Build a new PC (def DIY)

[Huge]

s/hour/minute/

[Andy Champ]

Make sure you don't put anything personal on there. Or at least, not unencrypted.

Andy

[polygonum]

My first real work with computers was on a system where you had to go to some effort to know which drive files were on. It was the responsibility of the operating system to manage things like that. Of course, tech support knew but programmers, users, etc, usually had no idea.

On coming across PCs I had to regress to caring.

[Lieutenant Scott]

It's a yes, where did you learn English?

[The Natural Philosopher]

They are not one drive according to the OS. The OS may choose not to present them in the manner of an archaic Intel development system where drives were labelled A: B: and so on..

But then no decent operating system has done that for the last 25 years.

Well IF I aks my operating system what -hyiscal drives it has, I get

/dev/sda1 71G 45G 23G 67% / tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 692K 9.4M 7% /dev tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm tempest:/home/leo 227G 59G 157G 28% /home/me/tempest tempest:/var/videos 230G 215G 3.2G 99% /home/me/videos tempest:/var/

227G 59G 157G 28% /home/me/tempest_web tempest:/var/ 227G 59G 157G 28% /home/me/website

...not a sign of a drive letter in site. My 'disk drive' is called

'/' :-)

[Andy Champ]

The scary thing seems to be that when they do go they don't develop a bad sector, they just fall off the bus. So you can't even wipe them before sending them back for a replacement.

Have a read of

this

'm also sure I heard a story the other day of an SSD that "came back from repair" (mfgr swapped the drive) with someone else's data on it...

Andy

[D.M.Chapman]

I didn't really. I failed English - that's why I work with computers.

So, who are these enterprise grade storage companies who allow 3rd party maint to install and maintain 3rd party SSDs?

I'm genuinely interested - could save us a lot of money. Obviously, I'd want proper enterprise support levels, but I assume that's standard?

Darren

[Huge]

Do you realise who you're talking to?

[D.M.Chapman]

Aye, but it was late on a Sunday evening, I was bored etc etc.

I'll go now :-)

Darren

[Lieutenant Scott]

I don't mean that sort of rule bending.

[Lieutenant Scott]

No, my hardware RAID controller completely hides the fact that I have two disks. Trouble is I also can't access the SMART data for temperature and failures.

What if you had 53 drives?

[Lieutenant Scott]

Happens to mechanical drives too. If they completely die (which IME is 50% of the time).

So just speed then. How much faster are they anyway? Not that I can afford a

1TB SSD.

[Lieutenant Scott]

Butt out.

[Lieutenant Scott]

[The Natural Philosopher]

same really. I don't think Linux is limited on its mount points.

The point being I have to be the sysadmin to really see the underlying hardware;as a user I normally don't.

[Tim Watts]

I was curious - had a look at the 2.6.38 code and it does *seem* like mount points donot have a fundamental limit - they are linked into a tree structure of some sort, so I guess memory limits only apply (for any practical purpose).

[Andy Champ]

Depends what you're doing.

Typical random access latency for a spinning disk: 5mS plus half a revolution. So about 8mS for a 10,000 RPM drive, call is 120 random accesses per second.

Typical random access time for an SSD: Zero. Nothing, rien, nada.

Serial reads aren't usually too stunning, and writes can be downright slow.

See for example

Boot is one area that really scores. 10 times faster.

Andy

[The Natural Philosopher]

yes, at some level something will run out.

but that will be a Very Large Number unless you are trying to mount

10,000 disks on a CPU with 64MB of ram or something.

[John Rumm]

Unlike windows where lack of drive letters can be a PITA even though unix style mount points have been supported since NT. Alas they still don't seem to really integrate properly with things like available space calculations.

[Tim Watts]

Except for linux device nodes, eg /dev/sda, sdb.

When you get past sdz, it flips to double letters: /dev/sdaa /dev/sdab etc

Not sure what happens next time around :)