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Comment Re:Recoverable Failure rate: 99.9% HDD, 1% SSD (Score 1) 512

If you're using engine check lights as an analogy to SMART data so you know when to swap out a drive, I still disagree. Once SMART data goes bad, you can usually still get data off the drive but I wouldn't trust it to not have some corruption. I'd just yank the drive, rebuild the RAID if the machine needs high availability, or copy over from backup if it doesn't.

If recovering from backup and the backup isn't quite up to date I'd probably try some kind of data recovery, but I wouldn't want to rely on it.

Comment Re:Do the math (Score 1) 512

Compiling is almost ALWAYS IO bound for a project of any size. Why do you think make -j 4 or make -j 8 makes a noticeable difference on even single core machines? Because the compiler spends most of its time waiting on disk IO, reading and writing all those intermediate files.

From my experience when I toyed around with Gentoo a few years ago, make -j worked best when the number provided was {core count + 1}. Any more than that and it slowed down due to context switching overhead and/or disk head thrashing.

VisualStudio also supports parallel compilers for this exact same reason.

It has severe limitations. It doesn't work when you need to import TLB files, it does not work with incremental rebuilds, and it doesn't play particularly nicely with precompiled headers. The former is required for our project to build at all, and the latter 2 improve productivity more than using multiple threads (YMMV).

Comment Re:Do the math (Score 1) 512

I upgraded to an SSD recently and compile times didn't really change at all, which was surprising. Boot times, application load times, system responsiveness etc however are massively improved. At least on my setup (Xeon E31270, Windows 7, Visual Studio), compile times aren't particularly IO limited.

Comment Re:RAID (Score 2, Insightful) 552

That's just asinine. You should never rely on recovery of data from a broken drive to avoid data loss. Even if you do recover data from a broken HDD you shouldn't trust it hasn't had some form of corruption. Always have a backup. If you have backups, who cares if the drive is recoverable?

Also, don't buy Sandforce SSDs. There are plenty of alternatives that are faster and more reliable.

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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