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
I really do need a new computer bag. After over six years on-the-road the old one is starting to become unworkable. In reality, I want my travelling suite of goodies to be a lot lighter than in the past, which implies not only a new bag, but reconsidering what I need in that bag. I think that I should be able to do more with less to carry.
Before someone again refers me to a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air let me add that I am a Windows user. My employer is a Windows development shop so its kind of unavoidable. While I genuinely admire Apple hardware, I’m not such a fan of some of their business practices. So I prefer to look elsewhere for hardware.
This is the fourth installment in the long-running tale (parts one, two & three) of my search for the most appropriate host for this site.
The very fact that you’re reading this means that the site is now live on a server operated by Lightning Base. In the past I’ve used a shared host and couple of different VPS providers. In point of fact the site was at UnmeteredVPS.net for over two years.
I have nothing but nice things to say about UnmeteredVPS.net. That service is excellent, but it wasn’t exactly a perfect fit. It was an unmanaged VPS, which meant that I was responsible for everything.
Every few weeks I would need to update some aspect of the OS or supporting software. Some updates were trivial. Some, like major Apache or MySQL updates, were a bit scary. Despite five years running this site I’m no Linux guru.
Back in January I rather impulsively purchased a 120 GB Sandisk Ultra SSD. At $120 it was just too tempting to pass up. Until recently that disk lived in my HP Mini 5102 netbook.
In truth, 120 GB was on the borderline of being large enough for what I need. I have a 50 GB paid Dropbox account. That dictates that s very small disk will present certain inconveniences.
The SSD in the netbook achieved what I had hoped. The little PC booted faster, ran faster and had longer battery life than with the stock WD Scopio drive.
The events of past week or two have resulted in my having a spare 750 GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. I’ve swapped that into the netbook for now. That leaves the SSD without a home, a situation that I will surely remedy shortly.
A couple of weeks ago one of the daily deals emails from New Egg made an offer that I found I could not resist. I am weak, it’s true. The offer in question was a 120 GB SanDisk Ultra solid state disk (SSD) drive for a mere $120. Most SSDs of that size are $180+.
The appeal of SSDs is rooted in the same kind of sensibility that had me building Asterisk appliances that boot from flash media. Flash offers an attractive combination of performance and reliability.
The trade-off presented by SSDs is very high cost-per-gigabyte of storage. This offer, which was basically $1/GB, seemed like a nice chance to try an SSD for the first time. I wasn’t really certain how I’d use it, but I ordered one anyway.
This mornings attempt to get through my backlog in Google Reader turns up two interesting and kinda related news items. First, Kingston Technologies has introduced a line of low-end solid state disks (SSDs) called the SSDNow V Series. A 40 GB model in the 2.5″ laptop form factor retails for a modest $85, and of course the specs are much better than any comparable spinning magnetic media.