[HECnet] No connectivity to arsgea 4

[Dave McGuire]

On 1/22/21 1:18 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
> SSDs can fail, though, especially at modern densities.  I recently saw a 256 GB microSD card; that boggles the mind.  I wonder what the life expectancy of one of those is.

   Not long.  They get away with it because they're primarily intended 
for the consumer market, and with the throwaway mentality that salesmen 
have cultivated, combined with today's short attention spans, nobody 
even seems to care when they fail.

> Modern politically correct solder can be problematic too.  "Lead free" processes are less reliable than real soldering.  For years, maybe still, lead free solder was not acceptable for space applications.  Perhaps that has been cured by now, I don't know and don't care.  (I was told quite directly by a professional "if you are required to use lead free solder, do so.  If you aren't required, avoid it.")

   I myself do care, as I do commercial design and manufacturing.  Lead 
free solder is still awful by every meaningful metric, and that 
situation is not likely to improve.  Fortunately, "lead free", when 
applied to an assembly, only means "contains less than some percentage 
of lead by weight", so most PCBs can actually be manufactured with 
lead-bearing solder.  I assemble mine using lead-bearing solder.

   Remember the Toyota Prius accelerator failure that killed all those 
people?  That was caused by lead-free solder.

> I do like SSDs.  My home firewall, DECnet router, and Subversion server is a fanless (heat sink cooled industrial type) SSD based PC running Linux.  Unlike its plain consumer PC predecessor, it has no objections at all to spending its life in a dusty basement.

   I've found SSDs to be a lot less reliable than spinning disks.  I 
still use them for reasons of speed and power consumption, but I do more 
frequent backups.

              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA