Hi, I’m home!
How was the trip to Bangkok?
Great, I went to Panthip Plaza and got an SSD.
What?!! How can you? Who did you see to get that? Don’t give me that nonsense about catching it off a toilet seat!
?????
Have you been to the doctor? Is there a rash? Can I catch it?
????
I can’t believe my husband has caught an STD.
Oh. Not STD, SSD! A solid-state drive. Oh. OK.
Amazing how abbreviations (see genuinej, I do remember sometimes) can get you into trouble.
For many years I built my own PCs. Asia offers an easy supply of cases, power supplies, plugs and PC components; so acquiring all the bits you need is not difficult, and screwing them all together is not particularly challenging. The problems come when you push the switch on your new creation and nothing happens. Swearing helps to an extent, as does taking it all to pieces and screwing it together again. As a last resort you take the bag of bits to the local shop and let them discover that you failed to connect the power supply.
When it does work, operation can be an intermittent experience. Apart from the usual Windows horrors, loose connections can play havoc with your computing experience as drives disappear, everything locks up, or small clouds of smoke leak from the casing. You never know what is going to happen next; but it is always “interesting” and never benign.
But I rather enjoyed all the tinkering, and hanging round the tech shops looking for the latest bits to make my games run faster.
Then last year a Mac Pro came into my life and the tinkering stopped. It had space for four disk drives, so I stuffed it full of disk drives. They offered a graphics card update so I installed one. Then I just used it. And for the last year it has done everything I asked it to do with never a problem. It’s the perfect computer; but I still have the urge to tinker.
Enter the SSD. It’s a hard drive without all the spinning bits, which means it is much faster (that’s about as technical as I get). Make one your boot drive of choice and your computing world speeds up in all sorts of ways. So when I saw one in a shop window in Panthip…..
They are much smaller than a normal hard drive; so my plan was to stick it in the spare DVD drive compartment, leaving my existing four drives intact. But first I had to make a journey into the Mac Pro to plug a SATA drive cable into the motherboard, a trip that required me remove a couple of fans and a heatsink cover. Not particularly difficult, and a chance to see that the inside of this machine is as painstakingly designed as the outside; but a little bit fraught as I worried about dropping screws or breaking some fragile component as I blundered around. Didn’t break anything or drop anything and soon I had the SSD up and running.
Damn, this thing is fast. Starting applications is almost instantaneous and, best of all, my Lightroom preview photos load immediately rather than churning the disk for a couple of seconds; a real time saver when I need to work through 700 photos in an afternoon.
And it doesn’t give you nasty little rash.
Comments 🔗
2010-06-08| genuinej saysYour remembering of the difference between abbs and acrs makes my earlier efforts seem really worthwhile. Thank you soooo much.