Posted on 03/08/2014 12:36:27 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Edited on 03/09/2014 9:34:22 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Traditional hard drive manufacturers are currently going through a paradigm shift
(Excerpt) Read more at wiglafjournal.com ...
We’re not nearly as fully connected as people think. Farm country is barely connected if at all. And even in the well connected chunks of the world connections get interrupted. Lost my cable (internet and phone) for nearly an hour last week. My office WILL lose connectivity during the summer monsoons, luckily we’re not cloud so productivity will go up as we can no longer goof off on the net.
Total permanent connection is decades out at best. Yeah companies on either coast talk about it, but those initiatives all slow down dramatically when they get more than 100 miles away from the coast and find out just how much nothing there is in this country.
Part of the problem with storing private stuff on the cloud is that access anywhere problem. Even if your cloud provider doesn’t peak if you accidentally over connect all of a sudden a bunch of very “at home” stuff lands at work.
You hit the bullseye on that. I still buy CDs just because I like physical control of the medium if I want the whole album, but about the only place I play a CD is in the car because it came out a year before the external player connector was standard. Right now I'm considering reripping my CDs at 192 kbps because I finally have a player I can hear the difference from 128.
When my last CD player died I considered not replacing it and just using my bluray for the CDs, but I found one cheap which also had a USB interface for playing and ripping.
Great post!
While I believe most of what you stated is quite accurate, if not spot-on, the biggest limiting factor will be the overall lack of bandwidth of the WAN(Wide Area Networks) and or Internet in our country. For it all to become a reality, most businesses will need more than a couple of T1s for their ‘pipe’ out to the Net, and that’s when you start getting into ‘real money’. After the initial ‘push’ into the “Cloud”(God I hate that buzzword as it’s commonly used), the throughput/bandwidth requirements isn’t as bad as most folks would think. Once the data is in place, only differential data needs to be uploaded to storage. Using compression for the transfer, it can be efficient.
Having said that, If I own a business, I’m running a ‘Private Cloud’.(this is what I built at work) No way in hell am I going to entrust my data to some location on the other side of the country, or world for that matter - to be physically managed/accessible to anonymous people. That’s not even getting into the many scenarios of snooping/espionage by .govs and others who may not have the best interests of my company in mind. For those that don’t run their own “Cloud”, STRONG encryption will be paramount. Both for the storage itself, and for the transmission of data.
Regarding what I consider to be the horrible state of the Internet, just imagine what could have been done in our country with all of the money wasted on TARP, (non)stimulus, and other bailouts/boondoggles during recent years. We could have developed a real WAN infrastructure comparable to the Interstate Highway system, but for data networks. Gigabit connections to every business/residential area. Combinations of fiber and 4G Wireless everywhere. Many of the displaced employees of ISPs, ect that work within the current infrastructure could have been hired on to work on and maintain the new one. I tend to be very Libertarian on most things, but if the government is going to ‘print’/borrow/waste money, it might as well put it toward something useful.
The SSD is faster than a hard drive, but the main advantage is very low power requirements, which makes the SSD the best choice for mobile computing, phones, music players, etc. Capacity is more expensive (much more), and SSD failures are without warning. A hard drive usually has some CRC failures and such first, giving the user some clue that it’s time to be replaced.
I still buy CDs because I still like physical ownership, and liner notes. But I’m getting more and more willing to not, CDs can be a problem to find (even in the amazon age) and my threshold for just getting the MP3 keeps dropping.
I suspect that smart manufacturers are going to be using similar setups for performance rigs; boot off SSD, with a disk for storage. Given the capacities you can get these days, you could pretty much ghost an image of your boot drive to your hard disk for quick restoral in case of hardware failure, and you really wouldn't notice the loss of space by much. An external drive would back up your data, which would also contain your $BOOT image.
That was part of the option one I mentioned. They leave the company before or after the bankruptcy or merger and acquisition with the options and stocks received as compensation along the way to the end of the company.
MBTF on SSDs isn't that bad, providing you are using it intelligently. If you are constantly writing to it, it's not going to last as long. If you use it to primarily read from, they will last as long, if not longer than a disk because there are no moving parts to break.
Not to mention the fact that you don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" for any data held by a 3rd party.
I'd like to shoot the person who came up with that evil phrase.
What’s the failure rate on SSD? I have never used one but would prolly buy a Samsung or Intel due to brand name
I replaced my friends (2009)laptop hard drive yesterday. It died
15 free GB cloud storage backup-— www.copy.com
He should have been using it
No offense intended, but one of the iron laws of technology is that stupid ideas never die, they just come back with a trendier name. The fact is that “cloud” computing was already used several decades ago, and it proved inferior to stand-alone computers. It just wasn’t called the “cloud,” it was called the “workstation.”
Central application-hosting and storage were originally introduced because of technological and financial limitations (i.e. processing power was expensive). But the workstation model did prove two things: the limitations of individual workstations overrode the supposed benefits of not having to outfit an entire computer for every employee, and computer and software manufacturers LOVE the workstation model, because it increases both the dependency and cost of abandonment (see Sun Microsystems for a case in point). What tech company wouldn’t love to have total control over your hardware and software, with the cost of your going elsewhere being prohibitively expensive?
If the workstation model was efficient, it would not have been abandoned when the cost of stand-alone PCs dropped to an affordable level (especially since the “connectivity” was much better internally than the internet will ever be). That was obviously not the case. The Google (and Microsoft, et al.) dream of simple, cheap front-end computers with all of the apps and content hosted elsewhere is nothing more than the technology of the past with a new paint-job.
P.S., only urban-dwellers on the East or West Coast could assert that internet connectivity is near “universal.” All that the cloud is going to do is force companies to relocate to urban areas... and it’s not like this country needs larger and more politically powerful cities...
With cloud storage, you have chunks of your data distributed across potentially thousands of different servers. No one server will contain the entire file (security) and the data chunks will be replicated in many locations (redundancy).
So if one (or even many) servers go down or offline, you will still be able to recover your data from the other servers.
So the absolute opposite of what you are talking about.
I mainly buy SSDs from Newegg. They are constantly running specials on them these days. I also buy from PCMall as we have terms with them so on orders over $1000 I usually get 'em from my rep and get a healthy discount off the web price.
‘Cloud storage’ is a new name for ‘remote storage’. Chromebooks are new dumb terminals. The old is new again.
Not at all. Where are your apps? Where is your data? Not on the local machine, but stored remotely. It doesn’t matter if the storage is on one mainframe or distributed across thousands of servers, you still can’t do anything without a connection (and I defy anyone to assert that the internet will be any more reliable than an in-house network. And I’m not talking about data retention, I’m talking about connectivity and throughput).
There is no fundamental difference in the workstation-server model and the frontend-cloud model. The mechanics will be different, but the results are the same. The reality is that there is no reason, beyond data portability, for the cloud model (as the expense factor that spawned the workstation is no longer present... modern desktops can do just about anything you want them to do). And data portability doesn’t require a Chromebook... just a dropBox or VCS.
Only the software companies drool over the “cloud” (because it is in their benefit). And I’d like to see you open your cloud-based business in Iowa...
(In other words, you pretty much ignored every point I made in my post...)
I agree. It was annoying when the entire network was running 4mb token ring and Word took 5 minutes to load from the server. Now it's "move all your stuff to the cloud, access it anywhere", that is, until you can't because you're sitting in an airport without free wifi or you're 30 minutes outside of nowhere.
Stop giving liberals money to destroy us with. Seems that such would not need be said on FR, but a number of you seem determined to help fund the left. And proud of their Apple loyalty.
Just come out of your closet and be done with it.
My old boss, who had been in the data processing business since the 1970s, laughed at all the passing fashions in computer programming and hardware back in the 90s, and accurately predicted future trends (under new hipper names of course). For example, object oriented programming was nothing new he told us and demonstrated. The silly ‘cloud computing’ term would not surprise him a bit. Just note how archaic is the very term ‘data processing’, even though whatever this thing is called today it is nothing more or less than... data processing.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2042801/microsoft-investing-over-670-million-in-iowa-data-center.html
...Microsoft is investing $678 million in the expansion of its data center in West Des Moines, Iowa, to bolster online offerings such as Xbox Live and Office 365.
The plan, dubbed Project Mountain, was awarded tax benefits and is expected to create 29 new jobs, the board of the Iowa Economic Development Authority said in a statement on Friday. The data center will be used to support Microsoft’s cloud services...
Yes. Depends on how much storage space you require. SSD's are expensive. I bought a Seagate Momentus 750GB Hybrid for my MacBook. It combines SSD tech with old platter tech, so you get fast speeds and large storage for under $100. I prefer keeping my DVD drive; otherwise you could convert the DVD slot to a second HD slot for a large mechanical hard drive and use the primary HD slot for a true SSD to keep costs down but get the highest speeds possible.
For my desktop machine, I swapped in a true 240GB SSD, and plugged in a large external mechanical 3TB HD for lots of space.
Extremely easy to swap in SSD storage, same form factor. Cloning software is readily available to clone your old HD to a new SSD; takes a minute to physically swap in the new drive.
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