I think it's more like we are catering to the morons.

I was able to recover 95% of the data from the drive after letting the drive cool in a refrigerator (not freezer) so I all that a win for me. But, I'll never trust a Seagate as long as they exist. And yes, a lot of my drives were Seagate drives. Thanks for that bit of info.

Oh, and let me guess.... those SSDs were OCZ SSDs? Right?

I beg to differ on the "average user" comment.

Take my brother's notebook with a slow 5400 RPM hard drive and boot-up times of more than three minutes. I put an SSD into it and it took off like a rocket with sub one minute boot-ups. Same thing happened with my desktop. Even launching a simple desktop program such as Microsoft Word can benefit from an SSD. You double-click the icon instead of waiting as the HDD retrieves several different DLLs from all over the drive to load into RAM, the SSD can load it all in one shot and have the program on the screen in less than two seconds.

SSDs have absolutely stunning performance numbers when it comes to retrieving random bits of data from all over the drive and that's what counts, random read speeds. HDDs absolutely suck at random read speeds and it all comes down to seek times, which absolutely suck.

You're talking about sequential reads. Yes, multiple drives can help in sequential read speeds but 4K Random Read Speeds is what spinning hard drives absolutely suck at. And before you mention that I'm just talking about benchmark numbers, yes... I am talking about benchmark numbers but 4K Random Read benchmark tests very closely mirror real world activity.

You can see this in how the average OS boot-up is slow as shit on an HDD. This is because OS boot-up is pulling seemingly random (at least to the HDD) bits of data from all over the drive which results in having to find the data (seek times) and that's what HDDs absolutely suck at.

I'd have to call bullshit on the "most give you either SMART warning or "delayed write failure" errors long before they die" part. I've had many a drive that was working fine one day, monitoring software showed no signs of pending drive failure, and then... dead the next day. *click* *click* *click* *click* *cry*

You say the problem with SSDs is when wafer shrink, well... it seems that manufacturers have thought about that and have gone back to larger lithograph processes. In fact, Samsung has done just that with their 850 Series SSDs by going to 40nm and 3D-NAND. Not only has Samsung done this but Intel has also been considering SSDs of their own to have 3D-NAND.

I thought the sampling rate refers to how many times per second changes in the wave form are tracked. Obviously the higher the amount of times the wave form changes are tracked per second the more true to the analog form of the wave the digital version of it will be (if that makes any sense). And isn't that what we want? A more true to the original wave form representation? More data should equal less interpretation the DAC needs to do to convert the digital back to analog.

Correct me if I'm wrong but shouldn't a higher sampling rate make up for the stair-step look of the wave form? Obviously the higher the sampling rate the more bits you need to represent the wave form thus resulting in a larger uncompressed audio WAV file.

And you're going to be seeing a lot more companies that have operations in Russia doing the same thing. Don't be surprised that by next year there will be no foreign companies operating in Russia and Russia wants it that way.

Basically, Russia has said in no uncertain terms that they don't want to play ball with the rest of the world. Their latest actions have shown that they want to become an isolationist and cut themselves off from the rest of the world. "We're Russia! We don't need the world! We can survive without you!" That's basically what Russia is saying.

OK Russia, can we have that block of IP addresses that you're not going to be using now that you've cut yourself off from the global Internet?

My car is a 2004 Pontiac Vibe which is really nothing but a re-badged Toyota Matrix. And you know what they say about Toyota's right? Do your regular maintenance like change the oil when you're supposed to and the thing will run until doom's day.

If they didn't spend their money on such lavish houses, cars, vacations, and women they would have money to retire on.

Not only* Typed on a phone with autocorrect. Damn autocorrect.

Other only that but hard drives have started to become more and more unreliable.

When if you want a notebook PC?

I thought that they made it as closed source as Windows is. Apple isn't exactly forthcoming with anything that they do.

Then again, this may be my hate of everything Apple coming through on this.

The whole OS. See Apple Mac OS X as an example.