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

[Peter Knaggs]

On the topic of well-designed things, the little iRiver iHP-120 audio
recorder/player
can be upgraded nowadays to use a Compact Flash card instead of the
original
"spinning rust" Toshiba 20GB (MK2004GAL) 80mm hard drive. Essentially the
same
concept of upgrading from spinning rust to SSD, except over a considerably
longer
time frame. I think the iRiver iHP-120 is almost twenty years old now, but
it still works fine
thanks to the free Rockbox firmware. Even the original Toshiba hard drive
surprisingly still
works (it's required in order to be able to update the firmware on the
iHP-120 so that it
can work with Compact Flash storage). Some photos of what the modification
(still somewhat
of a a work in progress, but currently usable) looks like are here:

http://www.penlug.org/foswiki/bin/view/Main/HardwareInfoIriverIhp120

On Sat, Dec 1, 2018 at 6:24 PM Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
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