Daily Archives:May 8th, 2015

The Canine Party

Just thinking about one of my favourite Dilbert cartoons.

dilbertvote

Beware of archiving on SSDs

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.

The interesting result of the election

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.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser