Author:
Mike
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Date Posted: 15:13:16 02/13/14 Thu
>Hey, Mike,
>
>instead of, say, 2.5" mechanical hard drives, what's
>your experience with, say, the 250GB SSDs?
I've had limited experience with them. The manufacturers claim that the technology is different than with USB flash drives. That may be marketing-speak, or it may be true.
I work part-time with a company that has a number of clients all over southern California, all with different attitudes about new technology.
As an example, two clients collectively run a half-dozen nursing homes / convalescent hospitals. Another client runs a storefront internet cafe. Another client has a couple of mom-n-pop fast food places. Other clients are accountants, or dentists, or writers. In the case of the nursing homes the facility owners are super conservative - it's only been in the last few months that they had us add wireless internet to the facilities so that the residents ("don't call them paitients") and their families could use iPads, laptops, etc. to surf the net and get email and view photos of the grandkids. Recently at one facility we did a rollout of Win7 to replace the WinXP (17 machines). Since we were going to lay hands on each box in the facility we offered to update the computers with more RAM, with newer hard drives, or even SSDs but the owner commented that his grandkid had to replace an Intel SSD in the gaming machine at home after only 6 months. Yes, it was a 5 year warranty drive and under warranty but "I don't think they are ready for prime time yet".
On the other hand, at the interent cafe they've replaced most of the boot & swap drives with Intel SSDs (5 year warranty) and had "only" 3 (out of 29) die in the first year. That's a 10% failure rate under warranty. They won't even THINK of using them in the back ofice machines.
They cafe is a little different. The gaming room machines are all identical. If the boot drive gets messed up (virus, trojan, etc) they don't bother to salvage it - they just wipe the drive and drop a "canned" image on it with a program called Ghost. If they lose a SSD it is not a real problem - they just swap it and Ghost it. The image is one that was made a while back from a new machine that has all the standard programs on it, and no more, and is commonly referred to as the "golden master" drive. The restoration is not difficult, and from the time they start the copy until the dead machine is up and running is about 15 minutes (when I timed it both the source and destination were IDE/ATA mechnical drives, SATA would be faster and SSD would be faster yet).
Personally, I have an older laptop - a IBM T40 - that I'm using to learn Linux. I'd love to find a IDE/ATA SSD that woudl fit in it but IDE/ATA SSDs seem to be few and far between and expensive for a spare machine that I have less than $100 in.
>As for flash drives making not very good doorstops,
>it's just, which door? If it's a low-clearance door
>with industrial carpet underneath, they work pretty
>well.
The ones that my co-worker bought (and got screwed on) looked like this ebay item: 201036246403 - not very big.
Something like item 331067056984 would work as you described. But something like item 271301903808 would not work at all.
Mike
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