OT probably, help please

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday January 22 2015 11:05:02 Brandon Allbery wrote:

> I think there are a lot of things one can do that can have the side effect
> of pushing the boundaries of hardware (this includes things like
> compression).

Compression? Depending on what kind and the application, it can also shift the burden from (mechanical) peripheral hardware to the CPU.

> Not to mention things like SSD where you are explicitly
> trading lifetime for performance.

Indeed.

> Searching for reasons to believe it's
> just to drive obsolescence isn't particularly fruitful, unless you consider
> paranoia an end in itself.

Oh, I'm not. But I also don't believe in the contrary, i.e. avoiding things that give debatable (performance) gains at the detriment of longevity.

> I've seen too many cases related to both BSD (and later Mach, i.e. NeXT and
> OSX) where much of the hardware level "stuff" is completely ignored by any
> of the upper-level reporting software. -- one of the main reasons why Drive
> manufacturers developed S.M.A.R.T. -- the OS does not do the job.

FYI: still doesn't properly, BTW - OS X does not provide SMART status for external drives, unless you install an additional kext:
https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver .
But SMART status isn't everything: I've already had issues with a drive or 2 where SMART considered the drive to be fine while it most definitely wasn't.

William: remember the Quantum harddrives that you had to help spin up when they reached a certain age? Other than that they were virtually indestructible :)

R