Author Topic: Using a UPS to save SSDs  (Read 1436 times)

Doug Bissett

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Re: Using a UPS to save SSDs
« Reply #15 on: November 10, 2023, 01:39:21 am »
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Crucial: no experience of them. And I've concluded from your input that my backup drive may as well be one of those quaint Olde Worlde electromechanical things, with a simple USB-3 cable (to suit), around 1TB or even 500GB, formatted in FAT32 (purely for inter-OS portability).

Crucial has really good performance numbers, and I have had no reason to question that. I will never buy a spinning disk again. They are more expensive, more delicate, and slower than SATA (AHCI) disks. I may even switch totally to NVME sticks, even for external (USB) drives.

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Seemingly it comes with two types of USB-3 cable, which is handy and probably means they can cope.

Cables don't mean much. Adapters are available.

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Avoid: Western Digital and San Disk got no applause, so chuck them on the compost heap.

If you have them, use them, but I wouldn't buy a new one.

[quoteEthernet would mean more cables littering the floor.][/quote]

There may be an advantage to using Ethernet, but I don't know what capabilities your printer has. My HP OfficeJet 3830 has WiFi. No cables, and more function than using the USB connector. If it does what you want, use it, but I would avoid connecting it to a battery.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: Using a UPS to save SSDs
« Reply #16 on: November 10, 2023, 01:55:05 am »

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Seemingly it comes with two types of USB-3 cable, which is handy and probably means they can cope.

Cables don't mean much. Adapters are available.


A friend who would know told me that a USB-3 cable has more computing power than the Apollo Lunar Lander (which landed using computer guidance)
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Andrew Stephenson

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Re: Using a UPS to save SSDs
« Reply #17 on: November 10, 2023, 09:33:27 am »

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Seemingly it comes with two types of USB-3 cable, which is handy and probably means they can cope.

Cables don't mean much. Adapters are available.


A friend who would know told me that a USB-3 cable has more computing power than the Apollo Lunar Lander (which landed using computer guidance)

(Re: those cables)  I mis-phrased, intending to say I presume Seagate ensure supplied cables work properly with their HDD.

(Re: the Apollo Lunar Lander)  Possible.  One snippet of lore I do recall the BBC relaying at the time of Apollo 11 was that the Command Module's onboard computer had (wait for it!) 16KB of RAM.  And it was named "Colossus", maybe referencing D.F.Jones' SF novel, in which an early AI controlling the USA's armaments conspires with a similar Soviet m/c -- but no spoilers from me.

BTW, given the colossal ((clever link, wot)) log-jams of RAM packed into tiny volumes these days, we hear Not A Lot about Error Correcting Code (ECC) RAM in office m/cs.  Did I miss something?  Over in Wikipedia, an article explains: modern CPUs commonly employ ECC within them; and ECC slows down RAM, uses extra power and may call for different support circuitry; but still...   :-\   "Detect-2, correct-1" has been around a lo-o-o-ong time.

Doug Bissett

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Re: Using a UPS to save SSDs
« Reply #18 on: November 10, 2023, 05:49:47 pm »
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(Re: those cables)  I mis-phrased, intending to say I presume Seagate ensure supplied cables work properly with their HDD.

Seagate. like every other manufactuer, use the cheapest cables they can get. USB cables are basically two kind. One is used for charging devices, and the other is used for data. In fact, both are the same (although some charging cables don't have the data wires). I would expect the USB cables, that come with any device, will work with the device. The connectors, and the legth, are the inportant parts.

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(Re: the Apollo Lunar Lander)
16K, in those days, was a huge amount of memory. Remember that it was not running an operating system, only a very specialized, highly optimised, program.

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we hear Not A Lot about Error Correcting Code (ECC) RAM in office m/cs.

ECC, when it was first developed, was am expensive stop gap for poor manufacturing. Today it is an advertising gimick. Memory rarely fails, eliminating the need for ECC (which is just as likely to fail, and slows memory speed). It is generally only used for "mission critical" computers (usually in hospital monitoring machines). If those who mandate that (usually governments), really understood it, thay wouldn't bother.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Using a UPS to save SSDs
« Reply #19 on: November 10, 2023, 06:08:55 pm »
My understanding of USB C cables is they get complicated when delivering a lot of power. Basic 1 amp or whatever is just wires, start jacking up the amperage and voltage and it gets complicated enough to need processing power to negotiate the link and cheeping out can be dangerous, it's OK to charge slower then ideal, it is not OK to overcharge.

ivan

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Re: Using a UPS to save SSDs
« Reply #20 on: November 10, 2023, 06:48:44 pm »
Cables supplied with the equipment are generally ok but, we must remember that there are several versions of USB 3 and their plugs are nit the same.

USB 3.0 has the standard USB format plug, then there are the USB 3.1 and 3.2 which have different format connectors.

Andrew Stephenson

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Re: Using a UPS to save SSDs
« Reply #21 on: November 11, 2023, 08:09:10 am »
Thanks for the footnotes, folkses.  As I have ordered (and paid £££ for) the Seagate HDD with those possibly vexatious USB-3 cables, I'll just have to wait and see if there are problems.  Think of it as a test of Seagate's technical/commercial good sense?

One more BTW, re that Apollo 11 computer: while approaching the Moon landing, ISTR they had a problem with a sensor that kept trying to abort the mission, so they were radioed some new code which they then had to hand-enter in a hurry.  // ISTR-2: wasn't their m/c memory based on a 3-D array of magnetic cores? // I suppose, overall, I'm fortunate to have lived into a era of considerable improvements.  // And so to bed, as Samuel Pepys was prone to writing in his (in)famous diary.