Tech Confession Time!

Flavius Heraclius · January 18

4 hours ago, da na said:

Dead Thread Redemption 2

I install all operating systems from DVDs/CDs. Sure, it is slower than USB, but I like having a stack of labelled discs and always being able to immediately find the one I need. And with a DVD it is really clear if the install is working or not - if the installer is sitting there with a blinking cursor for a few minutes on a USB, I never know if it's actually successfully reading files from the flash drive. But with DVDs it is very easy to tell.

Honestly, I'm starting to go back to this approach myself too. I spend a lot of time fidgeting with random USB drives laying all over my apartment, trying to figure out which ones have important files on them and which ones I can wipe, etc. Hell, I probably have several drives sitting around all with the same image burned on them. Disks are a lot easier to label and keep organized.

Particularly for really large images, like a windows install. Getting a new USB drive ready to boot Windows takes quite a bit of time--particularly if you need to re-download the image.

Godlygamer23 · January 18

On 12/7/2023 at 4:44 PM, bluessorrow said:

Is there a reason for that?

I don't really understand the storage market as I have been really outdated on this, last time I built a PC, having a SATA SSD as a windows drive was a luxury.. And now we have 7Gb/s read/write speed as standard apparently..! Absolutely had my mind blown as I shopped for an M.2 drive first time in years this black friday.

While the drives can achieve 7GB/s, that's only during sequential operations. Anything more random, and the speeds start to drop, and it becomes difficult to distinguish between a 'high quality' NVMe SSD, and a 'high quality' SATAIII SSD, since the primary issue with SATA SSDs is more so to do with total throughput based on the limitations of the interface, versus latency, unless you have a workload that benefits from NVMe SSDs specifically.

I personally also use hard drives a lot of the time simply because it's cheap, and the performance is totally acceptable for the workloads I put them under.