[conspire] Replacement Computer Was: 3rd Master Hard Disk Error

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

>  We have to remember that the physics for all hard drives even before 
> there were 8" floppy disks was oxides of iron and similar metals.
> The memory hierarchy concept continues.  $100 can buy:
> *  16 GB DDR4
> *  500GB USB 3.1
> *  2TB HDD with 128MB cache SATA
> 
> Also, 8GB RAM is "typical" for laptops on the market today.

Vocabulary word for the day is 'amortisation' (or, for most people here, 
'amortization').

Which is to say, the trick when purchasing things like computer hardware
with high likelihood of economic service life extending over several
years, the trick is to do your planning based on estimated value each 
year until decommissioning.

Hardware that you can expect to be fully usable for ten years is worth
spending for, even if it costs twice as much as alternative choices you
guess you'll decomission (or put in a closet in four years).

I keep seeing people buying underdesigned gear that'll be unsatisfactory
in only a few years, merely because it was 'cheap', ignoring it being
actually quite expensive on an annual basis over its service life.

More at:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-bicycles
(As /usr/games/fortune just said to me:  'Cheap things are of no value,
valuable things are not cheap.')

I'm sure you're correct that 8GB is 'typical' for laptops on that market
today.  IMO, the right thing to do is determine before buying what'd 
be required, eventually, to substantially increase that.  Find out how
many memory slots the unit has, how many are currently occupied, whether
DIMMs must be provisioned in matched pairs or not, what max. RAM the
motherboard supports, and how much it currently costs to (say) quadruple
total RAM by buying high-density DIMMs of the supported type on the
retail market (from, say, http://www.satech.com/ ).

You'll thank yourself later for doing that preparation up-front.