Are you still using film? I'm assuming your 'hols' last more than just three or four days and are in places of more scenic interest than your home territory.
I can take 100 or more shots just on the trip to shore from the cruise ship in ports of call where the ship has had to lay off at anchor and provide a tender service (with maybe another 100 on the return trip from shore).
Unless the excursion ashore is particularly lacking in scenic interest, I typically clock up a thousand or so stills and maybe an hour or so's movie footage to boot on each day's outing when on my 'hols'. Even day trips to local places of interest can produce a few hundred photos, including quite often some movie footage.
You didn't happen to be involved in the recycling of all those expensively made Dr Who episode VTs by any chance? :-)
It doesn't make me wonder why. It's quite obvious if you give it any thought and remember that the larger internal desktop HDDs all use the power of a 12v BLDC motor to spin their platters at 5400, 7200, 10200 and even 15000rpm (though the advent of SSD technology has rendered those last two speed options obsolete now). The +5v (along with the +12v) are legacy requirements.
Even though every SATA interfaced SSD drive I've seen have all been 2.5 inch drives and (just like their larger 3.5 inch cousins) are endowed with the +3.3v option, none to my knowledge actually utilise it as an alternative to the +5v line. At the very least, all SATA SSDs will run just fine off the +5v (and ground return) lines alone. There's no need to provide the +3.3v as anyone who has ever used a 4 pin Molex to SATA power adapter should be only too aware.
If any of those power rails are eventually to become obsoleted, it's more likely to be the +5 and +3,3 volt rails, That "Legacy +12v line" will most likely become the 'defacto' standard for distributing DC power to everything in PCs and IT kit in general simply because of the ease by which the actual chip voltages required can be generated by commodity on- board dc-dc switching regulator chips.
Is the right answer! At least as far as pressing that unused SATA disk drive shown on the RHS of that image.
More accurately, a SATA docking station, preferably one with eSATA and USB3 interface options. Rather conveniently, a SATA docking station will handle laptop sized drives equally as well as the full size 3.5 inch desktop drives.
A SATA docking station or two makes a very cost effective data backup system since you can use a collection of 'bare' drives rather than a collection of 'bare' drives each fitted into their own individually purchased external USB/eSATA housings (or a bunch of overpriced 'readymade' external drives). It's also an obvious way to give your undersized retirees from your NAS box a second lease of life as archival storage backup drives.
No I bought my 1st digital from Kodak when mistakenly advertised at £100 instead of £300 so couldnt resist the bargain, I think it was 2002.
Problem nowadays is we go for 2 x 2week hols each year and the most scenic thing my wife does is shopping plus she hates me taking her picture.
I used to own a place abroad and had thousands of pictures but when I started going through them there was duplicates from one year to the next so deleted probably 60% of them.
Current camera I got oct 2017 and have taken just over three thousand pictures but probably only retained a couple of hundred.
I do have a suitcase full of film snapshots that I ought to convert to digital and save on my external HD.
The voltages required by digital chips will be lower and so a 3.3V power supply will be more than adequate for all future semiconductors and solid state storage devices. Today it's common for the core of many large semiconductors to be running at 1V (or lower) and the interfaces at 1.8V. The 3.3V is kept for interconnects for legacy purposes.
As technology moves on the required power supply voltages will be lower.
True, but higher psu voltage rails have some big plusses: they move more power per given cable & connector ampacity, and are less vulnerable to resistance, both fixed & unintended.
This is already the case. Many servers are 12V only, or only have a small amount of current on 5V rails. Graphics power supplies are also 12V only - they have 3.3V from the PCIe connector but only at limited current.
However the countervailing force is USB, which encourages 5V usage. It remains to be seen whether USB C will usher in common use of higher voltage USB (it'll go up to 20V).
I think we'll see 12V for bulk power, and USB Power Delivery up to 60W (12V @ 5A), with 100W PD (20V @ 5A) reserved for more specialised chargers/docking stations. 5V will persist for lower power applications (eg USB lamps, power banks, etc)
Interestingly I am safe from ransom ware purely by an accident of design
- apart from running Desktop Linux anyway.
And this may be of interest to windows users.
All my important data is on a server. That runs Linux.. It happens to export that data via NFS, because I have no windows or MAC clients, but it could export it via Samba and so make it available to Windows and MAC users.
It backs that data up on a timed script to a second disk that is not visible either to NFS or SAMBA
Unless corruption happened and I didn't notice BEFORE the backup, I always have a 'last nights snapshot' available.
Even then if I thought a scrambled disk was a possibility I would create a file called do.not.touch.me and test to see if it had changed and not do a backup unless I found out why.
Having a Linux based twin disk server instead of NAS is handy
Well, you've just stated the case for standardising on a single 12v rail voltage. The power demands of various devices can all be neatly serviced by on board dc-dc converters whatever their actual voltage requirements.
It's already a long established technique for providing the dozens of amps at circa one volt or so to modern CPU cores as well as the 1.8v for dimms (and Gawd knows what else that happens to require a 'non-standard' voltage).
So little of what's on board a modern MoBo these days uses the 5 volt rail directly that it might as well be derived off the 12v rail and any serious power demand on the 3.3v rail would be far better served by an on- board 12v to 3.3v switching converter anyway.
As for the negative rail voltages, they were mainly used as low current biassing voltages. In fact the -5v rail disappeared from the ATX spec a decade or so back since virtually nothing used it even back then and any modern adapters that still needed a -5v rail simply derived it from the
-12v rail using a low power analogue voltage regulator chip or a simple zenner diode and resistor. Anything that needs non-trivial power levels on a negative voltage rail can also be served by dc-dc switching voltage inverting regulators powered from the +12v rail.
The +12v rail has always enjoyed a looser voltage tolerance spec (+/-10% as opposed to the +/- 5% tolerance of the 5 and 3.3 volt rails). This feature lends itself to the use of a 12v SLA as a simple battery backup for a 12v only system (10.8 to 13.2v) where a slight increase of the upper limit to a float charging voltage of 13.5v is unlikely to trouble the only kit that uses it directly, the BLDC spindle motors in desktop HDDs.
The simplified +12v only PC power supplies will be both cheaper to implement and easier to design for the higher efficiencies required to qualify for the Bronze 80 and higher certification standards of efficiency.
Once a roadmap to a single rail PSU powered PC has been published and a transition period agreed, we'll start seeing adapters advertised as being "12 volt ready!", possibly even being described as "12 and 15 volt ready!" to indicate that they can be used in the current multi-rail powered PCs and transplantable into a modern 12v only system PC.
There's every good reason to eliminate the multiplicity of voltage rails between the PSU and the MoBo so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see such a transition wherein modern 12v only MoBos could still provide by default the original +5 and +3.3 volts in their PCI and PCIe expansion slots with a signalling system whereby a modern "12 volt only" adapter could negotiate for additional 12v power via these otherwise unused connections in the interface. This would allow otherwise expensive to replace adapters with normal power requirements to continue being used.
Whether we'll actually see such a development in PC power standards remains, to my knowledge at least, an unknown. It just seems the most obvious next step for the manufacturers to take in improving reliability and reduction of overall production costs whilst meeting an ever increasing demand to reduce the energy consumption of desktop PCs.
The OP has not indicated whether they have a laptop or not.
Obviously the unpowered USB adaptor is not an option for a 3.5" drive if they have a laptop - either a full, externally powered, USB case, or a powered HDD dock would be needed.
Even in a desktop PC, I'd suggest it's cleaner to do that than having to open up the case to tap into the PSU wiring. And some desktops won't have a spare connector of the right type anyway.
My PC still has Molex power connectors but the power supply is
450 watts which is fine for my needs. Circa 2006, though with a new M/B in 2011.
At least molex and 40 pin parallel connections engaged permanently and the latter used gold-flashed pins so they never cause problems unlike the nasty sata connections used currently.
Before 450 watt PSUs became common (to satisfy growing cpu power consumption) there was a generation of earlier 250W PSUs. I recall I had such home pc happily driving half a dozen 5.25 inch drives. Perhaps more on occassion. I could hardly believe it.
The brand new 650W supply I bought a couple of weeks ago has numerous Molex connectors - still needed for additional case fans, a somewhat elderly DVD writer and a totally unnecessary case light.
We have a number of PCs and all our data is held on a proper server, so I am not overly worried about reliability. This PSU cost £16 - a lot cheaper than a similar modular one.
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