Status-Q

Solid-state disks are wonderful things: quick, power-efficient, and mechanically robust.

But it’s worth noting that you shouldn’t use them for archiving data on a shelf, unless you keep them provided with power.

This KoreLogic blog post discusses the problem in terms of preserving legal evidence, and notes:

For client application SSDs, the powered-off retention period standard is one year while enterprise application SSDs have a powered-off retention period of three months. These retention periods can vary greatly depending on the temperature of the storage area that houses SSDs.

Now, I haven’t had a very good track record from my spinning drives in general, and I assume that any data on them is probably ephemeral unless they are in a RAID array. All of my computers use SSDs internally now.

But for offline archiving purposes, old-fashioned hard drives are definitely better.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link.

Figures are not finalised yet, of course, but these numbers strike me as revealing:

UKIP – 3.5M votes : 1 seat
Lib Dems – 1.5M votes : 10 seats
SNP – 1.2M votes : 57 seats

I’m not a political animal and have little interest in the overall results. And I’m no fan of UKIP.

But I am interested in algorithms, and it does seem clear that ours is rather broken.