdd to try it and what a dog. People think by stuffing tons of ram into their computers will make them faster, not really… put a ssd drive into your computer you will see a difference compared to adding more ram…
“Apple has bought Israel’s Anobit, a maker of flash storage technology, for up to $500 million, the Calcalist financial daily reported on Tuesday.”
"Anobit has developed a chip that enhances flash drive performance through signal processing. The chip is already incorporated in Apple devices such as the iPhone, iPad and the MacBook Air.
Last week, Calcalist said Apple was interested in Anobit’s technology to increase and enhance the memory volume and performance of its devices. The chip may as much as double the memory volume in the new iPads and MacBooks."
Will SSDs really replace magnetic hard drives though? As far as I understand, the big flaw with SSDs is that they have a limited lifespan due to the way they store data. Basically, each write cycle damages the drive, thus limiting them to between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles. I think this would be a major hurdle to overcome before they can be a true replacement.
That said, I do have one on my new computer, and I sure do love the speed!
Speaking of mechanical drives, both Seagate and WD have announced they’re dropping the warranty from three years to two years on all but their most expensive models.
Guess they just picked those platters up off the floor and rinsed them off instead of ‘wasting’ them. Shit, there was a dead one in every case lot as it was.
On the other hand I RMA’s 3 this month, haven’t done that in over a year! At $40 you toss 'em. At $100 it’s worth 5 mins of paperwork and $5 postage.
[quote=“herbie_popnecker”]Speaking of mechanical drives, both Seagate and WD have announced they’re dropping the warranty from three years to two years on all but their most expensive models.
Guess they just picked those platters up off the floor and rinsed them off instead of ‘wasting’ them. Shit, there was a dead one in every case lot as it was.
On the other hand I RMA’s 3 this month, haven’t done that in over a year! At $40 you toss 'em. At $100 it’s worth 5 mins of paperwork and $5 postage.[/quote]
what you mean, you don’t like paying 255$ for a wd-green 2tb drive when 2 week prior to the price HIKE they were 58$
The hidden problem is when you claim that warranty.
Say you buy a drive with a 3 year warranty and register it. It fails after 6 or 8 months. You go online RMA it and send it off and you get a replacement. What never gets mentioned is they only warranty THAT ONE for 90 days. So much for three years.
Or you can go back to where you bought it without the sales slip, rant and whine, throw a temper tantrum and act like a complete asshole and maybe the manager will wimp out and give you another.
Seems to work for clothes… HAHAHAHA
Gonna try a 60GB Vertex in that useless HP Netbook. Not top rated SSD but WTF for $69
Anything would be an improvement in that P.O.S. and I could easily get $69 used for the 250GB that’s in it.
I have a gen one ssd OCZ 128gig in my Optiplex 980 with a corei5 8gigs ddr and 2 24" lcd’s running debian some times and windows 7 x64 the others.
DAM it’s snappy, and its a old drive. If i were to buy a new one with the higher read/write it would be way faster… Soon, i’ll use this 128gig for my Xen server and buy a 256 SSD for the 980…
I made sure to get an SSD in my computer when I bought it back in December. It’s an Intel drive (I think it’s the 510, but I’m not sure). 120 GB. I use that along with a standard 1TB spinning platter drive. This machine SCREAMS! It boots up in about 45 seconds once the BIOS finishes the POST.
All goddam day, still not up. Goddam useless fucking junk XP - requires a SATA driver, won’t friggin slipstream in (the updated ones don’t work, the older drivers removed)
I don’t wanna use the Win7Lame restore disks and spend all day removing the HP crap either. Wanna do an XP Pro/Linux Mint install on it.
