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Did you know...
It's easy to install an internal hard drive in your computer. Here's how
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Western Digital does not believe in SSDs, Santa Claus
By Tim Stevens  posted November 24th 2008 7:55AM
The holidays are upon us and, at a time when many are set to celebrate their faiths and beliefs, Western Digital's Senior VP for Marketing Richard Rutledge is clarifying one of his company's: now is not the right time for SSDs. Apparently WD only " enters markets that exist," and while we could understand about him being unsure of the many spiritual entities banded about this time of year, we're rather confident the competition are believers, and they have plenty of milk and cookies laid out for holiday shoppers. Rutledge did indicate WD is looking at creating both low-end SSDs for smartphones and ultraportables as well as high-end ones for " enterprise" applications, but only " when they present appropriate opportunity." Hurry up and get with the program, WD, or you're going to be left crying and holding a lump of coal while all the other companies bring their increased revenues to show and tell.
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The Beauty of Solid State Drives
As soon as I clicked ‘Publish’ my previous post about Mac, I noticed my Mac slowed down and crashed a few programs asking to report the crash to Apple. I’ve been noticing the slowness since morning and wasn’t sure what was going on. So I closed all my programs (which caused some more crashing) and decided to restart my computer. It did not boot back and once the Apple logo appeared computer simply shut down. I tried googling on iphone for similar behavior. On one of the forums it was suggested to press apple+S and hold until command line loads on boot. Then I tried to do a disk check by entering
/sbin/fsck -fy
This returned an error that the disk cannot be repaired. A few more attempts and the disk was not accessible at all. My Solid State Drive (SSD) Crucial 256GB died the 3rd time.
This is an excerpt from earlier post about my SSD experience:
I do not suggest buying Solid State Drives from Crucial. Here’s why: I got this SSD in November of 2009. 2 months later it died. One day I was just not able to turn on computer and BIOS was not even showing there was a drive connected. All data was vanished instantly. Good thing I do automatic backups every night. I have returned the SSD to Crucial and got a replacement 2 weeks later. The replacement SSD was DOA and I had to return it again. I finally got the working drive and using it till today, but I’m not much confident I can trust this company and making sure every day that the backups are running. I checked reviews of the particular SSD and found out that many other users have had same issues. As for the drive’s performance, to be fair, it is very FAST just like many other SSDs on the market today.
 As I said I could not trust this Crucial SSD and I was right once again. The $700 SSD turned unusable and all data was destroyed. I went to a local Microcenter retail store and purchased Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive for a little over hundred bucks. That is almost 7 times cheaper than SSD and hopefully more reliable and as fast as SSD at small peak usage like starting up computer, opening programs and copying files. This drive is a combination of 500GB HDD and 32GB SSD. Seagate promises up to 80% performance increase and up to 300mbps transfer. I think I will stick with this drive from now on and once I get a new Crucial SSD replaced by warranty will sell it on eBay.
At ASPnix we are experimenting with some SSD drives from Corsair and Kingston ( Intel) on a very powerful servers as boot drives only. We don’t store any data on them and so far haven’t had any issues. If we experience any issues I’ll definately post a review here.
What about you? Have you had any issues with HDD, SSD, Hybrid Disks lately?
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Solid State Drives (SSD) Reliability Myths
Today is the day. It’s the day when I finally realized the Solid State Drives are not ready for the ‘prime time’. They don’t fit either personal/home requirements nor enterprise.
At ASPnix we have posted this Announcement today:
As many of our customers know in the past 3-5 days mail server has become quite unstable and has been restarting every few hours.
Windows logs did not show much so we were having trouble identifying the issue.
We have tried to reinstall SmarterMail and had a feeling there was an issue with either disks or network adapter drivers.
This was one of our best servers on the network with monster 2TB RAID10 and SSD boot drive.
Today we finally found the issue on the day it became completely obvious. SSD boot drive stopped responding and the server did not boot after restart.
This was not the first time we experience SSD drives die and luckily the total of four SSD failures we have experienced on our work computers and not servers.
We have just replaced the boot drive in mail server with a nice 1.5TB spinning drive and reinstalled windows.
All Mail data is on a RAID10 which was attached to this new server, so all data is safe, of course!
We are finishing up SmarterMai configuration on new boot drive and the server will get back online within about 15-30 minutes.
This was a great lesson to us and we won’t be using SSD drives on any of our servers as the technology doesn’t seem to be ready.
We apologize for the inconvenience and we believe the mail server will be stable from now on.
If you have any questions please let us know. We’ll be happy to provide more details on the issue.
The post was earlier edited and after couple clients’ concerns and one line was removed because it was a personal emotional opinion.
The line that was removed stated:
The SSDs are a joke and not ready for either personal or enterprise use.
I completely think so and thus you read my opinion here in a personal blog. Over the past 16 months I had to return SSDs 4 times. I have returned 3 Crucial Drives and 1 Corsair. All of them showed the same symptoms. Unlike spinning hard disk drives that start make some noise and show bad blocks, SSDs slow down fast within a few hours and turn off completely. If you don’t make backups every hour, you will most likely loose some data. I do backups daily online and weekly to an external drive and still managed to loose some important data.
I wasn’t sure if it was just me or many people have similar issues. At first I thought maybe my disk-intense work makes them all die but after reading different reviews this became clear I’m far not the only one.
If you search online for SSD failures or SSD reviews, you will find thousands similar complaints. Just read the comments to the above articles. It seems the technology is just not ready and not mature enough. Normal spinning drives fail a lot too, but over the past few decades we got used to them and got a feel of when they fail and how they behave. For some reason I had higher expectations of the SSD drives and the technology is promising, but it will take many years for SSD to drop in price, become more mature and finally replace good old spinning magnetic drives.
I cannot tell you not to buy SSD if you really want you should try them out, but please make sure you backup your data every hour and enjoy the 200Mb/sec speeds.
I’m currently testing a hybrid drive from Seagate which is 4GB SSD + 500GB HDD (32MB cache, 7200rpm) = 2 in 1, model ST95005620AS. They promise upto 300Mb/sec speeds while offering 500GB capacity at a little over $100. I believe it’s a great deal and time will show if this hybrid technology is a good transition from magnetic HDDs to soon to be the “de-facto” new standard – SSD.
What do you think about HDD vs SSD? What experience have you had with SSD? Share in comments please!
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Information Technology
*I.T.*
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gOOd prIce ?
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| What's Relevant... |
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Singapore's STI gained 39.9pts (+1.3%) to 3,053.5. In the broader market, gainers led losers 374 to 103 with 1.1bn shares worth S$1.3bn changing hands.
We expect the market to open higher this morning as concerns about the Greek debt crisis eased.
Investors might want to consider good value stocks like Genting Singapore and Golden Agri-Resources.
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| Bernanke - Every Word You Say |
Yesterday, Asian indices staged a strong rebound, with the Hang Seng Index and the SIMSCI rising more than 1.0%. The rally then followed through in Europe and U.S., where the S& P500 had its sharpest rally in 2 months.
| Code |
Name |
Type |
Expiry |
Exercise Price |
| N8XW |
HSI22200MBLeCW110728 |
Call |
28-Jul-11 |
22200 |
| N8ZW |
HSI21800MBLePW110728 |
Put |
28-Jul-11 |
21800 |
| OB4W |
HSI21600MBLeCW110831 |
Call |
31-Aug-11 |
21600 |
| OB7W |
HSI22200MBLePW110831 |
Put |
31-Aug-11 |
22200 |
| N5WW |
SIMSCI360MBeCW110729 |
Call |
29-Jul-11 |
360 |
| N5UW |
SIMSCI350MBePW110729 |
Put |
27-Jul-11 |
350 |
The market is not forecasting any changes in the Fed’s rate decision tonight as it is widely expected to hold rates at 0.25%. What investors and analysts need to watch out for is Bernanke’s speech in Fed press conference later. His comments will shed more light on what is the future Fed plan on supporting the U.S. economy. Among the key words to be watching for are: “stimulus”, “inflation”, “jobs” and “debt ceiling”.
Mr. Bernanke, every word you say, we will be watching you…
The following are some notes on Bernanke’s recent speeches:... More
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- According to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Singapore is expected to overtake Switzerland and London as the world’s largest wealth management centre by 2013.
pharoah88 ( Date: 16-Jun-2011 16:57) Posted:
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1.860 |
3,000 |
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pharoah88 ( Date: 16-Jun-2011 16:43) Posted:
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Genting Malaysia:
News Update
¨ Genting New York company official said that Resorts World New York is looking to open on 1 Oct 2011.
According to the official, the video lottery terminals at GNY are expected to rake in US$380/machine/day. In addition, the racino was originally scheduled to have 4,525 slot-like video lottery terminals, but will now have an additional 475 electronic table games such as roulette, bringing the total number to 5,000.
¨ Our forecasts are unchanged, but we have raised our SOP-based fair value to RM4.60 (from RM4.40). However, that our DCF value for GNY has assumed a more conservative GGR of US$330/machine/day. We maintain our Outperform call on the stock.
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Genting Malaysia:
News Update
¨ Genting New York company official said that Resorts World New York is looking to open on 1 Oct 2011.
According to the official, the video lottery terminals at GNY are expected to rake in US$380/machine/day. In addition, the racino was originally scheduled to have 4,525 slot-like video lottery terminals, but will now have an additional 475 electronic table games such as roulette, bringing the total number to 5,000.
¨ Our forecasts are unchanged, but we have raised our SOP-based fair value to RM4.60 (from RM4.40). However, that our DCF value for GNY has assumed a more conservative GGR of US$330/machine/day. We maintain our Outperform call on the stock.
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BY NEIL JEROME C. MORALES, Reporter
Alliance Global aims to double profits to over P6B
ALLIANCE Global Group, Inc. of property tycoon Andrew L. Tan targets doubling its profits to more than P6 billion this year, an executive said late last week.
Growth will primarily be driven by better performance in its property unit and entertainment complex.
“The full-year target is we want to double what we did last year. Last year was P3.2 billion [and] this year is P6.4 billion,” Alliance Global President Kingson U. Sian told reporters after the company’s stockholders’ meeting in Quezon City.
For gaming, Mr. Sian said increased earnings are expected in “all segments like local VIPs and mass market.”
In terms of revenues, 60% will come from local gamers but moving forward, the company wants to tap more Chinese and Korean gamers to increase the contribution of foreigners.
Travellers International Hotel Group., Inc., which owns the eight-hectare Resorts World Manila complex in Pasay, is equally co-owned by Genting Hong Kong, the third-largest cruise line operator in the world and local conglomerate Alliance Global. Last year, Resorts World Manila opened the Genting Club and the Newport Arts Theatre.
For the property sector, Mr. Sian said Megaworld Corp. will drive the growth as it expects profits to breach the P6-billion mark.
The projection shows an 18% growth in net income compared with P5.085 billion last year.
Megaworld, one of the top higher-end condominium developers, has seven ongoing projects within Metro Manila and several residential developments within the Makati Central Business District and San Juan.
Profits of Alliance Global -- whose other units are Emperador, Generoso and The Bar producer Emperador Distillers, Inc. and Golden Arches Development Corp., the master franchise holder of McDonald’s in the Philippines -- surged by 28% to P2.85 billion in the first quarter from last year.
Furthermore, new developments are under way in the 25-hectare Newport City tourism, hotel and gaming development in Pasay City. A new hotel is expected to be built in the entertainment complex.
Mr. Sian said the company expects to seal an operating and branding agreement this year for a new five-star hotel.
Alliance Global now has the 342-room Marriott and six-star luxury hotel Maxims in Newport City. It is also building budget hotel Remington and the 540-room luxury Hamilton Hotel in Newport City.
“For hotels, eventually we will have close to 2,500 rooms,” Mr. Sian said, adding that the company will reach about 1,500 rooms with the opening of the 712-room Remington in October.
A new grand ballroom and an amusement center will add to the amenities at the hotel and casino complex. “We are now building a convention center and ballroom at Newport,” Mr. Sian said.
The company allotted 1.2 hectares for the grand ballroom, which is targeted to be the biggest in the country. Its commercial operations will start in 2014.
“Foot traffic is 15,000 per day by this year. We might even hit 25,000 or 30,000 because of the ballroom and convention center,” Mr. Sian said.
To date, there are still four hectares in Newport City that can be developed by Alliance Global.
Mr. Sian said Alliance Global will also put up a new amusement center on top of the Newport Mall.
“There are enough reasons for the investors to believe [the profit target],” Claire S. Quiray, analyst at Regina Capital Development Corp., said in a phone interview yesterday. “You can see by the influx of clients and customers in Resorts World,” she added.
Shares in Alliance Global, which has a market value of P103.73 billion, rallied by 2.38% or 24 centavos to close at P10.34 apiece on Friday.
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Ho Ching not leaving Temasek: Sources
SINGAPORE
“HC (Ho Ching) told the staff internally she is not leaving,” said one of the sources.
Ms Ho, the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, has been executive director at Temasek since May 2002 and chief executive since January 2004. The sources said Ms Ho told staff that, if she had to leave on a “high note”, she could have done so last year when Temasek’s portfolio had more than recovered from the financial crisis.
Temasek’s portfolio rose 43 per cent year-on-year to S$186 billion at the end of March last year, surpassing the S$185 billion just before the financial crisis that drove its value to S$130 billion.
The sources declined to be named because the information was not public.
A Temasek spokesman declined to comment on the
Ms Ho had earlier planned to step down in October 2009 and Temasek had appointed former BHP Billiton CEO Charles Goodyear to replace her.
The American would have been the first foreigner to run Temasek but, in July 2009, the leadership transition process ended with both Temasek’s board and Mr Goodyear citing differences regarding strategic issues that could not be resolved.
— Ms Ho Ching, chief executive and executive director of Temasek Holdings, has informed her staff that she will not be leaving the investment company, two sources told Reuters yesterday, contrary to a recent Financial Times report that she would likely step down in August.Reuters report, just as the company had declined to comment about the June 8 Financial Times report.Agencies
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Are the ‘enhancements’
justifiable of the fee increase?
Letter from Leow Zi Xiang
I REFER to the letter “Enhancements to legal course in Singapore” by Mr David Quark, Executive Director, Singapore Institute of Legal Education (June 19).
It cited several components of the Preparatory Course leading to Part B of the Singapore Bar Examinations as being part of “enhancements” to the course, which supposedly justifies the fee increase.
However, I would like to point out that the Electronic Filing System, File Management System, Criminal Procedure Case Management and pro-bono engagements were all already in place previously.
The only “enhancements” are in fact the availability of electives and the tea and talk sessions. It is misleading to characterise all of them as “enhancements” when that is not the case. Also, I am sure the prominent members of the legal professions are glad to give their time ex gratia in relation the tea and talk sessions.
The letter also stated that “[o]rdinarily, course fees for the Preparatory Course are borne by law firms that have given training contracts the students”.
This is also not entirely accurate.
The ordinary procedure, in fact, is for law firms to reimburse students the fee a full year later instead of paying for them up front, as it appears to be suggesting.
More importantly, such reimbursement only takes place if the trainee is retained as full-time employees following expiry of the training contract. I do not have the exact figures but it is clear that there is a substantial number of trainees who are not retained.
Finally, it appears from the SILE website that printed copies of the training materials will no longer be provided this year.
Surely this would result in some cost savings for SILE. Are the newly available electives and the tea and talk sessions really worth an additional $2,000 per student for a 5-month course?
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Badminton result disappointing
Letter from Chan Han Kwan
THE Li Ning Singapore Open 2011 final for the men’s singles between Lin Dan and Chen Jin (both from China) ended without a fight as Chen Jin won the badminton title with a walkover.
It is such a great disappointment to the fan and for the sport when the obvious reason for many was that the China team wanted to conserve energy and prevent accidental injuries. The organiser should owe all the ticket holders an explanation and a partial refund for allowing the match to be cancelled in this way.
As this demonstrated, when the final is between players of the same country, there is a tendency of a walkover.
I am better off watching matches live on television at home.
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More than 100 ‘independents’
set to contest China elections
BEIJING
More than 100 “independent” candidates — including farmers, factory workers, university professors, students and journalists — have announced their intention to stand for election, rattling senior party officials.
China’s network of district assemblies have traditionally been stuffed with candidates “elected” from a carefully pre-selected list of mostly Communist Party members, although according to the law anyone can stand if they have the support of 10 local voters.
In the past, only a tiny handful of “independent” candidates have managed to get elected. Activists say, however, the rapid rise in popularity of Twitter-like microblogs and Internet chat forums is now making it harder for the party to control the system.
Mr Yao Bo, a well-known newspaper columnist with some 300,000 followers on his microblog, said he would submit “a thousand” supporting signatures for his application.
COMMUNISM CHINA seems mOre demOcratIc ? ? ? ? — Grassroots democracy activists in China are challenging the ruling Communist Party in unprecedented numbers by harnessing Twitter and other online social media tools to campaign in elections.
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Ausgroup We are ceasing coverage of Ausgroup due to a lack of institutional interest in the stock.
Our last rating was NEUTRAL while our last TP was S$0.52.
Notwithstanding, acting CEO Stuart Kenny reiterated a turnaround and positive outlook in our recent meet up with him. We believe that a dual-listing could catalyze the stock and narrow the valuation gap against ASX-listed peers.
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Friday, 17 Jun 2011, 9:56am (5 hours, 7 minutes ago)
Microsoft VP, Dan'l Lewin has told TechRadar in an interview that the tile layout in Windows 8 on tablet devices was conceived before the iPad was launched.
As reported by TechRadar:
" Think about when the planning started for what you saw just the other day all the planning, the intent, the interface design work was done before the iPad hit the market," said Lewin.
Lewin also admitted that Microsoft needs to churn out its products faster:
" We know where we're going - we just have to get there faster."
It's always good to know your mistakes and correct them.
Source: TechRadar
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A laptop with its head in the cloud
Sadly, the Chromebook isn’t the most practical concept
NEW YORK
At the heart of the Chromebook concept is that a laptop doesn’t need a hard drive.
Doesn’t need programs on it.
Doesn’t need Windows or Mac OS X. Doesn’t need a desktop, files or folders. Everything you need is online, so all the laptop needs is a Web browser.
It’s a sexy idea. No hard drive? That means no moving parts, long battery life (8.5 hours a charge) and lighter weight (1.5kg). The first one to go on sale yesterday in the America, the Samsung Series 5, has only a 16-gigabyte SSD drive — basically a big memory chip, like on the iPad or iPhone.
No Windows? That means no viruses or spyware. No serial numbers or copy protection.
No payments to Microsoft for upgrades every couple of years.
No two-minute start-up process a Chromebook starts up in under 10 seconds.
You don’t have to worry about backups. You can log into any other Chromebook, and find your whole software world waiting for you.
The Samsung itself is beautiful, with a sparse, uncluttered MacBookish feel. It’s black plastic body is a joy to hold and to behold.
The laptop has two USB jacks, a Web cam, a video output jack, a memory card slot and a headphone/microphone jack — but no Bluetooth, ethernet jack, FireWire port or DVD drive.
It’s really weird to use a computer where everything happens in your browser if you attach a hard drive or flash drive, you even see its contents in a browser window. You can never quit or minimise the browser there’s no desktop behind it, no matter what your instincts say.
But let’s give this shifted paradigm a chance. How well does Google’s newfangled concept hold up in the real world?
Sadly, not very well.
The Chromebook concept assumes you’re online everywhere you go. But when the Chromebook isn’t online, it’s essentially a 1.5kg paperweight.
(Google says an upgrade this summer will permit you to read your email, calendar and Google Docs when you’re offline, and that over time, more apps will be written to be offline-usable.)
Maybe in Silicon Valley, where Google’s engineers live, you can live your entire life online.
But in the real world, you can use this laptop only where you can find, and afford, Wi-Fi hot spots.
I tried valiantly to use the Samsung as my main machine, but by the end of a week, I was about ready to toss it like a frisbee.
I took four flights with it.
At each departure gate, I had to pay US$7 (S$8.70) for Wi-Fi.
Three of the flights had no Wi-Fi on board, so the Chromebook sat uselessly in my bag. On the fourth, Wi-Fi cost US$13. That’s right: US$13 every time you fly, just to look at your own photos and documents. Then US$17 for the hotel’s crummy Wi-Fi.
Another assumption of the Chromebook concept is that Google’s free online software can do almost everything regular software can do — email (Gmail), Web browsing (Chrome), chat (Google Talk), photos (Picasa), word processing, spreadsheets, slide shows (Google Docs).
The software does the job for the basics. But what if you want to run real, brand-name software? Photoshop? Skype?
How will you sync your iPhone if you can’t run iTunes?
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Chrome marketplace offers 1,000 Chrome programs.
Most are free. But most are also lightweight, phone-type programs:
Weather, sports tickers and so on. They live online, so all you’re actually installing is a bookmark.
Truth is, considering how stripped-down the Samsung is, you have to wonder why it’s as big, heavy and expensive as it is. You can find plenty of fullblown Windows laptops of the same price (from US$430 in the US), weight and size.
Unless you’re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn, you probably shouldn’t buy a Chromebook. — You can say all kinds of nice things about Google’s Chromebook laptop concept. You can say it’s ahead of its time. Or that it’s thinking way, way outside the box. Or that, as failures go, at least this one swung for the fences.World of Warcraft?
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Shares slump but analysts
say downtrend is temporary
Jonathan Peeris
jonathanpeeris@mediacorp.com.sg
SINGAPORE
The benchmark Straits Times Index ended down 34.7 points, or 1.14 per cent, at 3,020.13, after falling to its lowest intra-day level since late March, as worries over weak US data and Greece’s spiralling debt troubles kept investors away. — Shares in Singapore slumped yesterday, in line with losses for the rest of Asia and Europe, with sentiment hurt by mounting debt problems in the euro-zone and more signs of slowing growth in the United States and China.
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About pharoah88
Go to Message
As I said I could not trust this Crucial SSD and I was right once again. The $700 SSD turned unusable and all data was destroyed. I went to a local Microcenter retail store and purchased Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive for a little over hundred bucks. That is almost 7 times cheaper than SSD and hopefully more reliable and as fast as SSD at small peak usage like starting up computer, opening programs and copying files. This drive is a combination of 500GB HDD and 32GB SSD. Seagate promises up to 80% performance increase and up to 300mbps transfer. I think I will stick with this drive from now on and once I get a new Crucial SSD replaced by warranty will sell it on eBay.
