Yah, I got that precise one, since the 16G NGFF card it comes with is too small for my comfort. However, 128GB is not enough when I'm filling up 64G camera cards each day. For off-camera backups I have a 512G 2.5" SSD.

At the moment my plan is to upgrade the internals to the 128GB NGFF card for the base OS and then use my 512G SATA SSD and one of those Apricorn USB->SATA adapters (powered by the USB port so really only works well with SATA SSDs) to connect it up to the chromebook when needed.

I had originally purchased a System76 to take with me into the field but it turned out to be a bit too bulky and the clamshell is a bit too fragile (beyond that, though the System76 is a really nice regular-sized laptop). I'm sick and tired of the small Atom tablet I had before... so hopefully the chromebook w/its haswell cpu will be a good replacement despite not having a full 2.5" SSD SATA port built-in.

-Matt

I just ordered one of these precisely for its small form factor and haswell guts. Haven't gotten it yet but I had been looking for something along those lines for over a year now. The only downside is that the internal storage uses a NGFF (M.2) SSD slot rather than a full-blown SATA port, so the amount of storage you can throw into it is limited.

That said, I expect I can just upgrade the internals to ~64G and then connect up an external SSD via USB for higher capacity to backup my camera cards.

-Matt

There seems to be a general misunderstanding by many folks on who inflation hurts the most... I guess because a lot of people want to blame inflation for all their troubles. But inflation is not the cause of your troubles, folks.

Inflation hurts people with more money the most, because inflation only affects people who actually hold money for long periods of time. People with very little money (for example, who live pay-check to pay-check or have only a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of dollars in the bank) simply do not carry the cash long enough for inflation to have any effect.

Even at modest levels of inflation a person working pay-check to pay-check is spending the cash almost immediately after receiving it. Most people... most of the population, spends the cash within a year (or sooner). Losses from inflation are minimal in those situations. But for anyone with real savings inflation is a problem that can only be solved by investing the cash and receiving a better return... outpacing the inflation.

How does inflation transfer more money to the government? People seem confused about this too. The answer is also simple: Through taxes on gains. If I own stock in company X and it is worth $100, and 25 years later through inflation the company is valued at $200 and I cash it out, I owe taxes on the $100 difference even though the intrinsic value of my stock has not changed. This also tends to have a lower effect on the less affluent because the less affluent tend to be in a lower tax bracket. Taxes due to inflation wind up being a huge component for the affluent, and near zero if you are poor.

Inflation is the bane of the rich, not of the poor, and always has been.

What people misunderstand the most is the relationship between wages and inflation, particularly when the average worker is losing ground due to wages not keeping up. Wages not keeping up is not really a function of inflation, but more a function of supply and demand. The supply of jobs and the number of people looking for jobs, in various categories. As inflation occurs and wages become insufficient, workers demand raises. This is why we see strikes here and there in different industries all the time.

It is true that inflation makes it easier for employers to allow worker wages to stagnate. It would be hard to argue against that, but employers can only stretch the mechanic so far. The bigger problem for the average worker is that the skill requirements for jobs change and older workers tend to not keep up with the changing environment, becoming marginalized. For example, working a metal cutting tool in the old days required significant labor but little education. In modern times it requires having factory programming skills and enough knowledge to ensure that you do not accidentally destroy a $50,000 piece of machinery or kill yourself.

All this talk about bitcoin somehow magically being a way to work around inflation is just hogwash. There are many things which work around inflation with FAR less volatility and risk than bitcoin... bonds, stocks, and so forth. None of these things are riskless, and many work on the similar principle of having a fairly limited supply (a blue-chip stock, for example), and thus for a stable business tends to be immune from inflation in the long-run (except for taxes later on when you sell, but bitcoin won't save you from taxes either).

The idea that one can simply conjure money out of thin air with no risk and no investment has NEVER worked in the past and won't work for bitcoin either, but I guess there's a siren's song involved here similar to the siren's song that attracts so many people to casino gambling (despite 'gambling' in the stock market being more lucrative than 'gambling' in a casino).

The lack of education prevalent in this age of boundless information just astounds me. People are literally blind to proven facts that they don't happen to agree with.

-Matt

Heh. Talk is cheap. I hear stories like that all the time on financial forums, but rarely is it actually true. Still, at least some of the stories are going to be true... the problem is that most of them are not, and the far larger numbers of people who got cleaned out on the other side of the trade instead don't boast about their losses so...

Hope you paid your taxes when you cashed them out!

-Matt

Turns out that wasn't true. The Bitcoin had to be converted to cold hard cash first. Nor was the article about the Tesla being sold for bitcoin.

-Matt

Minus the taxes you owe for the capital gain.

-Matt

Yes, but without the protections of a government regulated middleman, which is what normal exchanges have, the traders involved will be subject to extraordinary risks on those sorts of contracts (totally separate from the actual trading value of a bitcoin which itself carries extraordinary risks). Even the current Bitcoin exchanges are subject to severe carry risks (as people using one of the Chinese exchanges that pulled up stakes and disappeared along with all of their money found out recently).

I think there are a lot of people who don't really understand how the public stock or derivatives markets work and believe, falsely, that the mechanisms can be safely replicated by an unregulated entity. Frankly, it takes supreme stupidity to trust any amount of money to these businesses.

-Matt

Mmm. I kinda wonder how you could possibly believe that Bitcoin is a good store of value when it's 'value' can fluctuate 50% in 2 days and when it has a trading spread of over 2% much of the time.

So far all Bitcoin has been good at is in parting fools from their money.

-Matt

Depends how much you value your 'movie and music' collection. Once you take into account the fact that your HDDs have to be replaced every few years no matter what (even if powered off and sitting on a shelf), whereas your SSDs are as good as their write-wear limit.

Since movie and music collections are essentially archival data, the SSD is actually a pretty good medium for storing them long-term. You just rewrite the SSD once every few years to keep all the flash cells fresh (on top of adding new videos and music) and it will last many times longer than a HDD.

This narrows the cost factor by a lot. Take (just for comparison) a 1TB HDD for around $90 and a 1TB SSD for around $530. To be conservative lets say that's about a 6:1 cost ratio (SSD:HDD). But when you factor-in the SSDs far longer life span, even being conservative you are still talking 3 HDD replacements per SSD replacement (and more realistically it will be 6+ HDD life cycles but I'll ignore that for now).

The cost difference for your long-term archival storage is now 2:1. The SSD is still double the price, but look at what you get for that: Always on (eats very little power so you can keep it plugged in), NO wear when not writing, NO replacement hassle every few years. Throw in the need for multiple live backups and/or RAID and it becomes a no-brainer.

I'm sold. That makes it worth it.

-Matt

The write profile of the filesystem, not the write profile of the program. Programs doing small writes, including standard log-writing, will not generally wind up causing small writes to actually go to the media. The filesystem cache will collect them all together and the SSD will actually get fairly optimal writes (or be able to write-combine less optimal writes). Most modern filesystems are going to do a pretty good job of this already.

There are always exceptions, usually niche situations. For example, database updates can often wind up modifying just a few hundred bytes in a large 16KB block of data, fsync(), then randomly seek and do it somewhere else... that can create some serious problems for SSDs if the database is constantly doing random piecemeal writes (verses the simple file appends that log-file writing does), if not managed properly. Databases will have knobs that allow one to tune flushes and that should solve most of the issues people bring up... but not all.

Another common situation is improperly using a SSD to stage gigabytes of temporary data (coming in regularly) that you intend to process and then wipe / start-over. SSDs are great for archiving data that doesn't change much, and can handle a certain number of write/re-write cycles, but you don't want to fill one up then rm -rf then fill it up again continuously. That WILL wear it out.

These sorts of exceptions are not in the majority though. Nearly all consumer use (or even power-user use or unix programmer / personal-home-network use, including modest SWAP use) simply don't generate sufficient write activity to even have to worry about the SSD wear limit. Server use cases will also mostly be SSD-friendly, but there will be situations where they aren't.

It doesn't take a whole lot of brains for a good sysad to deal with it. It's virtually a non-issue in my book. We can't fix stupid sysads or IT managers, and we shouldn't try.

-Matt

MLC at ~20nm is 1000-3000 or so (older MLC's using larger chip feature sizes could run in the 10000+ range). The wear indicator will probably hit zero somewhere between 1000 and 2000 erase cycles (over the full drive). It's usually conservative so it might indicate zero after ~1000 erase cycles or so but it depends, but usually the drive can continue to be written to well past 2000 erase cycles.

However, if you continue to write significantly to the drive after the wear counter reaches zero then you risk catastrophic failure above and beyond what the vendor nominally targets. Cells can wind up going bad and causing massive corruption past a certain point if left to sit a while, even if the last write & verify succeeded.

-Matt

There is a lot of misinformation on SSD failure modes, mostly because people ignore what SMART tells them and run their SSDs into the ground before replacing them.

Basically it comes down to this... The drive has a pretty good idea of how worn-down the flash chips get. It will count-down the wear indicator (from SMART) from 100 to 0. At the point it reaches 0 the drive can no longer guarantee nominal operations.

If you continue writing to the drive AFTER the wear indicator has reached 0 then you CAN have catastrophic failure situations. The more you write to the drive after that point, the more likely it will happen. In many cases you can write 2x or more the amount you wrote to get from 100 to 0 and the drive will work fine, which is why people tend to ignore the wear indicator after it has hit 0. But the drive just can't guarantee that data integrity will be within reason after the wear indicator hits 0.

If you replace the drive when the wear indicator has reached zero then you are far less likely to get a catastrophic failure. Sure they can still happen... failures are not intentionally created by the drive firmware after all. But if you use the wear indicator properly you can mitigate the catastrophic failure cases by at least an order of magnitude (and probably better).

It's that simple.

--

It is also true that there have been many firmware bugs over the years. SSDs at these capacities are fairly new beasts after all. There are dozens and dozens of SSD brands (though really only three major controller chipsets). Firmware is where the differences are. The only two vendors *I* trust are Crucial and Intel and that is it... I trust them because they are clearly staying on top of their firmware upgrades.

Even with the firmware bugs I know exist on my oldest SSDs (Intel 40Grs), I haven't had any failures. In fact, at this point I have at least 30 SSDs in operation and have yet to actually see any honest-to-god failures. I am certainly more confident of newer models (for Intel and Crucial anyhow) than older ones. Firmware might have a few hicups here and there as time passes but it will generally just get better and better. Judging a current deployment based on 5-year-old distrust is stupid.

-Matt

I think you're a bit confused over how normal filesystem operations are cached on a modern OS (e.g. OS X, Linux, BSDs, Solaris, etc). Even normal log writing (whether you run it through a compression program or not) on a normal non-SSD-aware filesystem is not going to result in tiny little writes to the SSD. The writes will simply wind up in the buffer cache (or equivalent) and get flushed to media when the filesystem syncer comes around every 30-60 seconds or so. The most highly fragmented case in this situation might require the SSD to flush a 128KB a dozen times each 60 seconds which doesn't even remotely wear it out. Only a complete idiot tries to fsync() a log file on each line, so baring that ... it isn't an issue.

I've heard this complaint many times over the years and not one person has EVER provided any factual information as to what and how much and how often they are actually writing to the SSD. Not once.

The amount of data being written is always an issue with a SSD, but if it's being permanently stored it actually isn't the issue you think it is because the equivalent cost of storage for archival data is actually better with a SSD simply due to the SSD in write-once situation lasting forever (maybe rewrite a full drive once every 5 years or so to refresh the cells x ~1000-3000 rewrites). The SSD will easily last 25 years or longer (probably until the firmware itself degrades), whereas a HDD has to be replaced every 3-5 years whether it's off, idle, or doing work. SSDs are great for archiving stuff. They take virtually no energy when idle and can simply be left attached and powered and the only real wear occurs when you write.

For temporarily staged data... this is probably a SSDs one issue. There is a wear limit after all, so constantly rewriting the drive at a high rate will wear it out. But this is also a problem with an easy solution... since such data is usually laid down linearly and processed linearly, HDDs are still useful as a storage medium. Simpler staging of temporary data doesn't even have to use ANY media if the data trivially fits in ram... you just use a tmpfs mount and schedule a job to process the data at reasonable intervals.

In terms of swap, again you appear to be confused. Simply placing swap on a SSD is not going to wear it out. It depends heavily on how much the OS actually pages data in and out. In most consumer/home-system situations the answer will be 'not often' (relative to the SSD's wear limit). In a server situation swap is not written to under normal operating conditions at all unless someone made a major mistake. It's just there to handle DOS attacks and burst situations in order to allow the system to be tuned to utilize all of its resources as fully as possible.

For example, again a 'tmpfs' (memory filesystem) which is backed by swap can actually be VERY write-efficient since the OS isn't going to flush it to its backing media unless the system is actually under memory pressure. If one schedules things such that the system is not normally under memory pressure (which is a typical case for a server installation), then the SSD won't be worn out... but it will be available for those situations that happen every once in a while that really need it.

Oh well, I don't expect much from Slashdot posters anyway. But, honestly, these things should be obvious to people by now.

-Matt

That's a joke, right? You actually believe Bitcoin is accepted and trusted by merchants? You can count the number of serious businesses trying to use bitcoin on one hand. Walmart's virtual currency is already used in far more transactions than Bitcoin ever will be.

You are staring at pretty numbers on a screen and have absolutely no sense of scale.

And as far as credit cards go, the space is getting pretty crowded already with Yahoo, Google, and others pushing into the space (after realizing that wallet apps are pretty useless without them). Lets see someone due monetary conversions to a bitcoin account with a credit card and see how long it takes them to either go bankrupt or be forced to charged significant fees to stay in business.

Bitcoin has no advantage whatsoever as a first-mover when the 'currency' is too unstable to actually be usable in the wider world of commerce.

-Matt

Why would the world population want to do that when they could be using BTC2 or BTC3 or ... BTC (each with a slight tweek of the algorithm) instead?

There are tons of virtual currencies already in existence, and no barrier to entry for creating more (including no barrier to entry for creating clones of Bitcoin that use a different cryptographic base).

-Matt