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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 11th, 2024

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  • Education of people is always(?) better, I’d say.

    It’s good to exercise the mind, just like exercising the body.

    What if 25% of car drivers could handle their own car maintenance? The one downside people will scream at first is that fewer mechanics will be needed.

    But that is too short sided.

    More home mechanics will need to buy more tools, so that’s more store jobs and more manufacturing jobs and more shipping/trucking jobs.

    And more people who understand mechanics mean a better workforce who can invent new/better products or processes. And can do more research into manufacturing science, which would improve society.

    This would also lead to safer cars because they are better roadworthy, and car manufacturers would have a harder time using low quality parts.

    So all of those changes would apply to technology when more people know how to use technology.








  • If you don’t need the I/O pins, look into a mini PC. In the US, used can easily get you something under $100 US. New would probably be around $100-$150.

    If you get a low CPU, they idle around what the PI would be doing.

    A PC would give you faster, more durable storage, inside of a case. And maybe memory upgradability, if you need it eventually.

    A PC would be bigger, but some are not much bigger, especially if you add any USB dongles or external storage to the PI.

    The YouTube channel “Hardware Haven” has a bunch of random old “junk” computers he’s worked on.





  • From the drives I have seen, usually there are 3 write-cache sizes.

    Usually the smallest write-cache is for drives 128GB or smaller. Sometimes the 256GB is also here.

    Usually the middle size write-cache is for 512GB and sometimes 256GB drives.

    Usually the largest write-cache is only in 1TB and bigger drives.

    Performance-wise for writes, you want the biggest write cache, so you want at least a 1TB drive.

    For the best wear leveling, you want the drive as big as you can afford, while also looking at the makeup of the memory chips. In order of longest lasting listed first: Single Level, Multi Level, Triple Level, Quad Level.




  • An analogy is writing everything on one piece of paper with a pencil. When you need to change or remove something, you cross it out, instead of erasing, and write the new data to a clean part of the paper. When there are no more clean areas, you use the eraser to erase a crossed off section.

    The larger the paper, the less frequent you come back to the same area again with the eraser.

    Using an eraser on paper slowly degrades the paper until that section tears and never gets used again.


  • In general and simplifying, my understanding is:

    There is the area where data is written, and there is the File Allocation Table that keeps track of where files are placed.

    When part of a file needs to be overwritten (either because it inserted or there is new data) the data is really written to a new area and the old data is left as is. The File Allocation Table is updated to point to the new area.

    Eventually, as the disk gets used, that new area eventually comes back to a space that was previously written to, but is not being used. And that data gets physically overwritten.

    Each time a spot is physically overwritten, it very very slightly degrades.

    With a larger disk, it takes longer to come back to a spot that has already been written to.

    Oversimplifying, previously written data that is no longer part of a file is effectively lost, in the way that shredding a paper effectively loses whatever is written, and in a more secure way than as happens in a spinning disk.