> Me, I treat all media as about to fail.

That's a whole lot easier when you haven't 10x more for the media.

> I installed a SSD for the OS on my Windows 7 DVR. Boot up time was almost 5 minutes with the AV drive.

My cold restart time with MythTV is under a minute with a conventional drive. Some problems are just self inflicted.

> As soon as you make this an insurance problem (calculating and recovering loss) you change the pricing formulas for air travel. It becomes either unprofitable or unaffordable.

That is total bullshit. It's already an insurance problem and the airlines do fine. Airlines are already responsible for getting you safely from point A to point B in a flying Cathedral.

Securing the terminal is a cakewalk in comparison.

The 9/11 attackers were a combination of people of interest and those that could be linked together using public records and 12 year old data mining techniques.

That's why the no-fly list is such a joke.

That kind of nonsense didn't stop 9/11 to begin with.

> Hasn't Apple's Time Machine sort of set the bar a little higher on frequency of backup?

No, not really.

Idiots bring everyone down as much as assholes do. The only thing that really matters is results. Can you use what they produce? Can you maintain it? Can someone else pick it up and continue? This can apply on both sides of the spectrum as a mediocre contributor may produce garbage and require babysitting.

Clearly he's just a cheap bastard and didn't want to pay for the extra drive to run mirrored.

> Good SSDs have tons of metrics available through SMART

Only the good ones? Utter trash in terms of spinning rust have a ton of useful metrics available through SMART. Simplifies the selection process quite a bit when everything is suitable rather than just some select models.

Just how exactly does "that disk was too old" constitute defending Linus?

Sounds like he should have known better. That's probably the way most of the rest of us will take it.

If you think that going back to 1939 would help, you are simply ignorant of the relevant history.

Yeah. We're pretty much the only nation on the planet that hasn't tried to corral and exterminate them. Must be that we're mere pawns in their global conspiracy.

You are trying to flee the spirit of the FSF in Linux.

It's much like trying to avoid the lingering legacy of DOS in Windows.

If you are a wannabe software Robber Baron, then Linux just isn't for you. Finally after all this time the anti-GPL crowd have their own compiler and they're using it. No big surprise there.

I have a 1.5TB drive that's been in service for nearly 5 years.

I usually retire drives not because of failures or disk errors but due to capacity. I've seen drives from 500G up to 4TB and hammered drives of all sizes.

Capacity doesn't really impact longevity.

> You mean like everyone running Windows, as well as anything using an ext filesystem?

You have no idea what you are talking about. Your attempt to cite information you clearly don't understand doesn't alter this.

No one defrags drives under Linux.

NTFS requires defrags? How lame.

I know how thin SSD drives are. I have some. Although I realize their limitations. I just don't swim in the kool-aid or act like some sort of tech fashionista.

It's good that you mention drive failures because spinning rust gives you some warning. It makes it easier to prepare rather than just being surprised suddenly.

The cost difference also makes it more likely that you have some degree of protection either from array redundancy or extra copies of the data.

Not going out of your way to waste as much money as quickly as possible has some practical benefit.