4 ms·

I'm currently using a T43 I was given it by a friend. I completely completely agree with you regarding the concept that older hardware results in better-design

by i336_ 10y ago

I'm currently using a T43 I was given it by a friend. I completely completely agree with you regarding the concept that older hardware results in better-designed and faster software. (If I had the money and I could deliver a pallet of T42s to Google's front door as a protest-prank, I would.) I'm hesitant to put an SSD in mine though. The disk is swapping about 65% of the time I'm using the machine (although I have 2GB)... I fear I'd wear through the flash cells in 6 months. I'm completely serious.

Yetanfou 10y ago
No problem there, the flash wear problem is overstated to begin with, SSD prices have plummeted so even if you were to wear the drive out in a few years - months would be close to impossible on an old, bandwidth-restricted machine like this - you can just buy a new drive. My (120 GB, Intel) flash drive on the T42p (maxed-out at 2GB) has worked flawlessly for about 3 years now, with no sign of giving up. S.M.A.R.T. data is unreliable on this device, unless you really believe it has an uptime of 904608h+33m+15.150s, 5468289 uncorrectable errors (increasing by 2 per second), etc. More believable are the host write 32MB (81785) and NAND write 1GB (3726) numbers. Media wear sits at 0%. I.e. just put an SSD in the thing and be done with it. Just make sure to get a big enough device if you're worried over write exhaustion as write lifetime is directly related to device size.
- ge96 10y ago
  Would you get a warning before the SSD completely failed/was unusable?
  - Yetanfou 10y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice, maybe. Techreport did an endurance test on SSDs which gives some insight in the failure mode. The last article in the series can be found here, links to earlier episodes can be found through the article: techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead Some excerpts on the failure mode: ...all of the drives wrote hundreds of terabytes without any problems. Their collective endurance is a meaningful result.... ...The Corsair, Intel, and Kingston SSDs all issued SMART warnings before their deaths, giving users plenty of time to preserve their data... ...Samsung's own software pronounced the 840 Series and 840 Pro to be in good health before their respective deaths... ...If you write a lot of data, keep an eye out for warning messages, because SSDs don't always fail gracefully. Among the ones we tested, only the Intel 335 Series and first HyperX remained accessible at the end. Even those bricked themselves after a reboot. The others were immediately unresponsive, possibly because they were overwhelmed by incoming writes before attempted resuscitation.... ...Also, watch for bursts of reallocated sectors. The steady burn rates of the 840 Series and 840 Pro show that SSDs can live long and productive lives even as they sustain mounting flash failures. However, sudden massacres that deviate from the drive's established pattern may hint at impending death, as they did for the Neutron GTX and the first HyperX....
    - ge96 10y ago
      Man it sounds somewhat involved. It's not as easy as drop-in with regular HDD's. Still I get the benefit... so what do you do? Based on its class, estimate the lifetime? How would you do that? Do an average read/write count per day or something? Thanks for the info. This is separate technology than the emmc or whatever that's prevalent in new "cheap" laptops now that is used for main memory. Like the laptops that come with 16GB storage haha.
      - Yetanfou 10y ago
        Make sure to have an up-to-date backup of the important bits on the drive (I'm using rsnapshot [1] with a 1h interval, backing up to a mirrored server), otherwise just use the thing for what it was intended to do. I've had quite a few magnetic drives fail without warning as well so I assume storage to be unreliable and act in accordance.
        i336_ 10y ago
        Heh, my storage situation is interesting. I'm currently trying to squirrel spare change away where and as I can so I can get a ZFS pool; it's mildly irritating that the "perfect" price/performance ratio means you need to get $1k in drives before you can begin. I'm aware of ACD (https://redd.it/5s7q04 https://redd.it/5s7q04) but I'm in Australia, where "real" internet (ie, upload speeds above 100KB/s) are a dream for 95%+ of the country (including me), so the ~5-8TB of (un-deduplicated) data I have here would take at least 1090 days to upload if I did it 24/7 and had perfect and unwavering 100KB/s upload. During which my entire connection would be unusable because TCP. Heheh. The "send me a HDD" route won't work because the data has been sliced-and-diced in various ways (the worst case example being a disk image tar+split'd to fit on a FAT32-formatted HDD) and I need to de-Rube-Goldberg everything first. That would take me about 6 months, and I'd definitely want a properly mirrored setup for that. Moral of story: I probably don't want your old computer with its tiny HDD. (And if I could go back in time and tell myself that the hotswappable disk thing I was hearing about in 2006 most emphatically did not apply to my two 486s, and that plugging that HDD in with power on would not only take out the PSU but also the floppy drive controller, that may have helped things a bit... what I had to do in the end was duplicate the HDD contents between the two machines in question so I had my files available on both - the triplicates-of-my-duplicates snowball started there, I think.) I honestly won't be surprised if, once I've deduped everything, I only have about 50GB of truly important stuff, and a few hundred gigs of "I can redownload that if I need it".
- i336_ 10y ago
  > [E]ven if you were to wear the drive out in a few years - months would be close to impossible on an old, bandwidth-restricted machine like this [ Sound of penny falling on head and subsequent facepalming ] Of course, why didn't I realize that. Good point. I have an SSD here with some data on it; if I can figure out where to stash that I might install it, heh.
Yetanfou 10y ago
BTW, +many on the suggestion to deliver some old iron (or, rather, titanium and magnesium) at Google HQ. For some reason they are amongst the worst offenders when it comes to creating sluggish JS-heavy pages. Given the performance of their earlier, JS-free search site this is both confusing as well as disappointing.

by i336_ 10y ago

Yetanfou 10y ago

No problem there, the flash wear problem is overstated to begin with, SSD prices have plummeted so even if you were to wear the drive out in a few years - months would be close to impossible on an old, bandwidth-restricted machine like this - you can just buy a new drive. My (120 GB, Intel) flash drive on the T42p (maxed-out at 2GB) has worked flawlessly for about 3 years now, with no sign of giving up. S.M.A.R.T. data is unreliable on this device, unless you really believe it has an uptime of 904608h+33m+15.150s, 5468289 uncorrectable errors (increasing by 2 per second), etc. More believable are the host write 32MB (81785) and NAND write 1GB (3726) numbers. Media wear sits at 0%. I.e. just put an SSD in the thing and be done with it. Just make sure to get a big enough device if you're worried over write exhaustion as write lifetime is directly related to device size.

ge96 10y ago
Would you get a warning before the SSD completely failed/was unusable?
- Yetanfou 10y ago
  In theory, yes. In practice, maybe. Techreport did an endurance test on SSDs which gives some insight in the failure mode. The last article in the series can be found here, links to earlier episodes can be found through the article: techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead Some excerpts on the failure mode: ...all of the drives wrote hundreds of terabytes without any problems. Their collective endurance is a meaningful result.... ...The Corsair, Intel, and Kingston SSDs all issued SMART warnings before their deaths, giving users plenty of time to preserve their data... ...Samsung's own software pronounced the 840 Series and 840 Pro to be in good health before their respective deaths... ...If you write a lot of data, keep an eye out for warning messages, because SSDs don't always fail gracefully. Among the ones we tested, only the Intel 335 Series and first HyperX remained accessible at the end. Even those bricked themselves after a reboot. The others were immediately unresponsive, possibly because they were overwhelmed by incoming writes before attempted resuscitation.... ...Also, watch for bursts of reallocated sectors. The steady burn rates of the 840 Series and 840 Pro show that SSDs can live long and productive lives even as they sustain mounting flash failures. However, sudden massacres that deviate from the drive's established pattern may hint at impending death, as they did for the Neutron GTX and the first HyperX....
  - ge96 10y ago
    Man it sounds somewhat involved. It's not as easy as drop-in with regular HDD's. Still I get the benefit... so what do you do? Based on its class, estimate the lifetime? How would you do that? Do an average read/write count per day or something? Thanks for the info. This is separate technology than the emmc or whatever that's prevalent in new "cheap" laptops now that is used for main memory. Like the laptops that come with 16GB storage haha.
    - Yetanfou 10y ago
      Make sure to have an up-to-date backup of the important bits on the drive (I'm using rsnapshot [1] with a 1h interval, backing up to a mirrored server), otherwise just use the thing for what it was intended to do. I've had quite a few magnetic drives fail without warning as well so I assume storage to be unreliable and act in accordance.
      - i336_ 10y ago
        Heh, my storage situation is interesting. I'm currently trying to squirrel spare change away where and as I can so I can get a ZFS pool; it's mildly irritating that the "perfect" price/performance ratio means you need to get $1k in drives before you can begin. I'm aware of ACD (https://redd.it/5s7q04 https://redd.it/5s7q04) but I'm in Australia, where "real" internet (ie, upload speeds above 100KB/s) are a dream for 95%+ of the country (including me), so the ~5-8TB of (un-deduplicated) data I have here would take at least 1090 days to upload if I did it 24/7 and had perfect and unwavering 100KB/s upload. During which my entire connection would be unusable because TCP. Heheh. The "send me a HDD" route won't work because the data has been sliced-and-diced in various ways (the worst case example being a disk image tar+split'd to fit on a FAT32-formatted HDD) and I need to de-Rube-Goldberg everything first. That would take me about 6 months, and I'd definitely want a properly mirrored setup for that. Moral of story: I probably don't want your old computer with its tiny HDD. (And if I could go back in time and tell myself that the hotswappable disk thing I was hearing about in 2006 most emphatically did not apply to my two 486s, and that plugging that HDD in with power on would not only take out the PSU but also the floppy drive controller, that may have helped things a bit... what I had to do in the end was duplicate the HDD contents between the two machines in question so I had my files available on both - the triplicates-of-my-duplicates snowball started there, I think.) I honestly won't be surprised if, once I've deduped everything, I only have about 50GB of truly important stuff, and a few hundred gigs of "I can redownload that if I need it".
i336_ 10y ago
> [E]ven if you were to wear the drive out in a few years - months would be close to impossible on an old, bandwidth-restricted machine like this [ Sound of penny falling on head and subsequent facepalming ] Of course, why didn't I realize that. Good point. I have an SSD here with some data on it; if I can figure out where to stash that I might install it, heh.

Yetanfou 10y ago

BTW, +many on the suggestion to deliver some old iron (or, rather, titanium and magnesium) at Google HQ. For some reason they are amongst the worst offenders when it comes to creating sluggish JS-heavy pages. Given the performance of their earlier, JS-free search site this is both confusing as well as disappointing.