Something that might make a day easier, Vol. 18

SpudimusPrime

26447

Skill Level: Informational

Hi imgur. Broke my streak playing the American Civil War Reenactment Home Game over the weekend like many of you.

With one-ish exception, these posts have been tech-centric because that's my wheelhouse. It's the area I'm most knowledgeable in, which is odd to admit because of how much I know that I don't know, not including the unknown-unknowns. I plan to continue to post tech-tools as long as I can, but I also hope to see more things outside of my wheelhouse as recommendations. The multitool post (Vol. 4) was a fun little history research and I hope someone out there was interested enough to fact check me and do further reading.

That aside, today's post is informational, inspired by a home project where I'm trying to get some life out of old hardware again. In the image above you have four-ish types of hard drive. I say "four-ish" because the only real difference (for most people) in the left two is the size. You can put either one in your desktop computer, but only the smaller one in your laptop (normally, I'm sure there is an exception out there somewhere). Mechanically those are "platter" hard drives that you can think of operating like a turn table. They don't take falls well, and are slower than the other two, but otherwise will serve you well.

Before continuing, you're probably aware of this already, but your computer has two types of "memory." Your hard drive, which functions as the "long-term memory" and your RAM which functions as the "short-term memory". Your RAM is nearly always faster than your Hard Drive. Since retrieving things from the hard drive takes time, your computer will make educated guesses about what you'll want and preload those parts into the RAM, reading it from the hard drive. When you're done though and power is removed from the RAM, what ever was in the RAM is gone forever. Save often.

Sometime in the 2000s, someone asked "Why can't RAM (computer memory), which is much faster, be used to store information forever? The SATA SDD started to answer that question.

The SATA SDD was among the first in long term storage that didn't require moving parts. These are ideal for laptops since they handle being moved around a lot without issue. When compared to your standard Thumb drive the only key differences are speed and portability again, these are much faster than either the HDD or a Thumb drive (typically) but you're more likely to find a thumb drive in someones pocket. SDDs have served as a transition between the HDD and the smaller SDD M.2 on the far right. There are downsides to the SDD though, but since the M.2 share them I'll cover those momentarily.

The M.2 is not the only drive in its size, and every time I look there are more so I'm going to stop looking. M.2s (to me, personally) truly answer the question I mentioned earlier. It's nearly as fast as your RAM in many cases, has no moving parts, and is super compact, and power efficient. It and it's cousins are great for nearly everything from Phones to Desktops and Servers. Since it's so great, we shouldn't even need anything else, right? Wrong. On my desk is a 64GB SATA SDD I bought in 2009 and finally died in 2021, which is unusual for SDD's. Most die long before that since the mechanism by which they store information can only be used some unknown number of times (lots of factors involved, but the general accepted number is 100k writes). I did use that drive for most of that period time by the way.

When it failed, it didn't stop working. I can still access the drive and it still has an older version of Ubuntu on it that I can update. It's basically RAM now though because after a reboot it's right back to where it was. That's the thing you must consider when buying storage. What is your purpose? Do you need something on your desk that'll never move and last forever? You should really consider an HDD. Do you need to cut seconds off of your reaction time in a game? SDD's are going to be better suited for the task. A combination of both is generally recommended for maximum benefit, storing your OS on the SDD and important stuff on the HDD.

If you need more proof that HDD's aren't going anywhere yet, go do some price checks. There are entire sub-reddits dedicated to stalking Best Buy for the best deals on them. Hopefully today I've given you something to consider before you make your next computer purchase. Just remember that HDD's can and will fail, it'll just take longer or some unfortunate motions. I'm looking forward to seeing this corrected (truly! Just be cool please). If you do have a correction just keep in mind this post was written for people who know their computer stores information and not much else.

See you tomorrow imgur. Until then, if you see this, would you share something that just makes your day a little easier?

Previous Entries:

01. Bitwarden Password Management: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-f4GqUhb
02. Flameshot Screen Capture: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-2-utWyG3n
03. Krita Digital Painting: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-3-kkpMii8
04. Multi-tools: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-4-AMo33rR
05. Command line installers: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-5-EZbZe2O
06. Ventoy and YUMI Bootable USB: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-6-tsF4ONO
07. Clonezilla Drive backup and Recovery: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-7-IApGpkE
08. WinDirStat Windows space analyzer: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-8-tSaDOwf
09. 7zip archive manager: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-9-xB6Z5pQ
10. Advanced File Renamer: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-10-mo0JZyh
11. Discord: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-11-FD3KkmE
12. VMWare Worstation/Fusion: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-12-a6a4a4Y
13. Arr suite of tools: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-13-GrIyDXB
14. Docker: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-14-SU9S8v6
15. Markdown Formatting: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-15-c2RS0uu
16. Portainer: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-16-6CCaf1
17. CPUZ/CPUX: https://imgur.com/gallery/something-that-might-make-day-easier-vol-17-pu9zrJY

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YouMealyMouthedCrotchPheasant

The same sort of people who are ringing a death knell for HDDs are probably unaware that DLTs have been used since the 80s to store data because they are extremely cheap and have high(ish) capacity while retaining information longer than any platter (or solid state) drive.

9 months ago |

aducksayswhat

"The SATA SDD was among the first in long term storage that didn't require moving parts" being pedantic, before SSDs were 'productised' as a drop-in alternative on SATA, flash memory wasn't exactly new. For the early 'lean and mean' netbooks people were using compact flash with adapters to get the response times/low power/no moving parts even if the transfer rate wasn't as good. And of course use in cameras/media players

PaperinoVB

As another techie: you're doing God's work here.
Just some suggestion for next posts if you need them: images and videos viewing (XNview and VLC are my choices, you'll have your own), system cleaners and optimizers (not antivirus! I mean Wise365 etc), utilities for the more tech savy (Sisinternal Suite, now by Microsoft. Just think Procexp and Autoruns), privacy tools (O&O Shutup and the like).

MightyIink

Sadly I see so much confusion over sata and pcie m.2's at my work because they both look the same but arent compatible with each other, even the other techs keep making that mistake.

Always check for the pcie logo on an nvme.

A thousand times this. It really feels like it's evolving into another one of these situations (source xkcd):

nobodyspecial995

NVME is amazing. So small, but so fast.

SpoilsburyToastMan

Small point... It's not "SDD", it's "SSD". Solid State Drive. There is no disk.

Yeah, I even caught myself on that one while doing the post, but the image I used labeled it as SDD and I figured for consistency to keep it. In retrospect it would have been better to correct it in the post and carry on.

FeloniousMonk13

Hang on BRB gotta download some more RAM

KainLamond

Nothing you said is applicable to my IBM PC/AT...

I did consider adding PATA to the post, but ultimately decided against it since we're not likely to see them in the wild anymore. I'm not sure that would've helped you though lol

And 5.25 full height HDDs or I guess all the kids call them double height HDDs now a days...

Zalure17

My main issue with SSD vs HDD is price. I get more storage space for far less cost with HDD. Of course any time I bring this up I get push back from people screaming at me SSD is faster but I’m like I can wait those extra few seconds if I’m saving several hundred bucks.

To those people I would ask what the expected use case is? I don't need speed to open documents or even pictures really. I don't need speed over my network since a lot of it's going to be bottlenecked by the network itself. Unless you're doing a lot of graphics and/or animation, huge amounts of SSD aren't going to be super beneficial to me.

My laptop is a general use computer. Browse the internet, watch youtube, and side touch of gaming but the gaming involves emulators for older games.

I don’t need the speed for these tasks but things like ROMs, images, and music files do take up space so the HDD with high storage space that’s affordable is the way to go for me.

KaminM

I remember in the early/mid 2000s when a company made a legit RAM disk, a PCIx expansion card that had many DDR RAM slots and a port for an extra battery with a SATA connector port. It was an interesting proof of concept, but allowed XP to go from POST to usable desktop in just a few seconds. And now we have NVMe.

Oh God, I remember reading about that. At the time for the cost, I remember thinking it was Goofy but still neat lol

I had to look it up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

thatguyfromny

My first hard drive weighed 45 lbs, was the size if a small suitcase, was made by WANG, and was a whopping 10MB.

"size of" not "size if"

poorwegian

Congrats on your hefty wang I guess

Biggest WANG in the neighborhood, that was for sure.

Jeez! What'd you need all that space for? That'd hold almost four copies of doom!

Doom didn't come out for another decade.

That only underscores the impressiveness of the size. I hope you still have it if only as a souvenir of the age!

Unfortunately, I lost everything in a fire in '99. The drive came to me second-hand. A friend was the head of the IT dept at the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC. They upgraded theirs to 20 MB so he scored me one of the replaced 10 MB ones. Hooked it to my C64 at home with a homebrew adaptor and a PSU from a commercial videogame cabinet and used it as storage for my BBS.

With the history you just listed with that, that is extra hateful that you have lost it. I know it's been over 20 years, but I'm still sorry for your losses.

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