[ale] A modest proposal for the times

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 9 Apr 2025 18:16:33 -0400
"Jon \"maddog\" Hall" <jon.maddog.hall at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Steve,
> 
> Somehow the context of "laptop" vs "desktop" got lost in the shuffle
> along the way.   I seem to remember the conversation was around
> "laptops" and, quite frankly, I do not remember any laptops with 3.5"
> drives in them....ever.   I have had several laptops with 2.5" drives.

Ohhhhhh. That explains it. As far as I know, people don't carry around
all their data on their laptop. I was assuming the person has a desktop
computer that's their main computer, and a laptop for when they hit the
road. The laptop has a subset of their data, and the desktop has huge
storage. That's how I do things.

In this day and age I wouldn't be caught dead with spinning rust in my
laptop. NVMe bestows a huge overall speed improvement, especially when
you consider that laptop spinning rust are typically 5400 RPM. And it's
not like you can put a 12TB spinning rust in a laptop: It would
overheat. So yeah, $250 for a 4TB NVMe is a great investment for a
laptop.

> 
> I also have a NAS server with four 12 TB HDDs, RAID for 24TB effective
> storage.

Yes. That's where spinning rust shows its economy, given that the NVMe
equivalent would cost $6K.

 
> Of course how much you store on your laptop varies with how you
> manage data overall.   I have found that I can store almost ALL of my
> working data on my laptop because the density of storage has been
> increasing so fast that about the time the laptop storage is filled I
> get a new laptop with new storage and go back to being 50% full
> again.   Rinse and repeat.

True on my desktop too.

> 
> The biggest issue with my last laptop was that I purchased it in 2007
> with 500G of storage total.   By the time I switched to my new laptop
> late last year I had 3 TB in the laptop, with 2TB of user data.  The
> issue was effectively backing this up with only USB 3.0 speeds
> available.

How did you get a 2007 laptop to physically last this long? I bought
two laptops in 2006, and both long ago broke.


SteveT

Steve Litt 
Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques