Yikes… I guess I should have specified that I’m a Mac head…
I hope to god this isn’t my future! I HATE the idea of having my stuff in “the cloud” - “The cloud” is only useful or interesting to me as a temporary space to allow access to specific things across devices, I have ZERO interest in having my computer be nothing more than an access device while everything lives somewhere else. <shiver>
I want to add that while there is also concern about the data retention time (usually given as 10 years), that isn’t an issue either because most people don’t keep drives for that long, plus that applies over the whole temperature range of the flash memory chips and will be MUCH longer (PDF) at or near room temperature (25°C):
(that’s also how they can test them in realistic amounts of time)
Also, magnetic media isn’t permanent either, as anybody who has tried reading old tapes knows; this is one way “bad sectors” can develop in failing hard drives (flash memory is better in that addresses are physical memory addresses and not marked with special data on the platter, which hard drives need to find the sectors and is only written once when the drive is manufactured).
Well look at Megaupload to see the future of the cloud. True 99.9% was used for illegal files but what about those who put legit files there for their future use. Too bad it’s gone.
I thought that SSD only had limited rewrite with flash memory and that SSD with DRAM were not subject to this.
Things like dropbox can actually greatly simplify many things, I have businesses that use the hell out of it. Hard drive dies, reload on new drive, reinstall apps, reload dropbox, dropbox sync repropagates files.
One of the cool toys is doing things like moving your document folder so it is a subfolder of the dropbox folder. It becomes almost transparent to the average user and docs are automatically backed up to dropbox servers with no intervention or action by the user.
When browsing through huge photo libraries, like I do regularly, it’s hard drive access for me that’s the choke point. I haven’t gone SSD yet, but even with WD Caviar Blacks I want to browse through photos much quicker than the hard drive can keep up. I’ve been eyeing the SSDs, but am waiting for the prices to come down some.
you don’t really realize how much faster SSDs are until you’ve been using one for a while and have to go back to a spinny hard drive. I swapped a 320 GB hard drive back into my laptop to test something, and compared to the 128 GB SSD it was painfully slow.
Would SSD make a difference to network users?
I have a Windows Server 2008 machine that serves files via SMB to 3-4 users, and also is used for QuickBooks hosting via Remote Desktop for those same users. We only have about 50 GB of files that are shared over the network and use less than 100 GB for everything. I tend to assume that the network is the slowest part of the equation, but I’m not enough of an IT geek to know whether we’d get a benefit.
The network is most likely the bottleneck. If all of the equipment is 10/100 you are only moving about 12MB/second. if all machines are pulling at that, they will definitely not see much improvement.
Also network latency can be huge compared to lags experienced within a local machine.
That’s what I suspected - thanks for your help.
Everyone says SSDs are notoriously reliable.
Isn’t that true of HDD too? How to they actually compare?
In all my years of computing I’ve never managed to have an effective backup system aside from copying important documents and photos here and there. I thought I had a solution when I got a 1 TB Raid NAS drive, but GHOST won’t reckonize it in recovery mode.
I think the difference is that failure modes of hard drives are fairly well known, but for SSDs it’s a crapshooot of amusing or infuriating firmware bugs.
Effective full machine backups are a nightmare for home users. The cool ways to do it involve tons of hard drive space on separate boxes. If your NAS box has esata or usb ports you may want to try looking into plugging it in that way for recovery situations.
for anything mission critical I now use my own remote storage arrays. I usually try to have an image of base OS/application installs once every few months then download mission critical stuff from the daily backup.
Backing up everything daily is a huge PITA at the home user level. The kind of hardware you see in larger small businesses would cost more than most of us make a year to have the space for efffective backups and such.
No USB or eSATA. I complained to both Norton and D-link and they kept blaming each other, so I finally gave up trying to get it to work as a backup solution. It was hard enough just to get it to work as a NAS. One of the drives I bought for it was DOA and it took a while to determine that.
And why after all these years is it so hard to get an effective backup solution for home users?