2013 — 19 June: Wednesday
It is a truth universally acknowledged1 that I occasionally need to vary my recent diet of Kindle-based Austen Fanfic, so I thought "What better than a German Blu-ray?" (This time, leaving the currency conversion to my fancy new credit card, too.) I alighted upon "Die Tochter meines besten Freundes" with its fabulous cast list.
I leave as an exercise the enigma of its English title, while I sup my morning cup.
Actually...
... I also left Regency England behind for a while yesterday evening while browsing two recent issues of "Custom PC" and the latest "PC Pro" as I fear I feel an attack of the SSDs sneaking up on me. Again. Quite soon. Having loaded all the data, I left my subconscious the task of evaluating the depth of my regard for this beguiling technology as I slept overnight. With the "endurance" of one recent SSD being quoted as 40GB of data written per day for three years (a lifetime 'dose', as it were, of 72TB) this morning's mental printout concludes that should do nicely as my main system disk for (perish the thought) BlackBeast's remaining time on Earth...
Now, where did I hide my piggy bank? Watch this (data) space. [Pause] The 'crucial' component — a "Crucial CT480M500SSD1 2.5-inch 480GB M500 SATA 6Gb/s Internal Solid State Drive" — is now on its way to Technology Towers. Let's hope it will fit neatly inside the present 2.5-inch Velociraptor adapter and accept the present SATA cable.2
Meanwhile, it's time...
... to assemble a packed lunch and throw on a bit of clothing suitable for what may turn out to be quite warm weather for my walk. TTFN.
The oppressive humidity in and around Leckford made our 6.66 mile ramble feel rather longer, but there was no sign of the rain we'd been half-promised by conflicting feather warcasts. I dropped off the three PC magazines, stayed long enough to ensure the escaping cat was recaptured, and headed home for a very much-needed indoor shower.
I shall now be running in "feet up" mode for a while.
SSD pitfall #1
It seems an SSD must be aligned so that a logical sector (clearly a throwback to spinning rust technology) starts on a physical page of the SSD. Otherwise, if a sector spans a page boundary a write operation to it would have to clear twice as many blocks and thus halve the write speed. Logical, Mr Spock. I've found an incantation for use from an administrator command prompt:
Diskpart List disk Select disk n (where n is the number that was given for your SSD in List disk) Clean Create partition primary align=1024 Format fs=ntfs quick Active (assuming you want to install an OS) Exit
Of course, for all I know, the thing will be pre-formatted. But as they're popular with Mac devices, the default file system may not be NTFS, of course. Now I'm left wondering if I should also create a fixed size, aligned, separate partition on the SSD to hold the bulk of the system paging file. Though I (still) don't begin to understand why Windows feels any need to do any paging when I have a large amount of RAM space for it to sprawl around in at its leisure. (What a waste of space.)
Meanwhile, I've just been told that the little lump of hi-tech should turn up on Friday, courtesy of DHL. Since I have visitors arriving (all being well) at about 11:30 that morning for a drive down to Soton to inspect some facilities there, followed by a lunch at a venue I've been asked to suggest, I shall have to keep my fingers crossed that Mr DHL is an early riser who likes to offload little items first on a Friday morning.
If the lingering...
... warmth in my arms and face is any indication, I definitely caught a touch of sun today, to add to the tingles in my shins from an occasional brush with a nettle's miniature hypodermic — and, at one point, we had to step pretty smartly as we passed all too close to a hive abuzz with all too many busy bees. It's a bit of a jungle out there.