[FRIAM] keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.
Russell Standish
lists at hpcoders.com.au
Fri Apr 12 19:40:39 EDT 2019
On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 11:32:15AM -0600, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Thanks! After I tanked out harder than I thought I might yesterday, and needing
> to wind down some was browsing reddit to see how do-able it is to fix either
> one: turns out not all that do able. Short of the long is that Das Keyboard,
> Apple Keyboards, and a new to me company called red dragon for mechanicals get
> really good praise, partially for just being a darn good keyboard, and
> partially because of being much more sensable for budgeting than others.
> I'll see if Amazon has Das Keyboards used.
> Re: SSD-Hard drives, and speed. I can see that! any sugestions for brands to
> look at? and what's your experience been with reliabliy?
Hah - half way through writing this email, my finger accidently hit
the power button, which is helpfully positioned right next to the
delete key. One of the few design faults of my new laptop!
Anyway, after a bit of googling, I have found the configuration setting
to disable the power button (I only ever use it to hard power cycle
via the 10 second press any way, which still works).
So much more abbreviated response here: basically SATA interfaced SSDs
are not that much faster than hard drives, no more than 2x when
benchmarked, and making little practical difference to the performance
of the computer. M2 SSDs OTOH seem more worth it. I had a Patreon
Ignite 490GB job, which died just days before its 3 year warranty
period expired. Patreon did honour the warranty, and did replace it,
although it did involve sending the old SSD to Taiwan, so around a
month all up for the replacement to arrive. In the meantime, I bought
a Samsung 970 EVO, which is a faster technology called NVMe. So far so
good, although I only have about 4 months on the clock. My replacement
laptop which is only weeks old has a Western Digital Black NVMe SSD -
and so far so good.
Speaking of which, I swapped out the hard drive on my old laptop for a
second hand SSD about 6 months ago. It was a SATA based drive, which
had had a varied life under my care since mid-2014, but not a hard
life. About 2 months ago, the SSD started dropping offline after about
15-30 minutes of use. Since the latop was nearly 9 years old it was
time to upgrade. Not entirely sure if the SSD or the SATA subsystem of
the laptop is at fault. No data got harmed...
One final comment - avoid Btrfs like the plague. On the couple of
occasions I forgot and accepted the default option of Btrfs on a
machine with an SSD, the computer will work for a few hours (maybe
even days), then suddenly the load average goes up to 20, and the
computer becomes unresponsive. Some btrfs process is running, and it
never stops - the only way of recovering is via a hard power cycle.
Cheer
--
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Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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