Quote:
Originally Posted by cc_in_oh
Purely anecdotal - I've had multiple Seagate failures but no WD's yet. But I still buy whichever is cheapest. The last 2 are Seagate Hub drives that are very handy on my ancient PC with only 2 USB3 ports.
|
Buying what's cheapest is pretty much standard practice. And the nature of semi-conductor electronics is that things get steadily cheaper. It's a classic capital intensive industry.
The single biggest cost of making something like hard drives is the cost of building the factory to do it. You probably don't have the money lying around to do that (because if you're smart, your cash is invested in stuff that will generate revenue), so you take on debt to finance it. An allocated fraction of the debt becomes the largest part of the cost of the product. As the debt is paid down, the share of the price allocated to debt service drops, and so do prices. I see multi-terabyte drives these days that are at "impulse purchase" prices (like under $50).
This trend is accelerating as SSDs get cheaper. I just got a budget brand 120GB SSD for $30 at my preferred retailer. It will go into a pass-along Dell All-in-One that decided it could not boot from the installed SATA HD. I could pop that drive into a drive enclosure and access it just fine, but the Dell refused to boot from it. The All-in-One will get the SSD with Linux installed, and will live stuck sideways into the shelf under my computer desk and be accessed over my network.
My current desktop is a refurb ex-corporate desktop machine. It only had USB2 on the motherboard. A recent upgrade was a PCI-e USB3 card that would go in an unused mini-PCI-e slot. I added a USB3 hub, and it supports a USB3 drive enclosure and several USB3 flash drives. (And I'm seeing those at prices I used to get charged for USB2 models,)
A contact elsewhere spoke of migrating a database server he administered to SSD, replacing 16TB of SATA HDs with 16TB of 2TB Samsung SSDs. He got an order of magnitude performance increase. The box
screamed through database queries and updates.
What struck me was the SSDs had gotten cheap enough that it was an
affordable upgrade. Historically, a lot of stuff didn't happen not because it wasn't
possible, but because it was too expensive. Those barriers are dropping, and we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg of that happening.
Quote:
|
I shut down everything at night - PC's, router, bridge, switches, drives, printer, echo devices, media player, even STB (not modem only because I'd lose phone service). I just never had any reason to leave it all on generating heat and risking storm damage...
|
Heat generation isn't a concern here, nor is storm damage. I'm in NYC, and the last storm that disrupted things here was Hurricane Sandy.
If you're someplace where storm damage is a concern, shutting down at night makes sense.
______
Dennis