Speeding up my T60 Thinkpad.. Is it possible to get an Solid State Drive (SSD) for my T60 Thinkpad?
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From: BillW50 on 3 Dec 2009 13:45 In news:hf7iro$im0$1(a)news.eternal-september.org, Barry Watzman typed on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:37:51 -0500: > Re: "Floppy disks can only be written to less than a 1000 times" > > That is BS. First, there is no difference between reading and > writing. Actually according to the manufactures data, the magnetic media could be changed about 700 times before it could no longer hold the information. Although I don't know if this was a limitation of the media itself, or do from head wear. Magnetic tapes has a similar limitation. On a side note, I did find some floppies that lost data at some sectors within 6 months. Yet reformatting them and they were good for another 6 months. I tag these floppies and later found a third party formatting program that would identify these odd floppies from the start. > Second, while you can wear the oxide off a floppy disk, > keep in mind that back when we were using 8" floppies, the motors > were AC line operated and NEVER stopped; a floppy could easly be > "spinning" for 8 solid hours. And while the head was not always > loaded, once the head does load, it contacts all sectors on that > track, even if only one of them is being accessed. Our DEC machines we used for high quality graphics in the early 80's used 8 inch floppies and WD 10MB hard drives. Yes the same machines that turned B&W movies into color. And the users who left the floppies in the drives all day had a very high failure rate. As they would only last like 3 to 6 weeks. > If wear was a serious issue, they would not have lasted as long as > they did (years and decades; most 8" floppy diskettes written in the > 1970's are still readable, far over 95%). Well there are three problems. 1) Wear is one that effects both read and write. 2) The ability of the media to change the polarity x-amount of times. 3) The longevity of the stored data. Most of the hundreds of floppies I have are from the 80's. It would be nice if 95% of them are still readable. But to be honest, I haven't checked them for at least 10 years. So I can't tell you how many are still good. But I am not referring to this problem. But the limitation of the number of rewrites a floppy can handle instead. The good news is that I don't know too many people who would overwrite a floppy hundreds of times. > I'm not saying that they could be "worn out", but the statement that > "Floppy disks can only be written to less than a 1000 times" is just > not generally true. I didn't believe it either. But I read it from the manufactures data sheet back in the 90's. I figure they ought to know. ;-) I just tried Google for a floppy disk data sheet and I can't find one anymore. I can't even find many manufactures of floppies either. Maybe others might have better luck than I am having. :-) -- Bill Gateway MX6124 ('06 era) - Windows XP SP2
From: BillW50 on 3 Dec 2009 16:31 In news:hf999b$em3$1(a)news.eternal-september.org, Barry Watzman typed on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:06:50 -0500: > If it was an 8" drives, the diskettes turned .... as long as they were > in the drive and power was applied (and they rubbed against the liner > on the inside of the jacket). True. And another problem of 8 and 5� floppies were when stored, the jacket and the disk would get stuck together if unused overtime. Sometimes the drive couldn't loosen them. So turning them by hand would usually cure it for awhile. > Also, re: "the disks were not accessed after boot-up"; a CP/M warm > boot reloads the OS from the disk, and most utilities are on the disk. I only had one CP/M 2.2 machine which had the OS in ROM. And I really miss ROM based OS as they boot so fast. About 5 seconds if I recall correctly. Maybe 10 seconds tops. I do have 5 CP/M 3.0 (aka CP/M Plus) machines. And I often used a RAMDisk which I ran the CP/M utilities from. So with the right hardware, you could avoid having the boot disk in the drive. Something I valued a lot at the time. -- Bill Gateway MX6124 ('06 era) - Windows XP SP2
From: BillW50 on 3 Dec 2009 17:23 In news:hf99et$em3$2(a)news.eternal-september.org, Barry Watzman typed on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:09:49 -0500: > I am very active in the "classic computer" community and have WORKING > computers here that use 8" diskettes. I have over 1,000 diskettes > recorded in the 1970's and those of us in the community have exchanged > data on the readability of "old" diskettes (and, in particular, "old" > data). And they are HIGHLY readable. More than 95%, if they were > stored in a climate controlled environment (nothing exotic, but > indoors in a heated and air conditioned environment). Having working 8 inch floppies from 30 plus years ago vs. actively using them daily are two totally different things Barry. As according to the manufactures data sheets, floppy disks can be changed about 700 times and then they become useless. The data sheets were on 5� floppies, so for 8 inch it is probably a bit better. Since 8 inch were single density and single sided disks from what I recall. And only 128kb if I recall correctly. Which is far more magnetic material to work from then double density disks. -- Bill Gateway MX6124 ('06 era) - Windows XP SP2
From: ~misfit~ on 4 Dec 2009 01:49 Somewhere on teh intarwebs Robert Tomsick wrote: [snip] > I've got an X-25M one of my laptops, and it would take something on > the order of 5 years of writing 20GB each and every day before I'm > likely to experience a failure. I'm writing this on a T60 fitted with a 320GB 7200rpm Seagate HDD with Hard Disk Sentinel (HDS) installed. HDS reports average reads a day at 96.4GB and average writes of 33.63GB. The machine is on about 14 hours a day and is used for newsgroups, email, internet and some light gaming. -- Shaun. "Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchet, 'Jingo'.
From: BillW50 on 8 Dec 2009 09:06
In news:hflbc8$i6u$1(a)news.eternal-september.org, Robert Tomsick typed on Tue, 8 Dec 2009 10:56:08 +0000 (UTC): > On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:49:21 +1300, ~misfit~ wrote: > >> Somewhere on teh intarwebs Robert Tomsick wrote: [snip] >>> I've got an X-25M one of my laptops, and it would take something on >>> the order of 5 years of writing 20GB each and every day before I'm >>> likely to experience a failure. >> >> I'm writing this on a T60 fitted with a 320GB 7200rpm Seagate HDD >> with Hard Disk Sentinel (HDS) installed. HDS reports average reads a >> day at >> 96.4GB and average writes of 33.63GB. >> >> The machine is on about 14 hours a day and is used for newsgroups, >> email, internet and some light gaming. > > !! > > That's a lot of writing; that seems shockingly high for that > workload... > > AFAIK, reads don't affect SSD lifespan, but writes certainly do. > With an average of 30+GB a day, with some MLC SSDs you might end up > with your first failed sector after a couple years. (Although I > suspect that most of the writing done in your case is from swap and > is thus easily- avoidable.) > > That said, it looks like I made a mistake in my original post. > > The X-25M can sustain 100GB/day for 5 years... not 20GB/day. Looks > like you're still well in the clear. :) > > Source: > http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4 You are indeed correct Rob! A lot of the writing is do to the swapfile. This machine for example sees an average of 7.8GB of writes per day. Although my SSD machines sees far less. As they either see about 150MB of writes per day or none at all if EWF is enabled. -- Bill Gateway MX6124 ('06 era) - Windows XP SP2 |