While Anand may wax lyrical about OCZ and Sandforce and Jeff Atwood finds SSD performance hot, technology which fails often does not offer performance gains.

Equipment failure rate is a real problem in a company dependent on computers/IT. Not only do you lose money, you lose a lot of time returning/replacing parts and rebuilding systems. A company who makes it hard to return faulty equipment gets banned right away.

• SMC will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
  Useless obfuscating Indian tech support who seek only to disqualify returns of networking products which were sold  known as broken.
• OWC will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
  Poor products, false marketing claims, nearly impossible return conditions, wasting hours of customer time by forcing repeat calls to eventually get even partial refund. Thanks Dan for being a particularly time-waster along with your supervisor Janice.
• Seagate will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
  How many drive failures can one stand?
• OCZ will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
  Vertex 2 and Agility 2 failure rates. Hours and hours wasted trying to recover from serial failure before giving up and returning. Thank you to our dealer for swapping for Kingston V+.
• Icy Dock will never see another purchase from Foliovision.
  Thanks for destroying all my backup drives, guys.
• Fortran will likely never see another purchase from Foliovision (we bought a bunch of their Blue Zen silent power supplies: three have burn out in the last year).

Our IT blacklist is not longer than that. If you value your money and/or peace of mind, I advise avoiding any of the brands above.

Here are some companies whom we have found reliable:

• HP monitors. Especially the IPS series like the HP LP3065 and LP2465.
• Dell monitors.
• IBM Thinkpads.
• Kingston memory and almost anything Kingston.
• Asus motherboards and graphic cards.
• Nvidia graphics technology.
• Zalman quiet fan technology.
• Apple Macbooks and MBP and MacMinis.
• Western Digital hard drives, internal and external.
• Kensington high end pointing devices (Expert Mouse) with bad experiences on low end.

These items aren't directly IT but are usually around the office so they make the list.

• NAD Amplifiers: great sound and functional design.
• Black Diamond backpacks (less satisfied with LowePro which tend to fall apart quickly under wear).
• Manfrotto tripods.
• Pentax SMC lenses (the old metal ones).
• Crumpler computer bags.

What's very funny is when you find out your hunches and personal experiences are borne out by the statistics.

There's a great website in France called Hardware.fr which does a yearly round up of what is working and what is failing. They cover motherboards, power supplies, RAM memory, graphic cards, hard drives and SSD.

Surprise, surprise.

Avoid both OCZ memory and SSD's. I'd avoid OCZ anything after seeing the failure rates for 2010. Here's memory for 2010 (followed by 2010):

• Kingston 0,4% (contre 0,3%)
• Crucial 0,7% (contre 0,9%)
• Corsair 1,6% (contre 1,4%)
• G.Skill 2,0% (contre 2,7%)
• OCZ 7,1% (contre 6,8%)

Here's SSD failure rates for 2010:

• Intel 0,3% (contre 0,6%)
• Kingston 1,2% (contre 2,4%)
• Crucial 1,9% (contre 2,2%)
• Corsair 2,7% (contre 2,2%)
• OCZ 3,5% (contre 2,9%)

Notice that a good company like Kingston tries to recover quickly from a bad year (and picks better OEM suppliers going forward). Here's the early returns on SSD for 2011. OCZ is bad and getting worse with the Sandforce 2 controller:

• 6,7% : OCZ Agility 2 120 GB
• 3,7% : OCZ Agility 2 60 GB
• 3,6% : OCZ Agility 2 40 GB
• 3,5% : OCZ Agility 2 90 GB
• 3,5% : OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB

I think those numbers are still undercounted by those who are actually using the drives (i.e. multiple returns are counted just as a single warranty incident). Asus also rates well at Hardware.fr in the motherboard and graphic card categories.

Read those numbers carefully before going out to make a purchase. You can bring your downtime down to a quarter or less than what it would be if you bought the cheapest/whatever happened to be convenient items. In IT brand is important.

If you don't like downtime and hassle, avoid OWC and OCZ and Seagate at all costs. Storage is an area where failure is particularly taxing of time and energy.

By Alec

Memory | SSD Reliability: whom to buy and whom to avoid

Post from: Foliovision

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Apple Mini DisplayPort Dual Link DVI Adapter MB571Z

Here's what recent reviews on Apple's own store say (just two of two hundred):

Flicker two or three times a day – GM, Dec. 9

I am a totally MAC fan. I love their stuff. It is always quality. This thing is awful. I depend on my monitor as I do a lot of photo work. I had an older macbook pro which had the DVI output. Ok, so I have buy a 100 adapter now, I am sort of ok with that. Then I find it takes up one of my USB ports as well. A little less happy, but give me a product that works. Now this… Two or three times a day I need to cycle this thing. Very poor. I really hope they fix this.

bad, bad, bad – VC, Dec. 9

This thing is junk. Sadly I have to re boot or put my computer to sleep at least three or four times a day because it goes out and comes back with the dreaded TV Snow we all hated as kids when the cable went out. Apple should have gotten this right by now. As a consumer and big spender on apple product I'm disappointed again. Windows 7 anyone? (Joke) Is Apple listening?

Apple Mini DisplayPort Dual Link DVI distortion

Straight out of the box with 10.5.6 and without SuperDrive EFI update 3.0 and Performance Update 1.0, the issues were extreme. Flickering every few minutes, with the screen lost in blurry double vision every half hour or so.

The only cure was to unplug the MiniDisplayport and replug it. Absurd remedy.

The adapter was on the fast track back to the store at that point.

The next step was to do some research about what is and what is not working. I updated everything to the most recent versions. It took about 4 cycles to get everything updates, but most of the changes were with iLife and iLife applications and Digital Raw compatibility. That was a good start. But there was one more step to go for success.

I'm on firmware 1.01. There is a 1.02 out there but apparently it can slow down response time for the screen. In this case, the cure might be worse than the disease. In any case the 1.02 firmware is not available for download.

The final step was to delete a couple of lurking preference files:

• Library —> Preferences —> com.apple.windowserver.plist (I don’t know why)
• User —> Library —> Preferences —> ByHost —> com.apple.windowserver.xxxxx.plist

Afterwards, you should the PRAM (Command-Option-P-R and reboot). Which I did, several times (I recommend keeping at least one Apple keyboard around for this sort of troubleshooting: I had to pull mine out of the closet). Often a single PRAM reset won't ferret out all of the lurking settings.

Immediately afterwards, the issues were far less. I could even turn my HP LP3065 display on and off without getting a fuzzy distorted picture. That's gone now and I get the fuzz whether I switch off the monitor and turn it on again or switch between displays. During work, the adapter works pretty consistently.

Apple Mini DisplayPort Dual Link DVI Snow

• unplug and replug MiniDisplay connector
• unplug and replug USB jack
• put the computer to sleep and wake it up

All of those are a hassle and involve hands leaving keyboards searching for small plugs (there's a good chance you'll knock Apple's magnetic power plug loose) or long waits.

But you don't need to go so far. There's a trick which makes the issues just bearable. Just sleeping the screen is enough.

There are two easy ways to sleep the display:

• press Shift-Control-Eject. Your display will turn off and your hands don't even need to leave the keyboard. If you use an Apple keyboard as your primary keyboard, this is the easiest and fastest.
• If you don't use an Apple keyboard, there is a way around it. Go into System Preferences —> Exposé and Spaces —> Exposé and set the lower left corner to Sleep Display. I chose the lower left corner as it's the one I visit least and it's never too far out of the way.

After you've slept the display, you can almost immediately just move the mouse to wake it up. The work interruption isn't more than a few seconds. Not exactly productive but a lot better than reaching for the plugs on the back of your computer.

The biggest time saver: if you think that you will be able to make this work perfectly yourself, give it up. I've even tried plugging the Dual DVI MiniDisplayport adapter's USB connector into another USB hub. No better results. Perhaps it would help with a laptop. But on a Mac Mini do plug in the USB connector to the USB plug farthest away from the MiniDisplayport.

Mac mini back late 2009 Mini DisplayPort USB

If you are thinking about buying alternative hardware, forget it. You'll need a male MiniDisplayport cable to female DisplayPort (1,2). That didn't exist a couple of months ago but exists now. But from there you'll need DisplayPort to Dual DVI. Dell has one but it also costs $100/€100 and also requires USB power. I.e. it looks like it wll cost more and be more complicated (extra MiniDisplayport to DisplayPort adapter).

If you are shopping for a new 30" monitor to use with Apple computers, I highly recommend buying one of those which comes with displayport in. Currently the Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP looks like the only one. Samsung announced in 2007 but didn't deliver: their 305T is still Dual DVI.

Personally, I find it incredible that Apple can't or won't fix this problem for their 30" monitor users. It makes them look incompetent and I'm sure it's costing them a lot of sales (I didn't buy one of their high end notebooks as a consequence). I'm an old Mac hand so I was able to find the resources necessary to get this issue partially under control. It took hours, as if I were on Windows. What a new Mac user would feel, I can hardly imagine.

If all of the above prevents you from buying a Mac Mini or a Macbook Pro, so be it. If you do want to go Apple (and we do), plan to avoid going with 30" monitors or buy Dell until this adapter issue is fixed.

Additional Resources

• Apple Support Threads 8680802 & (Warning: very long!) 8674416
• Gizmodo
• 9to5Mac
• DisplayBlog
• Michael Tsai (developer of EagleFiler and SpamSieve)
  My 15" Powerbook & Mini DisplayPort Improved

By Alec

Apple Dual DVI Mini DisplayPort Adapter MB571Z Problems Solved

Post from: Foliovision

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It used to be enough just to pair up some hard drives and move a few files around.

No more. Each computer needs its own backup drive/system.

I’ve just been through cleaning up duplicate backups and freeing up about five drives.

While doing so, I had to come up with some principles of backup, which I will call the backup manifesto. Here they are:

• more backup is better
• all drives to be named and labeled at all times (how many Seagate 200 GB drives – first near silent hard drives available – can one photographer have? about half a dozen)
• dispose of dead drives immediately (you have to identify them)
• working drives go into USB cases of their own
• when in doubt, don’t erase but retire.
• you need backup of your backup. Always pair drives.
• less working drives is easier to manage i.e. 2×1000 GB is better than 10×200 GB
• back up 5×200 GB to 1×1000 GB. This liberates 5×200 GB (second half of the pairs) and leaves you with a single working drive with access to all your archived material.
• bare SATA drives with a SATA external plug is space/power supply efficient.
• drives are cheap – even good ones. Buy top of the line well-tested drives in the largest size readily available (usually one increment down from the current maximum). Find the extra $50. Your time and nerves are worth the expense.
• get a good disk cataloging program. I use CDfinder. You don’t want to have to handplug six ATA drives every time you need to find a single old file.
• if you are serious about using your disks efficiently, get a good disk space calculator (I use Baseline) which will also tell you about duplicate files. Using Baseline, I was able to clean out 30 GB of duplicate files on my Macbook boot drive in half an hour. It would have taken days to do this work by hand with just the finder.
• keep your boot drives only 70% full (maximum!). The last 30% of your hard drive is the slowest part. You don’t want to be booting from the slowest part – your new $2000 laptop will be running at about 60% efficiency. (Different rules apply to RAID arrays but even there you’d want to keep 10 or 15% clean to make sure you don’t crash it by filling all the free space.)
• upgrade your backups to new media when you can put 4 or 5 of them on the new large standard.
• firewire 400 is more expensive and somewhat unreliable. firewire 800 is still more expensive and very unreliable. Use firewire sparingly, only for fast media drives.
• if you insist on snapshots of old boot drives, just make them disk images on the big drives. You don’t really need those snapshots. Trust me – you won’t be going back to Windows 98 or OS X 10.1.5 or 10.2.3 (you might just go back to OS 8/9 for a legacy program or two so there are exceptions). Personally I haven’t. Mac OS X is getting a lot better and so are some of the new programmers. User interface is enough better that using vintage software is really a chore. Running any kind of virtualisation puts a big burden on your computer’s resources. The less of it you can do the better (I don’t even run Rosetta 99% of the time, let alone Classic).

When you are done, you should end up with two workhorse 750/1000 GB hard drives with a bunch of retired backups and a handful of free 160 GB to 300 GB hard drives available for various purposes (scratch drives/backup drives for friends).

You should almost never have to go to the retired backups to pull a file. Put them somewhere safe with a stable temperature. If they have sensitive information on them (no reason they need to – your sensitive information can be kept on one live drive and its two current backups), buy yourself an inexpensive safe and keep the retired drives there.

The retired drives won’t be used except in emergency so they should have a lifespan of another ten years. If you do have to pull a retired drive out due to a workhorse drive going down, you should duplicate it out to new media immediately.

Update - 18 January 2009: I've added an article with specific OS X back up software recommendations including a Bouncer Backup stress test on MimMac.

By Alec

The Backup Manifesto

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