Technical Double talk

[Phil8659]

Does technical double talk bother you as much as me?

Here is one example. We have SSD's which has a rating of MTF, mean time between failure, and today's mtf rating is in the millions of hours, which translates to over a hundred years, and often over two.

Yet on the other hand, the same techies say that SSD's wear out around 5 to 10 years, a shorter life span than HHD. The SSD I run on my T3000 I bought on a bulk purchase of 3 used SSD's. One died, the other I think I left it in a machine I put at the curb for someone else to fall in love with but the third was set up to run Windows 7. So, it was used when I bought it a long time ago, and it is still running long after 5, even 10 years. It still checks out as good.

So, fuck me Freddy, which is it? Only a dumb ass claims that it is both.

This technique, between the exact science of measurement versus the inexact expressions, like wearing out, is common from techies, along with politicians. For example, Social Security, based on investment of the funds in order to keep it solvent, but like all liars, is used whenever some party wants to lavish themselves at the taxpayer's expense, or the victim of idiots who are too fucking lazy to do their job. Double talk, and people do not riot and string these assholes up because, well, it is politically correct to claim that we do not speak a grammar system, but that we speak duplicit grammar, which has is not taught, but claimed to be valid by every sociopath there is.

[accelafine]

Does technical double talk bother you as much as me?

No.

[Phil8659]

Does technical double talk bother you as much as me?

No.

You have a way with the obvious.

[FlashDangerpants]

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is a calculated average for that component taken over a period of time using QA samples under lab conditions. The method is simply to divide the cumulative number of hours run across a large number of devices by the number of failures experienced. That's why they include the word "mean" in there. It doesn't measure how much wear and tear a device must endure before it first fails, or completely gives up the ghost, because we cannot find that out for most components before they are end of life anyway.

Even so, when considering these measurements, we don't take into account performance of forgotten hard drives left in a dumpster behind some rancid old lunatic's foul smelling hovel. Philbert69420 does not live in a Quality Assurance lab, he squats in a barrel on the outskirts of a homeless encampment for the mentally disturbed. This is not a valid test situation.

Further to that, the MTBF of enterprise grade 15K RPM SAS disks such as would be placed into a RAID50 protected SAN, or better still split out across a CEPH blob storage array, is not remotely similar to the kind of consumer grade disk that would be found in the shitty JBOD of despair that nurtures Philbot8675309's giant collection of Japanese tentacle porn.

On top of even that .. even the most basic household NVME storage device has TRIM protection to massively improve MTBF by actively blocking faulting areas of memory.

MTBF is useful if you need to weigh up risks at enterprise scale where you wish to determine how many spares to hold in each datacentre or fulfilment depot. It helps to assess whether to run one hot-spare or two per array. Getting the calculation right can save massive mounts of money, getting it wrong can end a company.

There is a large cloud provider called Hetzner who are well known for building their servers out of consumer grade components. Here's a video, skip to the 9 minute mark and they show you a guy sitting on a cage full of Seagate hard drives that might be second hand, if not, they've been treated like shit already anyway. Then it skips to home computer motherboards that are nothing like what you would see in an enterprise server, and then it's home user Ryzen CPUs. They use this stuff because even though they know they will have a high failure rate and probably invalid warranties, it's cheaper to throw away dead kit and replace it than it is to use 5 times as expensive kit that lasts much longer. MTBF is the very useful measure that allowed them to calculate that.

[Phil8659]

Now there is an expert in double talk and bull shit.

[FlashDangerpants]

Now there is an expert in double talk and bull shit.

Those and many other talents besides have I. I am the world's foremost gourmet lube-taster, and of course also the co-inventor of the 21st Century.

[Fairy]

Does technical double talk bother you as much as me?

No.

You have a way with the obvious.

And you have a way of doubling down on absolutely nothing.

[Phil8659]

Are you trying to get Age to declare his undying love for you? In pubic?

[Fairy]

Are you trying to get Age to declare his undying love for you? In pubic?

Are you trying to be stupid, or does it come effortlessly?

[Phil8659]

Are you trying to get Age to declare his undying love for you? In pubic?

Are you trying to be stupid, or does it come effortlessly?

I am glad you asked that. I have been meaning to ask you how you deal with it, since you seem to have mastered a much worse condition than mine. Any tips?

[Fairy]

Are you trying to get Age to declare his undying love for you? In pubic?

Are you trying to be stupid, or does it come effortlessly?

I am glad you asked that. I have been meaning to ask you how you deal with it, since you seem to have mastered a much worse condition than mine. Any tips?

The question was stupid. Out of the mouth of a stupid person. I should know. Not you.

[Phil8659]

The first two SSD's I bought on Ebay, each about 240 gb, one had only 1 hour of usage on it, the other only 6.
I used one to replace the 126 gb SSD on my T3400, which still had only short of 3 years usage, I think it was 2.7 years. And it still runs perfectly. All I had to do is clone the original onto the new drive.