Good for you. A lot of people will simply chuck 'em in the bin and shrug their shoulders on the false premise that it's not worth the effort for the sake of a one pound refund. These people are shirking in their duty as 'good citizens' / 'concientious consumers' in doing their bit to provide these emporia with the feedback they deserve.
It surely can't be too onerous a task to keep a box or bag marked "£ shop returns" handy for such items and the appropriate receipt(s) ready for the next 'shopping trip' that takes you near to the £ shop in question.
It depends on how you define 'reliability'. For a hard disk mounted in a NAS box or fileserver that's properly designed and not subjected to being dropped or otherwise mechanically disturbed as in the case of a laptop, the HDD can offer far better reliability (unlimited write cycles).
Modern SSDs are using MLC nand flash chips (the latest being TLC - an
8 level version of the 4 level MLC chips that took over from SLC, 2 level nand chips) with erase/write endurance ratings varying from a mere 3000 down to 1500 and lower.
The very first flash ram chips used in flash media cards and USB pen drives had erase/write cycle endurance figures measured in the tens of thousands with the earliest exceeding 100,000 cycles. These early memory chips didn't have the sophisticated 'wear levelling' controllers of the much later flash memory cards and USB pen drives and the even more sophisticated controllers used by SSDs so were reliant solely upon the flash chips themselves having sufficient write/erase durability to make a practical storage solution.
It did help that they were rarely used other than for archival style storage where even if they were in constant use in a camera, they might perhaps be formatted on a daily basis by a professional photographer or very enthusiastic amateur. At that rate, it would be many years before nand cell wear would start making its effect known, by which time, they would have long since been replaced with newer cards with an order or two of magnitude increased capacity at about a tenth of the price.
SSDs get round the steadily reducing erase/write endurance limits of the flash nand chips due to shrinking die fabrication dimensions and the use of multi voltage levels to store not just a single bit's worth of data per nand cell but 2 and, now, 3 bit's worth by clever wear levelling spreading the wear over much larger capacities of nand chips that result from these developments (10GB per day will wear out a 30GB drive with SLC nand rated for 10000 cycles in just under 3 1/2 years whereas the same 10GB per day on a modern 240GB SSD using MLC chips rated for 3000 cycles should last for just over 8 years.
With a large enough capacity SSD and an acceptance of a minimum 3 or
5 year lifetime for a given amount of data throughput (normally expressed as so many gigabytes' worth of write activity per day) that could be true. However, since it's extremely unusual to carry these things around whilst they're operating, a good old fashioned (non Seagate) HDD will more than amply serve the needs, even of a box with dual tuners able to record whole multiplexes in full.
That's only likely to happen when the cost of manufacture per GB of storage drops below that of 1 and 2 TB sized HDDs by which time we may well be buying in 10TB sized HDDs at the "Sweet Spot" price point some time over the next 3 to 6 years (5 and 6 TB HDDs have only now become recently available to the general market, almost 4 years after the availabilty of Hitachi's 4TB Deskstar drives).
When this eventually happens, the main benefit to PVRs will be reduced power consumption, less need for forced ventillation and much better behaviour awakening from low power standby making those models that little bit more eco-friendly.
Twenty metres? The last time I looked, the biggest they had were 5 metre patch cables. I bought 3 of them. I must look out for those 20 metre cables next time I'm in a Poundland shop.
That doesn't surprise me. They were ok with stuff like mains surge arrestor filters but once they applied their branding to crap routers, the game was up. My very first 'purpose made' gateway router, bought over a decade ago to replace a PC running Debian's firewalling rules between the NTL Pace STB and the house lan, just happened to be a Belikin model I'd bought from my local Staples Store for the reaonable (at the time) price of 50quid.
I took it back as "Unfit for purpose" a week later for a full refund once I realised there was no way to fully disable remote management.
I've never looked back, other than going "That explains it!" whenever I used to read of other users gateway/router woes once they'd admitted to using a Belkin product.
No, the post editing. If you disagree with someone, don't "fix" it, reply to it, saying what you think is wrong, otherwise you assume everyone has time to go back and view old posts, to compare and contrast to find your changes ...
That was my point, I wasn't disagreeing with his post, only correcting the 'tens' with 'hundreds'. He was entirely right, just one lousy order of magnitude adrift on the scale of the problem.
I thought it would have been obvious that 'what I had fixed' was a reference to the only new bit he'd added which was that final paragraph.
I added a smiley to let him know my empathy with his "Doh (slaps forehead)!" moment when he spotted my 'fix'. We've all 'been there'.
So why not just write that in your comment underneath?
So rather make a quick easily read comment underneath, you edit his post, making it slower for the reader to work out your point, just so you can make your point in a 'clever' way
I'm with Andy, it's an annoying practice, and not at all clever or funny.
You could be right. I assumed from the context, that Adrian was still referring to patch cables. Mind you, if he's referring to CAT5 cable, that's still a bargain at 5p / metre. :-)
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