

Linus Torvalds Compares Hard Disks to Satan - gregpurtell
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/linus-torvalds-hard-disks/

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benologist
What a thoroughly uninteresting read. Linus doesn't like the noise and
latency, developers prefer SSDs.

Stay tuned as this breaking news unfolds!

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ben0x539
Way to take a handful of offhand comments from someone else's interview and
try to spin it into an entire article for your own publication.

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greenyoda
Indeed. For reference, here's Linus' actual quote from the linked Slashdot
article[1]:

 _I'm not actually all that much of a storage guy, and while I'm the top-level
kernel maintainer, this is likely a question that would be better asked of a
number of other people.

The one (personal) thing storage-related that I'd like to re-iterate is that I
think that rotating storage is going the way of the dodo (or the tape). "How
do I hate thee, let me count the ways". The latencies of rotational storage
are horrendous, and I personally refuse to use a machine that has those nasty
platters of spinning rust in them.

Sure, maybe those rotating platters are ok in some NAS box that you keep your
big media files on (or in that cloud storage cluster you use, and where the
network latencies make the disk latencies be secondary), but in an actual
computer? Ugh. "Get thee behind me, Satan"._

[1] [http://meta.slashdot.org/story/12/10/11/0030249/linus-
torval...](http://meta.slashdot.org/story/12/10/11/0030249/linus-torvalds-
answers-your-questions)

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michaelfeathers
Linus used to say controversial things.

~~~
kamaal
That's actually one way to get famous. And it works very well.

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meaty
Having just spent the majority of yesterday recovering a backup thanks to my
laptop disk going pop, I agree.

Can anyone recommend a decent SSD (SATA2)? I am considering crucial m4.

~~~
rit
The OCZ drives are fantastic. I'm running a Vertex 3 right now, which rates at
about 60,000 IOPS. It was a replacement for a short lived Crucial.

 _This is entirely anecdotal, and by no means a smear against Crucial_ I put a
Crucial into my laptop the day before departing on a 3 month business trip to
Europe last year.

By the time I got to London, the drive had failed utterly and completely.
Thankfully, I had stuffed my previous drive into my bag with me and was able
to recover.

I replaced it with the OCZ ( It amuses me that my time in London has made me
hear that in my head as "Oh Cee Zed" ... I believe they have an even better
Vertex 4 now ) and it has been a rock solid workhorse.

I've since hauled that laptop + drive over about 120k miles and 15 countries
without so much as a blip.

Again, anecdotal but I adore this drive.

~~~
yskchu
My experience with OCZ is not as nice; their Vertex 2 has a bug where if you
sleep the machine too many times, you may get data loss. Total data loss.
Heaps of people on the OCZ forums having the same issue.

Luckily had weekly backups, so only lost one week's worth of data, but still.

This kinda soured me against trying any new OCZ...

Now I have an Intel SSD; pricier, but well worth it.

~~~
Kliment
Same experience, with two separate OCZ drives. Total irrecoverable data loss.
Yay backups. I switched to Intel too in the end.

~~~
jasomill
And, having had a similar problem with Intel, I switched to Samsung. So it
goes.

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meaty
I grabbed one OCZ and one Samsung. Fingers crossed.

Managed to persuade company to pay for it as well as I'm being a guinea pig
user :)

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wyclif
What are some good prosumer SSDs for people putting together new desktop
boxen?

~~~
jrockway
My experience is a bit outdated, but I've had good luck with both Intel drives
and the OCZ Vertex series. If I were going to buy an SSD today, it would
probably be the 240GB Intel 520.

