Re: [tlug] Memory upgrade and CPU bit-width question

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 4 January 2016 at 08:31, Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Curt and others for the update on SSD reliability!

Just to add one more data point, I've had three ThinkPad T4x0(s)
laptops in the past four years of work (the latest, a T450s, is only
three months old), all three with SSDs, and had no problems with data
loss or notable performance degradation after 2 / 1.5 / 0.25 years.

> I was looking at portable SSDs recently [...]

By portable, do you mean USB? I was going to recommend ensuring that
the USB bus could transfer data faster than a mechanical drive, but I
just did a bit of research, and was astounded to see that USB 3.0 can
transfer data at 5 Gbps! [1] The fastest mechanical drives seen to be
capable of about 1.6 Gbps sustained read [2], so the bus won't be the
bottleneck there. However, as USB 2.0 is limited to 480 Mbps, an SSD
is pointless in that case.

So, unless I'm missing something obvious, buy an external SSD only if
you have a USB 3.0 port to connect it to, and make sure you don't plug
it into the wrong port by accident. My last ThinkPad had only one 3.0
port and three 2.0 ones, and it's a reasonably high-end model, so I
don't think that all laptops have only 3.0 ports these days.

Cheers,
Josh

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2360306/usb-3-0-speed-real-and-imagined.html
[2] http://www.storagereview.com/wd_black_6tb_hdd_review