Only the penny-stock corporations. But it's easier for a herd of camels to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich corporation to go to Heaven.

You should read more of his posts.

Everyone except rich people and wannabes, apparently. It's the MAKE MONEY FAST mentality that has mortally wounded our economy over the past 35 years.

I especially like it when someone wants their representatives to eliminate entitlements, but don't dare touch their medicare and social security.

Full disclosure: I probably qualify as "old", and perhaps "confused" too. (Though if both, the later may not be caused by the former.)

No, its a stupid recommendation. Spinning rust doesn't last very long on a shelf. It will rapidly go bad mechanically if you keep switching between shelf and active. SSDs are far superior and data retention is going to remain very high until they really dig into their durability. If you still care, there's no reason why you can't just leave them disconnected from a computer but still powered... they eat no real current compared to a hard drive. SSD-based data retention should be 30+ years if left powered... impossible to test as yet :-)... but no reason why not.

However, for backup purposes there is still an issue of cost. Using SSDs for bulk backup storage can be expensive... it wouldn't matter for a big business so much but cost can be a big issue for individual users.

SSDs don't go bad the way HDDs do. With a HDD maximum reasonably-safe life is 3 years whether powered or not (and swapping between powered and shelf will radically reduce its durability). With a SSD only durability really matters. A business can easily justify buying the required SSD storage in bulk with a marginal cost calculation, but it might be too big a hunk of change for an individual.

Personally speaking I still use HDDs for my backups, for reasons of cost, but I expect in the next few years that will change as SSD prices continue to drop. I just bumped up from 2TB x 3 (active, on-site backup, off-site backup) to 4TB x 3. My storage needs are going up more slowly than the technology is dropping in price. The two will meet in a few years and I'll be 100% SSDs. I'm already 100% SSDs for everything else. No point even contemplating a HDD any more except for bulk backup storage or software test rigs.

-Matt

Actually, more and more SSDs today *DO* have power loss protection. Take it apart... if you see a bunch of capacitors on the mainboard all bunched together with no obvious purpose it's probably to keep power good long enough to finish writing out meta-data. Cheaper to use a lot of normal caps than to use thin-film high capacity caps.

-Matt

This is not related to the SSD. If your cpus are pegged then it's something outside the disk driver. If it's system time it could be two things: (1) Either the compilers are getting into a system call loop of some sort or (2) The filesystem is doing something that is causing lock contention or other problems.

Well, it could be more than two things, but it is highly unlikely to be the SSD.

One thing I've noticed with fast storage devices is that sometimes housekeeping operations by filesystems can stall out the whole system because the housekeeping operations assume the disk I/O will block when, in many cases, the disk I/O completes instantly and essentially does not block, causing the kernel thread to eat more cpu than intended.

-Matt

These tests explicitly state that the SSD is rewritten until it reaches its endurance rating before the retention test is done. At that point the flash in a consumer would not be expected to retain data unpowered for more than 1 year.

If you write your data to a fresh SSD once, multiply the number by at least 10.

-Matt

There's no guarantee that ECCS are independent and can operate in the vent of station blackout. The HPCI used in Fukishima, for example, is a steam turbine-driven pump but not a generator, and it has electrical components that require operation. Which is why it didn't prevent meltdown.

The primary turbines are not designed to operate on the amount of power generated from decay heat alone.

Scotty will have the power back just in time.

Small upgrades, this already happens.

Large upgrades, by phasing out old units and building new ones. The complex as a whole remains.

Taking down an old unit is BTW a very large task ("decommissioning"), can take decades and comes at extreme expense. Which is part of why plant operators try to keep their old units going as long as possible, even when they've become expensive to operate.

Could you, so that we know where you're coming from, elaborate on where renewables "dont cut it"?

These "some environmental groups" include the governor of New York, who is trying to get the plant permanently shut down.

It's not fringe radicals who think it's a bad idea to have a nuclear plant right next to the largest population center in the United States.

Right, because generators the size needed to operate nuclear power plants are the sort of thing that you just pick up at any corner hardware store and "drive up and plug in"?

here's what one of those generators looks like. A nuclear power power plant may have a dozen or more in their generator building. Even replacing just one is not some sort of couple day task. These things take prep work and a lot of labour to acquire, move, install and set up. Weeks to months. That's all assuming that the generator building itself is still usable; a failure in such a large generator, or the sort of external event that can take out such a large generator, is not exactly some sort of low energy event.

Back before Fukushima people like you were all over Slashdot harping about how major nuclear disasters couldn't happen again, that it's only possible with old Soviet designs like Chernobyl that are horribly misused. Quit being so damned short sighted. Unforseen events and cascading failures do happen. You can't just act like "the list of causes of major that have already happened is the entire comprehensive list of what could cause major failures".

If you scram, lose your grid connection and lose your generators, you will likely get a Fukushima-like event. Two of the three happened here. Let's not pretend that the concept of something taking out the generator room, or otherwise preventing its power from working the pumps - generators which are only rarely tested - is such a preposterous concept. And let's not be silly and act like massive pieces of industrial equipment can just be plopped down and hooked up like a little Honda generator.

I do believe it flew a lot closer than that in 2015.