No mo' hard drives

   / No mo' hard drives #51  
Already made that mistake, but I didn't know it from time sadly. I was panicking, didn't know what to do, because the files were very important and I thought that there is no way to recover them somehow. I went searching on the internet, and this is how I discovered DATA RECOVERY service, and thanks to them everything is all right now. I've got all the files back, and now I am saved from working on them again, a lot of time invested and everything could have been in vain.
 
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   / No mo' hard drives #52  
Wife's Dell computer failed last night. Only 4 years old. Don't know whether it is the power unit or hard drive. Will remove hard drive before recycling and plug it in and see if it works.

Bought her a Dell all-in-one mainly because it was 1 left at Bestbuy and has what I want, very much like the HP all-in-one I'm working on. About $800 for pooter, new Office and video/USB adaptor to use her old screen as a 2nd like I have here on the HP.

No hard drive in either one. A fairly big fixed drive but with 1 TB of cloud storage. Picture attached is similar to what it looks like but in black and 2 legs instead of legs across. CPU and all are behind the monitor. Like these. Down side is USB inputs are all on the back, and flash card insert is behind the on/off switch underneath. Wireless kb and mouse.

Spent the whole day except for brief lunch and our hour hike about 1 setting the thing up: one glitzch after another; it seemed. Then wife complains that her Ivy Farm notes aren't there. That's cuz I elected to only install her calendar and contacts in Outlook, not the big PST file.

Ralph
My hard drive failed in my Dell all in one after 6 years. I had a computer repair store install a solid state drive for $200. It runs faster now and better than new.
 
   / No mo' hard drives #54  
I would never use cloud storage for anything expect what you don't mind not having access to. It's to easy to be held for ransom.
Oh have I got bad news for you. You bank balance, investment accounts, social security account, all your video streaming and this website are “in the cloud”. Cloud storage is just a drive that isn’t in your house, and it’s almost always more reliable than the cheap drive in your home PC. For one thing, it gets backed up regularly.
 
   / No mo' hard drives
  • Thread Starter
#55  
Both my wife and I have all-in-one machines with solid state drives. Boot up so much faster. Hers is a Dell. Mine is HP.
 
   / No mo' hard drives #56  
Both my wife and I have all-in-one machines with solid state drives. Boot up so much faster. Hers is a Dell. Mine is HP.
I've been building apps for 35 years and I have all manner of computers. For non-work stuff my go to device is an iPad with a keyboard cover. It's always on, it just works and it has a SIM card so I can use it anywhere ($10 a month for additional SIM on my phone plan)
 
   / No mo' hard drives #57  
I think I will stick with hard drives and back ups. I am migrating to SSDs.
No SSD's yet, but I'm sticking with hard drives
The "cloud" can be (probably already has been) hacked, and there's data I keep under my control
 
   / No mo' hard drives #58  
Oh have I got bad news for you. You bank balance, investment accounts, social security account, all your video streaming and this website are “in the cloud”. Cloud storage is just a drive that isn’t in your house, and it’s almost always more reliable than the cheap drive in your home PC. For one thing, it gets backed up regularly.
Not only that but unless you're storing your backups offsite then you're exposing yourself to data loss. Worked with a guy who thought backing up to a 2nd external drive was enough until someone broke into his house and stole all his equipment. Countless years of family pics and other irreplaceable data gone forever. A house fire could do the same. There's no rational reason to fear cloud storage as long as you're using a legit company like MSFT or Google. Their cloud servers are better protected and more secure in every conceivable way compared to the PC in your house.

As to SSDs, I've been using them since they first were a thing and have experienced 0 failures in all that time. Seen plenty of mechanical HD failures though.
 
   / No mo' hard drives #59  
I haven't had a hard drive in a computer in 2 Lenovos and a Dell ago. I would never own another new hard drive computer. Take my word for it, They don't travel well. Crashed 3 hard drives from so much travel and handling. However, I have an old Dell Latitude running XP that I have hauled around and shipped everywhere and it's still going. I only use it to attach and program my voltage regulators. I guess they just don't make em like that anymore.
 
   / No mo' hard drives #60  
Some myths about computers.

You can't RAID an SSD..... Yes, you can.

Multi cores and hyper-threading make a computer faster. No they don't. They help by off loading back ground tasks, so the computer doesn't slow down. Your computer is only as fast as its clock speed, and the speed of its different buses and the level of its various interfaces. Very few applications are designed for parallel processing. Multi cores do not SPEED UP a machine.

You can wipe clean an SSD of all data. Nope. Every manufacturer has their own mapping system. There is no, approved, DOD method of wiping an SSD or any form of SS memory. I have been able to recover many of these, under direction from the owners, to recover, even after they have run Darik's Nuk'em.

Recycling centers love it when you drill holes in your old hard drives. No. We hate you. And we hate you with a passion when you drop off this little gift full of silicon shards that we then have to bag as hazardous waste. For god's sake, just press the central spindle on a bearing press till you hear it crack the frame. Or slam the central spindle with a hammer, but stop drilling them, and stop shooting them.

Speaking of drills, a reading device, like a floppy drive with no disk or a USB port, or RAM memory, or the CPU doesn't contain any information. Maybe the NSA could recover something, but you need millions of dollars of equipment to do that.

We once got a machine that had been drilled, they drilled the motherboard, they drilled the power supply, they snapped all the ram in half, they drilled the floppy drives, the GPU card, the network card, bent all the pins on the CPU, and mangled all the ports with a screwdriver. The only thing left functioning was the 500 GB hard drive. Curious, I ran a preliminary
scan on the hard drive, cause these were valuable at the time... which doesn't give any info, but can tell if info is there. And it was completely intact and not wiped and passed the performance tests. So we wiped it, and resold it.

MS operating systems are secure if you use an admin password. No. No. No they are not. :) MS is so terrible at security, that if a client, didn't know their password for admin or some other account, it was easier, to run cracking soft, see it, and then tell them what the password was then to have them play phone tag at guessing what it was. 8 minutes and I'm in. Other wise just put the drive in a Linux environment and read it anyway.

Just know that a recycle site, or a refurbisher, can not say honestly if they can wipe your SSD, M.2 Stick, or board level SS memory. We really can't be sure.
 
 
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