Idea for repairing my laptop power jack

Interesting. No conventional hard drive, just a 16G solid state. Do you find that a limitation? or just run an external? Oh wait, I just googled chromebook and realized most of the aps are in the cloud.

Most of my stuff is now in the (Google) cloud or one of half a dozen cloud servers that I'm having difficulty tracking. Locally, its on either a flash drive, USB 3,0 hard disk, NAS box, or various customer servers. I don't need to carry everything I own with me.

I gave a talk on the install to the local Linux abuser group: It's just my noted and totally disorganized. Web page to follow if I can find the time.

The SSD is easily upgradeable:

With Ubuntu 12.04LTS 32 bit loaded, the "Disks" program shows a 14GB partition (after subtracting 2.1 GB for the swap, and 2.1 GB for something else I left on the drive. Out of the 14GB, I have about 7GB free (after substracting out several 1GB movies). Yeah, a bit tight after loading LibreOffice and a bunch of big CAD programs.

The 2GB RAM is amazing. I monitor the swap with "System Monitor". I have to run a mess of programs before it even begins to swap. With a SSD, I hardly notice any slowdown. 4GB would be better so that I can run 64bit Ubuntu, but 2GB is adequate, especially at the price.

What impressed me most is how fast everything runs compared to my assortment of other laptops. About 20 seconds to boot from a cold start including the login and loading a bunch of drivers I added. About 5 seconds to shutdown.

I tried running ChromeOS for a while and learned to hate it. I assumed that I could run Android apps, like on my Android tablet and phone. Nope. ChromeOS is a differenet animal with very few useful apps. There are now laptops that run Android, but I don't want to pay the price. Besides, I like Linux better.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I have an older Asus laptop that was made to do graphics. The hard drive it came with died so I put in an SSD and the 20 second boot time from a cold start has been my experience too. However, I have been told by some of my computer guru friends that the SSD will have a shorter life than a regular hard drive because of the physics of the way stuff is stored. There ways to minimize rewrites and so on to lengthen the life of the drive and my son has implemented some of these but I don't really know anything about it. I just love how much faster the computer is now. Eric

Unlike HDs (which can last a week or several decades), SSDs have a known finite lifespan. It has to do with trapped charge that eventually makes it impossible to erase and rewrite.

You don't want to use an SSD on a system where huge files are constantly being written and rewritten. You should install the largest drive you can afford, as it will sustain more write cycles.

When I bought a new computer two years ago, I used the SSD solely for the operating system and files that didn't change often. (Mail, temp files, indexing, etc, were assigned to a large hard drive.)

Not a "known" lifetime. More like a bell curve of estimated lifetimes based on uncorrectable errors. If it worries you, run the manufactories diagnostic software to track the errors. For example Intel Toolbox and Samsung Magician: I deal with about 8 machines running Intel and Samsung SSD drives. In about the last 6-12 months, no new errors. With a failure rate of about 1.5% per year (as compared to 5% for rotating HD storage), I don't expect to see too many failures with such a small sample. Failure rate by brand: (Search for "SSD").

Nice article comparing reliability and failure modes of rotating storage and SSD:

Probably good advice. None of my machines or my customers machine or even their servers fit that description. In my case, it's a small number of fairly small files that written, erased, and copied constantly. Various filesystems that are designed to even out read/write cycles throught different cells on the SSD help quite a bit. I use YAFFS for weather stations running on CF cards.

I've had more problems with corruption due to unplanned power failures than anything else. Fortunately, it's repairable by running an erase cycle (takes forever), and restoring from an image backup.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I have to disagree. If a cell is good, on average, for 6000 write cycles, one can easily compute how much data can be written to the drive before it becomes useless.

Those unfamiliar with SSDs need to know that such drives -- including flash drives -- include "leveling software" that spreads writes across the entire disk. If a cell is good for 6000 writes, than a 256GB drive can tolerate

1536TB of data being written to it before becoming useless. (Of course, it can still be read.)

A major problem with SSDs is that, to make them cheaper (for a given capacity), the cells have to get smaller. And smaller cells won't tolerate as many write cycles.

My boot drive is a 256GB SSD. Only about 25% of it is used, and most of the files are OS files that aren't often updated or changed. Barring "some other" disaster, I expect it to last 20 years or more.

When subjected to inappropriately heavy use, SSDs can fail rapidly.

Don't you have some sort of power backup?

While we're on it... I sometimes hear my SPS "buzzing" for no obvious reason. The computer then often goes into Sleep mode, also for no obvious reason.

That's an interesting article. Thanks for posting it!

Hmm... these two 500 GB Seagates have been spinning for about 6 years now. (24/7, RAID-1.) Perhaps replacement disks would be a good idea...

Matt Roberds

Update, being typed on the broken laptop.

I have the week off and decided to take the ten minutes a day working on it advice given earlier. I cleaned off the table and picked up the basement room and got mentally ready.

But first, I took it in to the geek squad dept at the local stationary stor e and asked them to check it one more time. Yeah, that jack looks loose, i t shouldn't move like that, let me plug it in with your power supply - noth ing - let me plug it in with the store's power supply - hmmm, powers up fin e. I bought a universal power supply and am back in operation.

Life Is Not Fair. Especially when all the symptoms point to one and only one cause -- which isn't it.

I've come to the anecdotal conclusion that it's not how many hours you run the drive, but how many times you turn it on and off. I have a

1995's vintage Conner Peripherals CFA1080A SCSI drive running in my Xenix server. The box has been up since about 1989, but various parts and pieces have been replaced along the way. The drive was installed in 1996 and has been running flawlessly for the last 18 years.

I get somewhat less lifetime with my server drives and RAID NAS boxes. Leave the drives spinning and they seem to last nearly forever. Run them in start-stop mode, and they die quickly.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

This seems to be the consensus. My previous computer was rarely turned off, and ran 11 years with no problems.

With my current machine, I switch it to Sleep most nights, so the drives are not being shut down more than about 300 times a year.