A hard drive story...

[CALLumbus]

So I have this older desktop, (I call it my entertainment machine because it does everything except trading) a Lenovo IdeaCentre 300 from 10 years ago. Standard fare at the time. Intel i3-2100, 3.1 Ghz.

8GB ram, Win 7 64 bit. 1 TB spinny disk drive. SATA I interface.

Over the years, the thing had been getting slower and slower and slower to boot. It got to the point where it was taking, no lie, ~12ish minutes from power-on boot to final hard-drive thrashing and settle into a stable Win desktop. The drive had no bad sectors, no extraneous programs. I guess the machine just is what it always was. The slow burn to super-long boot times for what reason I cannot fathom.

Within the past few days, the 10-YO spinny hard drive started it's dreaded death cycle. You know, where on reboot the drive starts making those clicking noises and everything freezes, or other ungodly sounds. The sounds of a spinny hard drive on it's last legs.

So I ran out and grabbed a 1TB SSD drive and cloned the original spinny drive to the new SSD.

On the reboot with the new drive, the desktop came up in ~15 SECONDS.

FIFTEEN FUCKING SECONDS.

Holy shit! I am so bloody done with the spinny drives.

SSD for teh win.

 

[Overnight]

Haha! Yuk, Commodores always had a crummy soundchip, far inferior to Atari.

 

[Big AAPL]

Good story. The first time you experience an SSD boot up after years of HDD is a special moment. For me it was a face palm for waiting so long.

 

[CALLumbus]

Haha! Yuk, Commodores always had a crummy soundchip, far inferior to Atari.

You think ? For me, nothing beats the Amiga. But of course this is just my personal taste.

 

[Overnight]

You think ? For me, nothing beats the Amiga. But of course this is just my personal taste.

Well, two things. One, I was not meaning the 16 bit machines, I was thinking of the older 8-bit. Two, I didn't necessarily mean the music ability, but the sound effects. Atari had way better use of the POKEY chip for ambiance.

It reminds me of this darn game. That teleporter sound effect...

It was just so damned awesome. It was so awesome I actually learned how to activate it in BASIC on the console. Something like

SOUND 1, 255, 10, 15
SOUND 2, 254, 10, 15
POKE 53768, 1

Heh, those were the days.

 

[JSOP]

Good story. The first time you experience an SSD boot up after years of HDD is a special moment. For me it was a face palm for waiting so long.

Well can't blame you. There were all those issues of "instability" and data loss with SSD. I mean speed is one thing but you don't really want a drive that's gonna lose your data and do god knows what all the time.

 

[VicBee]

HDDs have an average lifespan of 7 years. I didn't believe it until... well, for me it needed to be twice, I learn it was, the hard way.

I've been on SSD and NVMe for at least 10 years.

 

[Overnight]

HDDs have an average lifespan of 7 years. I didn't believe it until... well, for me it needed to be twice, I learn it was, the hard way.

I've been on SSD and NVMe for at least 10 years.

Indeed. The thing with my situation is...The last time I needed a new HD, it was time to get a new PC anyways (The dedicated trading machine). But the spinny drives had become so reliable. That's why I didn't realize the power of the SSD until now.

My trading machine? Hell, it's an Asus desktop about 7 years old with a 2TB spinny disc. And I have used only 500 GB of the thing! (That's why a trading machine does not need a lot of space, when you use it for just trading).

I trust Asus over Lenovo for reliability...Should I consider cloning the trading machine spinny HD? Bah.

 

[VicBee]

Indeed. The thing with my situation is...The last time I needed a new HD, it was time to get a new PC anyways (The dedicated trading machine). But the spinny drives had become so reliable. That's why I didn't realize the power of the SSD until now.

My trading machine? Hell, it's an Asus desktop about 7 years old with a 2TB spinny disc. And I have used only 500 GB of the thing! (That's why a trading machine does not need a lot of space, when you use it for just trading).

I trust Asus over Lenovo for reliability...Should I consider cloning the trading machine spinny HD? Bah.

I would definitely clone it, if only for safety reason. Sometimes these damn spinning drives don't give enough warning before they die and prevent free data extraction.
For trading, a small size SSD or NVMe is enough. I'd put my money on faster RAM and at least 16GB. But the key is the plug to the web.

 

[Overnight]

...
For trading, a small size SSD or NVMe is enough. I'd put my money on faster RAM and at least 16GB. But the key is the plug to the web.

As far as trading goes?

In my mind, this is daytrading/scalping..

In my mind, this is swing/position trading...