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| tomman |
Posted on 24-02-11, 15:55
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Dinosaur
 Post: #1276 of 1315 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 58 days Last view: 14 hours |
Future is sloooooooooowly arriving in this house. Starting late December 2023, my ol' rigs got blessed by the joys of SOLID STORAGE DEVICES! Sadly, due to budget and logistics constraints, I was forced to shop locally, so my experience have turned out to be more painful than expected! - The Asus got a 1TB Crucial MX500, one of the Cadillacs of SATA 2.5" SSDs (I explicitly avoided Samsung after its recent QC fiasco with most of their EVO lineup using bottom-of-the-barrel Ez-Vanish™ NAND). Also, HECHO EN MEXICO. No problems so far there (sadly I couldn't buy two, or a dozen... just one) - Upgraded the Dell and ye ole' Thinkcentre with a deal on a couple Acer SA100s. A deal that turned into a scam after I ended becoming the unfortunate winner of the Flash Memory Lottery! When I saw those SA100s for sale at a big chain appliances store, I quickly pulled the cellphone, looked for some reviews, those that I found looked legit and honest ("TLC flash! Reasonable performance! CHEAP!"), and after melting the credit card and arriving home, the party ended abruptly: the drives were using trashier QLC (a silent change that happened sometime around 2023), and even worse, 2 weeks later, the drives were slowing down massively on reads! (sometimes reaching speeds rivaling meh USB2 sticks!). Fully rewritting + TRIMming the drive would restore read speeds... for a while. Sadly returning those SSDs were not an option (apparently appliance store chains in Venezuela believe that "24 hours" is a reasonable warranty length for computer parts), so this was a tough $55 lesson :/ Does anyone want some CHEAP preowned SSDs? :D - Ended replacing one of the Acers for another infamous drive, a 480GB Kingston A400. If there is a poster child for the Flash Memory/Controller Lottery, the A400 series fits the bill nicely. Kingston only promises specs, not consistency on the internals - they're a hodgepodge of every major flash memory TLC/QLC part (even YMTC embargoed garbo) and large SSD controller (SMI, Phison, and even Marvell!) under the hood. Mine turned out to be a Marvell-powered SSD with unknown flash (as the Marvell A400 firmware blocks the commands used by these handy Soviet SSD ID tools), but I suspect it could be more QLC trash. Oh, and SMART selftests are NOT supported on the Marvell variety either! Like, wtf man... - Even tried to give some solid state love to the retroboxes - found a good deal on some decomissioned bare Sandisk X110 64GB SATA SSDs who lived most of their life inside PoS retail boxes. Sadly none of my SATA-to-PATA bridgeboards decided to play ball - only ONE worked fine with a cloned drive, and only in ONE box... the PCShits mobo from the dumpster. Tried to solidstate Saki Mark II, but alas, the Compaq/Intel econoline setup got wildly confused when trying to boot from those bridged drive. And turns out no SATA drive (be it solid or spinny) in my arsenal would do CHS addressing AT ALL, so no joy either on my 386sx :( - The plan was also to upgrade the PATA-only laptops to mSATA + mSATA->PATA bridgeboards, but importing them is right out of the planning (for now), and nobody sells those boards in Venezuela at any sane price :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| wyatt8740 |
Posted on 24-02-13, 02:17 (revision 4)
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 Post: #3 of 3 Since: 05-18-23 Last post: 282 days Last view: 234 days |
I bought into SSD's two years ago; my 2TB samsung EVO is already corrupting itself. My 4TB is fine seemingly, and my other rando one (my only secondhand one) seems to be okay but I don't trust it or use it for much. That computer is basically a thin client via X forwarding. For everything except laptops (where the max HDD storage density in a <=9mm 2.5" form factor is less than with an SSD), I still will only use spinning hard disks going forward. Got some Toshiba HDD's; the largest sizes I could get that weren't helium-filled. Helium loss is something else I don't want to deal with. My Epson PC-486GR (PC-98 clone) does have a SCSI2SD in it, which so far is working nicely. But that's a little different than what typically is meant by "SSD." For laptops with IDE drives: you can use a regular sized 2.5" IDE -> SATA adapter (not mSATA) and shuck the drive PCB, sometimes. Doesn't work if the drive needs to be screwed to the frame for the HDD cover to go on, like some Dell Latitudes. But for a powerbook it's fine. My Powerbook G4 (running Debian) boots about 25% of the time with a SATA SSD and an IDE/SATA adapter, but if it can get all the way to the XDM login it's usually fine until I power it off. It seems like there's something that can go wrong in the initial minute or so after boot that can trip it up and cause a lockup. I use an SSD there because 2.5" laptop IDE drives are getting kinda pricey and a SATA one plus the converter board doesn't fit. I can shuck the shell off of a SATA SSD and fit it plus the adapter inside the powerbook with room to spare. It's still a powerbook at the end of the day, so it's kinda sluggish and not particularly great. But I do like typing on it so it's fine for just working in emacs. Blog: https://wyatt8740.gitlab.io/site/blog/ - compatible with Lynx, IE <whatever>, Netscape <whatever>, Mosaic <whatever>, and more, to my knowledge... if you can get around the SSL somehow. :( |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-02-13, 15:09
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Dinosaur
Post: #1279 of 1315 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 58 days Last view: 14 hours |
SSDs can be unreliable, but modern HDDs are not exactly robust either, especially anything made by Seagate these days. Having said that, I've also had bad luck with Toshiba rust spinners too - 2 out of 2 brand new drives that died after 3 years (a MQ01ABD100 2.5" that developed what turned to be G-list corruption, and a DT01ACA300 rebadged Hitachi 3.5" which ended with severe surface degradaton, something very un-Hitachi). Having said that, here is my storage strategy from now on: - I'm not going back to rust spinners for OS/apps boot drives. - Backup strategies shall be reinforced, and I'm not trusting backups to flash memory! Can't give a opinion about He-filled drives: they're very VERY expensive where I live :/ Posted by wyatt8740 Unfortunately my two PATA laptops (a Thinkpad T40 and a HP Compaq nx9010) require drive trays, and most SATA to PATA bridgeboards would not fit anyway on those - hence the need for a mSATA-to-PATA bridgeboard which conveniently has the same footprint as a 2.5" drive. mSATA SSDs are not hard to find here, but as Venezuela has absolutely ZERO market for vintage hardware of any kind, that kind of converters are impossible to find, even online (and importing is not an option unless you want to massively bleed money) So... I guess I'll keep feeding the ticking time bombs here :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
