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Old January 9th 19, 02:19 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus
Paul[_28_]
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Posts: 1,467
Default All I wanted was just to use that M.2 socket

Anssi Saari wrote:
Paul writes:

Sounds like you have plenty of storage now.
And with the recent price drops, this is as good
a time as any to stock up.


Yeah, I just recently updated my PC and the new(er) motherboard has a
single M.2 slot. As I have accumulated SATA drives over the years I
think it's time to do something. I have two sata SSDs and three HDs now
and two of the HDs are getting pretty old. So cutting that down to one
each would be nice but of course it takes quite a lot of copying data
around...


You've already paid for the HDDs, and with HDDs it's
a roll of the dice whether a particular model is a
good one or not. If the drives really "stink", you're
likely to have seen a hint of that by now.

My favorite drive has disappeared, and I see more Helium
ones. Which would undoubtedly be nice drives (if the
platter was well balanced), but they still can't seek any
faster than the old ones. The sustained transfer rate
will be a little better. And after five years, you'll be wondering
how much helium is left inside.

What you definitely don't want is shingled drives, even
though they've improved the cache behavior. They won't
admit in a datasheet, as to which drives are shingled.
Some 0.8" high Seagate drives, things people would be
tricked into using as boot drives, were actually
shingled (7 tracks in a set, zero clearance between
tracks, must rewrite 7 tracks at a time).

Both Seagate and WDC claim to be "working on a drive with
two arms", but that's been a fantasy for eons. Whereas
their HAMR and MAMR are more realistic technologies because
they're part of a capacity story. Nobody really cares about
speed all that much (they're pretty happy to make the
drives bigger, without a corresponding increase in
the read/write channel). Speed is normally limited by the
heads and read channel amplifiers. It takes DSP
techniques to get the data back.

It would be nice if we could select drives based on
actual tech (NOT shingle AND Helium AND not MAMR),
as any of the "wobbly" technologies don't belong in
my computer room.

Paul