Bad Drives-Best RAM

Now those were the good old days!

I bet in a lot of ways they really were.. Even when I came in there was an excitement of being on the threshold of something revolutionary. And, man,... has it become so. And no end in sight! Someone learning computers today can still experience the thrill of being on the edge of a lot to come in the future.

From then till now, that's one heck of an experience pool.
If only you had an SSD... 😟

Edit: I started on an abacus when Photoshop was really tough... 😉

Message was edited by: Samsara

Ignorance must surely be bliss

Ah, but isn't that part of Apple's doing. Hiding the "innards" with a beautiful and simple interface designed just for that purpose in mind? A "point and shoot" computer you only had to go click with.
I would be very surprised if many people knew about RAM or much else that goes on with a computer. Very, very few casual users I run into do. Very few users use their machines for heck of a lot, mostly I would say for the Internet since that seems almost essential now. No, like a lot of things, people are disinclined to look under the hood unless there are problems.
And that I would say that is one very good reason we are here. Because when people have been going along contentedly without a problem, not knowing what could even cause one, and one happens,... that's when a person needs the most help. Particularly because they are clueless and ignorant. It's after that when a persons real interest to learn is revealed.
But ignorance hasn't been bliss for me. Far from it, and maybe that's true for everyone. No one likes to feel stupid or ignorant. And speaking for myself only, I feel both at some time each and every day.

Thank you, CF.

Reading their conclusions, despite what they say about the effectiveness of scan errors to predict failure and the odds of it happening, I would still take note of them and begin to take precautions.

We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities.

And they go on to say,

Despite those strong correlations, we find that failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever.

failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives (i.e. heavy data "grinding" is not a significant factor in failure); and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot.”

Good that that confirms our own observations, and if one wanted the name of a good HD maker there's enough of an experience pool here to draw upon. Interesting that heat and heavy use don't contribute all that much to a drives poor health, that maybe cold could be a worse factor. (My Mac seems ice cold when I go to use it in the morning).


Wish we had a better way solid way to predict drive failure it seems. But it's good that there are some fairly easy to spot symptoms, or warnings, if the drive allows us enough time to back up.
Easy in that our drives may simply disappear from the desktop (really bad news if it's the boot drive and no backup system drive), or Open and Save dialog boxes indicate the computer is having difficulty locating certain HDs you knew were there just a minute ago.
There's more but either of those would be enough for me to clone everything on that disk. And if it's the System Disk, I'd use the clone I made and transfer it back to a different internal drive in the Mac.

I wonder how SSDs will go compared to standard drives. I imagine they might go more quickly once the process starts.
Funny thing about SSD failure rates is that up front we are told they will not last as long as regular disks, and in two ways. They slow down over time and then, if you're lucky, they die altogether when they become just too slow to use anymore. Cool thing is that since they've been out, it's been too soon to see anyone report any significant speed loss yet.

Hi Bill,

Kingston was the RAM I first chose some years ago. It seemed to dominate advertising in the magazines, was highly talked about, and for me, it was what the Macs in my shop were using.
I can't remember why or when I changed to another brand, but as far as I know Kingston is still on the better RAM list.

and to date I am completely happy with my purchase.

Just the thing people hear and take into consideration. Thanks. 🙂

Steve