Being Grateful For What I Have

I hope those of you who read this blog on a regular basis don't get the wrong impression! Despite my various posts, my life is not one long series of new, ever cooler gadgets! A lot of it is just me trying to keep up with the fast pace of modern technological change and to do so without having to expend what I consider to be ridiculous money. In reality, I often sit in wonder at what my modest income has been able to afford me. 

My daily driver "workstation" is an "Ivy Bridge" generation i7 with a Crucial half-terabyte SSD and 32Gb of RAM along with 3 more terabytes of mass storage. All this goodness resides in the Cooler Master Cosmos II Ulber-Case and attached to 4 pretty nice Lenovo ThinkVision monitors which affords me enough desktop real estate to do pretty much whatever I want without having programs double up in space. I use it every day and have never been frustrated in not being able to do ANYTHING! It's pretty much perfectly suited for my needs. 

However, for me, my real prize is the ThinkPad X1. No it's not the later carbon fiber model. It's the original one built around the "Sandy Bridge" i5. Spec-wise, it's not all that impressive. The screen's 1366 x 768, 13" The CPU is of course 3 generations old now, and being "non-carbon" means that it's significantly heavier as well. However, there's hardly anything I don't love about it. It's thin and light in the real sense of those words. The screen is a nice size and low enough resolution for my aging eyes to be able to see well. The SSD, and 8Gb of RAM make it fully capable of everything that I use it to do. As soon I pry her old T500 out of my wife's fingers, it will get a 600Gb Intel 320 SSD in the 2.5" drive bay. Last night I cloned it's Crucial M4, 256Gb mSATA SSD onto a Crucial, 480Gb M500. While that was going on, it occurred to me that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd be able to own a cutting edge design notebook computer with over a Terabyte of solid state storage in it!

From The Ridiculous To The Sublime!

 

It's pretty much all over, but the "cry'in".... With the exception of "mass storage" and I do mean MASS, as in 2Tb or over.... the day of the spinning hard disk drive is over. With the price that they're at today, there's absolutely no reason to not have one in your machine. If you keep an eye out for the constant sales going one, it's not even that challenging to find a 240/256Gb SSD for under a $100! And I don't mean one of those "no-names". I'm talking Sandisk, Mushkin, Crucial, and even some Samsung. It really hit home last week when I was replacing a failed hard drive for a client. I had done some estimates for him between $200 on the low end and $375 on the high of the range from using a "small" (240Gb) SSD for the OS and programs and using first his onboard SD reader for file storage then on to the mSATA later. He decided to go this route because the 1Tb SSDs are still too expensive. While I was shopping for a good drive and SD card, I realized that I could do a 480/512Gb SSD for the combined cost of the original concept! I was able to pick up a Micron C400, 480Gb drive for just short of $140. Sure it's "last gen", but still a nice drive and a huge upgrade from his failing mechanical 500Gb Hitachi HDD. And since his ThinkPad T430 has an onboard mSATA connector, he'll be able to add one of those for more internal storage down the road.

Speaking of....  while shopping for his drive, I came across one of these. A Crucial M500 mSATA drive of 480Gb capacity for $149. I picked it up and plan on cloning the 256Gb, Crucial M4 in my ThinkPad over to it.

In addition, I'm going to take the 600Gb, Intel 320 that was in my wife's (now retired) ThinkPad T500 and put it in the 2.5" drive bay of the X1 giving me over a Terabyte of solid state storage in a sub-1", sub-5lb Ultrabook! Sure, that drive is a SATA-II, but it's file storage, so I think it'll be "OK". I'm not even sure what to do with all that storage, but hey; it's there if I need it!

In the middle of this, my wife's new machine, a ThinkPad T530, got a 480Gb, Intel Pro 2500. Not the fastest SSD, but dead reliable. 

So, what does all this SSD shuffling tell you? Am I just nuts? Maybe, but it's really that the capacity of today's solid state drives have them in a place to replace virtually all mechanical drives not used in mass storage. Here's the telling thing: in no case, did I pay more than $150 for any of these drives! And additional benefit? They are so fast, that just the one change, allows machines that are several years old to be completely usable and even down-right fast and inexpensive! There's just NO reason to still be running a machine with a mechanical hard drive!