Posts by baka

Do SSD failures follow the bathtub curve? Ask Backblaze

these are consumer SSDs!

based on the capacities, these appear to all be consumer-ish SSDs. enterprise SSDs should have an even better AFR. And bleh on Seagate and WD, their drives suck, as evidenced by the results...

Brocade wrongly sacked award-winning salesman who depended on company insurance for cancer treatment

Hock Tan is a heartless asshole

I know Broadcom is well viewed by investors because Hock Tan is a heartless asshole that demands these kinds of actions, but man, I wish some of these investors would personally understand how ruthless he really is. I was in a company that was acquired by Avago/Broadcom, and during a company-wide all hands meeting, he basically said I bought this company for this division directly, the others either don't have a great roadmap that shows growth, or I'll find an idiot willing to take this other division off my hands. Those of us who were in the divisions he was either going to close or sell off were shocked that he was so apparent and smirking about it. Needless to say, once he found a taker for my division, we were gone and had to be out of the building the day the sale was announced.

Amazon drops battery-powered Echo speaker so you can play Despacito on the go

I really love my amazon tap, thank you Woot!

Glad this is being created. There's a lot of cool BT speakers out there, but the ability to tell my speakers to play from Spotify instead of doing it via phone is kind of nice.

Seagate spins off a bit of cash from slowing disk drive business

Would be hilarious if they spun off the hilariously terrible acquisitions made under Phil Brace's watch. As an ex-Seagate employee that was in the SSD side of things, I'd be surprised if they found a stupor.. errr suitor to take the SSD interests. Xyratex team is all but gone. There's still some StorageTek guys, but its a shell. I just don't see what assets are left to spin out for any real cash compared to their investment.

RIP Netezza, IBM’s FPGA-powered data warehousing dream

weird, just met the product managers at DellWorld a few months ago and was working with them on a project...

Analyst: Intel flash supply partnership prospects could point to SK Hynix

It does and it doesn't make sense. Hynix was a partner with them on the client drives on the NAND side, but not on the SSD controller side.

For datacenter, the drop-off in performance from Intel's current 4510 offering to Hynix's PE4010 would anger nearly all of Intel's customers.

Not only that but the amount of FW cusomization required for some of their OEM customers is not some Hynix has a good track record with,

NAND it feels so good to be a gangsta: Only Intel flash revenues on the rise after brutal quarter

I'm in the flash game, and it fucking sucks.

A year after Logitech screwed over Harmony users, it, um, screws over Harmony users: Device API killed off

Re: They should stick to mice and keyboards

Ditto. An expensive USB "HD" Webcam and a failed foray into expensive Xbox Gaming headsets.

I was a harmony user too, but after they pulled this hub stuff it sealed the deal.

Disk is dead, screeches Violin – and here's how it might happen

Re: This will kill X blah blah blah!

I can use a sata analyzer and record data from host to SSD. big deal. you can read data from jtag, not the same thing. if the controller is encrypting before it is being written to flash, then what you are looking at is meaningless data.

Re: This will kill X blah blah blah!

I don't agree with how hard it is purported to be to erase a drive (controller dependent) For drives with internal encryption, a secure erase just throws away the encryption keys. Without the encryption keys, the data on the drive is useless. Yeah you can see data, but it is encrypted data that cannot be decrypted. Even client class SSDs ship with this today (SandForce is first that comes to mind).

And yeah, very difficult to recover dead drives. In general if anything in the root area (controller FW / LBA map, etc) becomes corrupted, especially near the end of the life of the drive, then it is toast. In most cases if your primary root record is toast, your secondary (backup) root record is gone too. Its really a matter of the controller croaking rather than the flash as you mentioned. But also when/if a drive enters read-only mode Windows will blue screen because windows likes to write to disks.... and if writes are ignored, windows no likey... either completes boot if this is a secondary drive and doesnt recognize the drive anymore, OR if this is primary, you're duped into believe you can't use the drive anymore.

TLC and QLC suck at performance

TLC today (non-samsung) is about 300-500 PE cycles. Thats 1/10th of MLC. I am sure QLC is going to be even worse. Yes your SSD controllers can expand the life of these, but not enough to make up the difference in cost (up to 20% cheaper) and performance (I bet QLC will be a real slug).

Oh boy a cheap SSD that lasts 3 days in a server and is still more expensive than an HDD!

The labor costs to keep switching these out will likely outweigh the small performance benefits.

Also, 3D NAND has a long way to go to scratch today's MLC and TLC pricing. Its a brand new (read: expensive) process that until it is a 1/2yr into major production will be much more expensive.

QLC, sigh.

Google tries to quietly trample on Apple's toes

not "open"

check the specs... this phone does not support AT&T 3G data band, so in reality it is not a phone that any AT&T customer would be able to use. Booooo!

Why go through the trouble of designing a phone that doesn't support this? I thought there were HTC phones in AT&T's lineup already.

Nintendo Wii 'like a virus', games boss sniffs

reality sets in

hmmm i think the bigger thing to notice is that the 360 has been out much longer than the Wii. Since the 360 launched in 2005, does that mean it's owner have only purchased 7 games since then? That's a bit over 2 games per year... hardly worth batting an eye at. The Wii was released in the US on Nov 11 2006 and was difficult to find until lately.. yet still outselling xbox. This means customers have had less than 2 years to buy games, and at 3.5 per system, this means a run rate of more than 2 games a year.

Bubbly billygoat-bursting boffinry brouhaha at MoD

Send a human instead

I never understand these animal rights activists... If they want to stop testing on goats, they should volunteer themselves. If they are unwilling to do that, they should shut up and be happy that humans don't have to die in the name of science.

What's 77.1 x 850? Don't ask Excel 2007

Excel is also limited to 65536 rows.... conspiracy?

My Analyst wife reminded me that Excel also has a maximum of 65536 rows.... sounds like MS really has an issue with this number and hose surrounding it....