Author Topic: HDD + small SSD - worthwhile? (Read 6148 times)

Kim · « **Reply #25 on:** 16 March, 2021, 06:18:55 pm »

Quote from: road-runner on 16 March, 2021, 05:29:32 pm

I studied Cobol at an evening class in the '70s. After we had written the 4 divisions (IIRC) out, the teacher would get the white-coated technician to go to the compter lab and input this onto the computer and we would get a piece of tape something like this as the result. Is there an external drive I can feed my tapes into?

I believe that what you need is a bedstead.

CommuteTooFar · « **Reply #26 on:** 16 March, 2021, 06:22:34 pm »

Quote from: road-runner on 16 March, 2021, 05:29:32 pm

I studied Cobol at an evening class in the '70s. After we had written the 4 divisions (IIRC) out, the teacher would get the white-coated technician to go to the compter lab and input this onto the computer and we would get a piece of tape something like this as the result. Is there an external drive I can feed my tapes into?

I was really impressed the first time I saw a proper paper tape reader on a computer. An optical reader rather than the 10 chars per second readers I had seen before. This one, open the lid, place start of tape in guide. Close lid. Press button. Then 10 seconds later a huge pile of tape on the floor (or basket if you expected it). 1200 chars per second is vey impressive on a mechanical device.

CommuteTooFar · « **Reply #27 on:** 16 March, 2021, 06:51:19 pm »

When I built my current computer I bought an nvme SSD 1GB and a 2TB Hard disc. When I had something I wanted something that I might wanted to put on other storage I just bought a sata SSD and used that. The Hard disc remains unused since I bought it. Although relatively inexpensive it was a waste of money.

ian · « **Reply #28 on:** 16 March, 2021, 08:18:04 pm »

I'm pretty sure I have a USB 3-inch floppy (so, so wrong) drive in the drawer, though I'm not risking the nest of sleeping cables to find out if it's still there. I think it came with some ludicrously pricy ultrabook I bought in the early noughties that had rather daringly for the time ditched an internal floppy disk drive.

I still have fond memories of the integral tape player in my Amstrad 464. It took me a metric fucktonne of paper rounds to buy that computer.

DaveReading · « **Reply #29 on:** 17 March, 2021, 09:13:35 am »

Quote from: ian on 16 March, 2021, 08:18:04 pm

I'm pretty sure I have a USB 3-inch floppy (so, so wrong) drive in the drawer

Unless you're a former Amstrad CPC user, you probably don't.

Come to that, I don't think USB had been invented then.

ian · « **Reply #30 on:** 17 March, 2021, 09:33:37 am »

Fortunately, I've been confident enough not to need to measure it, but I'm reassured it's bigger than I imagined.

Lightning Phil · « **Reply #31 on:** 17 March, 2021, 09:38:45 am »

I remember in 1989 backing up system data to 5.25 inch floppies before we cut over a live sales system. Happy days.

CommuteTooFar · « **Reply #32 on:** 17 March, 2021, 10:36:13 am »

If you want really to struggle with 5.25 floppy discs you need Apples implementation. Most floppy systems used MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation). This required an extra chip to do the electro magic. Apple decided they did not want to pay for that. They chose the GCR recoding which did not need a special chip. The end results the same drive technology could only manage small amounts of data slowly.

Kim · « **Reply #33 on:** 17 March, 2021, 01:29:23 pm »

Quote from: DaveReading on 17 March, 2021, 09:13:35 am

Quote from: ian on 16 March, 2021, 08:18:04 pm
I'm pretty sure I have a USB 3-inch floppy (so, so wrong) drive in the drawer

Unless you're a former Amstrad CPC user, you probably don't.

Or the Amstrad word processors. I didn't realise the CPC used them too (I only remember the one with the built in cassette drive and the hilariously short curly monitor cables).

TimC · « **Reply #34 on:** 17 March, 2021, 01:32:58 pm »

Quote from: Lightning Phil on 16 March, 2021, 04:56:26 pm

Quote from: ian on 16 March, 2021, 04:24:58 pm
Pah, I'm storing my data on a C15 audio cassette.

Oh the delights of loading and saving games to the humble audio cassette. I can hear the sounds even after more than 40 years.

I still own a fully-operational (well, it was last time I looked a couple of years ago) Yamaha CX5M MSX computer that uses a separate cassette tape drive.

CommuteTooFar · « **Reply #35 on:** 17 March, 2021, 02:18:29 pm »

Quote from: TimC on 17 March, 2021, 01:32:58 pm

Quote from: Lightning Phil on 16 March, 2021, 04:56:26 pm
Quote from: ian on 16 March, 2021, 04:24:58 pm
Pah, I'm storing my data on a C15 audio cassette.

Oh the delights of loading and saving games to the humble audio cassette. I can hear the sounds even after more than 40 years.

I still own a fully-operational (well, it was last time I looked a couple of years ago) Yamaha CX5M MSX computer that uses a separate cassette tape drive.

Yeah but you could of uploaded your data across the midi interface to your synthesizer.

TimC · « **Reply #36 on:** 17 March, 2021, 02:44:54 pm »

I probably could but, as I say, I haven't even looked at it in a couple of years, and I'm not going to any time soon. I keep it for nostalgic reasons, not as a tool. One day when I really haven't got anything better to do, I might fire it up again and see whether it's actually usable, but I won't worry about it if it's not. It's one of those things that's probably only of real interest to a museum, but I've no idea if there's a museum of electronic music equipment!

Bledlow · « **Reply #37 on:** 19 March, 2021, 01:10:40 pm »

Got a new PC with an SSD. Starts up instantly. Excellent! No flailing around on spinning rust while it thinks about doing something.

Went for something fairly basic, but with a 512 GB SSD. Can easily expand memory if needed for storage. Should do for a few years. Copying stuff over now.

Jaded · « **Reply #38 on:** 19 March, 2021, 01:32:27 pm »

Must root around into e loft and find my Sinclair Microdrives.

I'll bet they are stored with the Z88 EPROMS

Polar Bear · « **Reply #39 on:** 19 March, 2021, 01:35:26 pm »

Quote from: Bledlow on 19 March, 2021, 01:10:40 pm

Got a new PC with an SSD. Starts up instantly. Excellent! No flailing around on spinning rust while it thinks about doing something.

Went for something fairly basic, but with a 512 GB SSD. Can easily expand memory if needed for storage. Should do for a few years. Copying stuff over now.

Excellent stuff.

On our two desktop machines I have installed Akasa caddies which allow you to hot swap in 2.5 inch drives. I use ssd drives as the caddy is connected to sata ssd port on the main board. It'd good for image copies, data backups and sharing between machines.

Jaded · « **Reply #40 on:** 19 March, 2021, 01:55:45 pm »

I've just trashed (drilled through) and SSD that I've had since 2017. It is hosed. That's the first SSD failure I've had.

Polar Bear · « **Reply #41 on:** 19 March, 2021, 02:48:39 pm »

What brand if you don't mind me asking. 4 years seems a short life unless you were really pounding it of course.

Jaded · « **Reply #42 on:** 19 March, 2021, 04:54:16 pm »

Crucial, and I've checked - no warranty, it is three years

Polar Bear · « **Reply #43 on:** 19 March, 2021, 05:15:02 pm »

That's a shame. I can recommend the ever so slightly pricier Samsung EVO drives with 5 year warranties.

Bledlow · « **Reply #44 on:** 26 March, 2021, 08:16:41 pm »

Having had my first SSD for a week now, I'm still surprised sometimes by how quickly it starts, opens things, etc. Pleasantly surprised of course. Installed something today which said I should restart, so I did - & forgot that no longer means "do something else for a while". I was getting up from my chair & realised I might as well sit down again.

And quietly, as well. No noise of spinning thing winding up to tell me it's working.

Polar Bear · « **Reply #45 on:** 26 March, 2021, 08:32:33 pm »

Nice isn't it.

We have two Quiet PC machines with ssd's and no cpu fans. Lovely Nofan copper flower cpu coolers. The only noise noticeable is the clunk from the dvd drive at startup on mllePB's machine. My blu-ray equipped system doesn't even do that.

Bledlow · « **Reply #46 on:** 23 May, 2021, 10:26:16 pm »

Pretty happy with the new PC, but I have one little niggle.

It's not a problem at the moment, but the storage is a bit limited, & I've been thinking of something which would take a fair bit of it, leaving less margin than I'd really like. There's a bay for a SATA drive*, & I thought that future-proofed it: I could pop a spinning thing in if I needed it. But now I've got used to SSD speed, & especially latency. So . . . could I put a SATA SSD in there? I know it'd not be as blisteringly fast as the NVMe one the computer came with, but it'd be faster than a rotating HDD, wouldn't it? Just for data - programs would go on the PCIe NVMe device, alongside the OS.

Can anyone tell me why I shouldn't do it?

*Says "SATA AHCI, up to 6 Gbps" in the spec. The SSD already in the computer is "PCIe Gen3.0x4 NVMe, up to 32 Gbps"

perpetual dan · « **Reply #47 on:** 24 May, 2021, 08:18:09 am »

The reason I had for choosing a spinning disk in that position was that it would cost an awful lot for the data I expected to accrue over the life of the computer. Photos, music and data for sciencing, neither of which is small. In any case, for large files the latency gets dominated by the throughput.

I mitigated this by having part of my nvme SSD as a cache for the spinning disk. That way the project I’m working on now gets faster.

pcolbeck · « **Reply #48 on:** 24 May, 2021, 08:22:02 am »

Should be fine. I have a ridiculously beefy Lenovo Workstation with 56 CPUs and that could be specced with both NVMe and SATA as a standard build. Currently don't have the NVMe as I bought it second hand without it and the Lenovo one with a the custom bracket etc is too spendy and I don't need the extra speed (I need CPU not disk speed). I just have a SATA SSD in there.

Solocle · « **Reply #49 on:** 24 May, 2021, 08:24:57 am »

My current setup is a 250GB NVMe SSD with a 4TB HDD, but I really need to upsize.

I actually added a 120GB SATA SSD, which I use for video processing, but that came from an old laptop, I backed it up onto my spinning rust before deployment.