You're an idiot if you're complaining about this.

Well, good day to you too, sir.

My complaint isn't about the message, it's the method of delivery. Or rather, the inability to turn off The President's Mouthpiece.

I can turn off the AMBER and weather alerts, but not The President's Mouthpiece. That's the part that truly gets my goat. Now listen to your phone like the good little citizen you are!

I don't object to the message, I object to the chosen method of delivery and the inability to opt-out of the most ominous. In other words, if the Government speaks and one has a WEA-enabled device, one must listen like a good little citizen!

You know, like those radios some governments had mandated you have. Good luck if they found you with a non-compliant radio.

Caused by policies enacted during the Clinton and Carter administrations, which the Republicans had twice tried to repeal. The Clinton-era economic boom was the bubble rising; Bush and Obama inherited the bust.

Actually, the root causes can be traced back to FDR's New Deal, and probably further. No-one came out of that mess smelling like a rose, but trying to pin the blame solely on either Bush or Obama is simply short-sighted.

Yes. And one of the reasons for having hot spares (and replicas and backups) is the chance of multiple drive failures close together. So it's not a problem if you've planned things properly, but it's something you need to consider to create a good plan in the first place.

Depends a lot on the drive, but that can be a problem. The best solution is to either buy a drive with a significant amount of over-provisioning built in (like the Intel S3700 or Seagate 600 Pro) or over-provision it yourself. That means that when it fills up it still has plenty of spare area to remap blocks.

Enterprise drives typically have at least 20% over-provisioning; consumer drives can be 5% or less. A 400GB Seagate 600 Pro is the same as a 480GB Seagate 600, except for that setting.

Micron and Toshiba make them, but they're hard to find. You can also get SLC ioDrives. But the Intel S3700 looks to be nearly as good, and much, much cheaper.

Not off hand, sorry. I haven't been the sysadmin for 18 months (moved back to programming), and I don't want to give a guess that might be off by a factor of two.

Because if write wear is the prime failure mode and you're running RAID, you're likely to lose multiple SSDs in a relatively short interval.

You can build a 48-core Opteron server with 512GB of RAM for under $8000. Going over 512GB in a single server gets a lot more expensive (you either need expensive high-density modules or expensive 8-socket servers - or both) but if you can run some sort of cluster that's not a problem.

It's a mix. We use enterprise drives for the really heavy stuff, and mainstream drives for data that's either read-only, read-mostly, or is in a database that does sequential writes like TokuDB or Cassandra.

We've been using SSDs in our servers since late 2008, starting with Fusion-io ioDrives and Intel drives since then - X25-E and X25-M, then 320, 520 and 710, and now planning to deploy a stack of S3700 and S3500 drives. Our main cluster of 10 servers has 24 SSDs each, we have another 40 drives on a dedicated search server, and smaller numbers elsewhere.

What we've found:

* Read performance is consistently brilliant. There's simply no going back.
* Random write performance on the 710 series is not great (compared to the SLC-based X25-E or ioDrives), and sustained random write performance on the mainstream drives isn't great either, but a single drive can still outperform a RAID-10 array of 15k rpm disks. The S3700 looks much better, but we haven't deployed them yet.
* SSDs can and do die without warning. One moment 100% good, next moment completely non-functional. Always use RAID if you love your data. (1, 10, 5, or 6, depending on your application.)
* Unlike disks, RAID-5 or 50 works pretty well for database workloads.
* We have noted the leading edge of the bathtub curve (infant mortality), but so far, no trailing edge as older drives start to wear out. Once in place, they just keep humming along.
* That said, we do match drives to workloads - SLC or enterprise MLC for random write loads (InnoDB, MongoDB) and MLC for sequential write/random read loads (TokuDB, CouchDB, Cassandra).

We have hundreds of SSDs in production servers. We couldn't survive without them. For heavy database workloads, they are the silver bullet to I/O problems, so much so that running a database on regular disk has become almost unimaginable. Why would you even try to do that?

Three year old Mac Pro: Up to 12 cores, 64GB RAM.

Not even released yet Mac Pro: Up to 12 cores, 64GB RAM.

So... No.

One PCIe 3 x16 slot is 128GT/s using 128b/130b encoding (i.e. data transfer can use >98% of the theoretical bandwidth). So ~126Gbps.

Six Thunderbolt 2 connectors are 6 x 20GT/s using 8b/10b encoding (80% efficient), so 96Gbps.