Lenovo X1 Carbon: Some thoughts about an old friend
In the earliest days of January 2013 I ordered the first laptop that I’d bought with my own money in over a decade. It was a Lenovo X1 Carbon. I had been carrying an HP 8510W, which was a decent…
LifeHacker: Top 10 Superior Tech Products You’ll Never Go Back From
LifeHacker is part of my Feedly stream, even though I often find myself at odds with many of their assertions or recommendations. However, a few weeks back they revisited a Top 10 list that I found myself liking a lot; Top 10 Superior Tech Products You’ll Never Go Back From. In fact, I am completely in agreement. It’s all good info, and largely unexpected.
Desktop Storage: SSD vs Magnetic Hard Drive
It has been said that you have to sometimes look back to see how far you’ve come. A little over a week ago the traditional hard drive in my desktop computer started to fail. The BIOS reported a SMART alarm indicating imminent disk failure.
While this HP desktop was a good deal when it was purchased, the 1.5TB Seagate hard drive, spinning at just 5400 RPM, was part of what motivated the addition of the 256 GB SSD as the boot volume. The traditional hard drive was only for user data.
Despite the alarm state, the system seemed to be running fine. I ordered a 1 TB WD Black hard drive from Amazon. In making the choice of the WD Black I looked around online for research on hard drive reliability. I found a blog post by Backblaze, a company that provides online backup. They have consistently found Seagate drives to be the most failure prone. As a huge user of hard drives, it’s great that they make their data public.
The Dead Disk Bounce: Does An SSD Get A Second Act?
My desktop PC is just now passing three years old. When it arrived I imaged the factory installed 2 TB hard drive, replacing it with a Crucial m4 256GB SSD
The boot time of the computer was improved by the SSD. Since the boot volume was just the OS & apps it was quick & easy to backup by making an image of that volume. The fact that I make routine backups became important recently, when the SSD failed outright.
In this case I had just installed some updated to the OS, when a reboot was required. However, upon rebooting the system could not find the boot volume.
Eight Weeks Later: Living With The Lenovo X1 Carbon Ultrabook
While under a different title, this post is the third in a series called A Road Warrior Plans To Shed Some Weight. It describes my thoughts leading to the purchase of an Ultrabook.
It’s been about eight weeks since the Lenovo X1 Carbon arrived. During that time I’ve made three business trips. So I’ve accumulated some experience with the X1 Carbon (hereafter just X1C) both at home and on the road.
The day or two after I placed the order for the X1C I came down with a significant case of buyers remorse. I paid around $1700 for the device, which is without question a lot of money. I had thought that perhaps I was being unduly irresponsible, even for me.
Learning About SSDs
Solid state disks (SSD) are coming down in price
Last winter I put a cheap 120 GB San Disk Ultra SSD into my aging netbook and gave it another year’s lease on life. Over the summer I saw a deal on some nicely spec’d HP Pavilion HPE desktops I bought a couple for myself and the Mrs. It seemed a sensible way to move us away from Windows XP.
This is a little story about the solid state disk residing in my desktop PC. The device in question is a 128 GB Crucial M4