Eh, the better question is "why does your computer leak data other then the MAC address"? Which is exactly what the PNL (preferred network list) is doing.
Sure, it might save battery life, but information leakage like that should be off by default.
I am genuinely excited at the idea of BTRFs becoming production ready.
Don't hold your breath. I've been watching the btrfs development and it's simply not there yet. A good clue for when it will be considered "production ready" would be when RHEL advertises it as something other then a technical preview. And it's still labeled as experimental in Fedora 19 (released July 2013), even after it was slated to become the default in Fedora 16 (which didn't happen).
So, maybe it makes it in time to be included in RHEL7 as "ready".
Although Red Hat is already talking about RHEL7 since 2012 of last year, and they'll probably be using one of the Fedora releases as their base. So unless btrfs makes it into FC20 or FC21 as "ready", I think they might miss the RHEL7 release.
2x8GB of DDR2 ECC is still expensive when compared to DDR3. The price of DDR2, once you want to get up into the 16-64GB per machine range is enough that you should probably consider scrapping the motherboard & CPU and buying something that uses DDR3.
If you are talking about zpools, there are commands to add or remove devices as needed, and the pool can even use a bigger (why would you put an smaller?) device as soon as it is detected, starting the resync automatically.
Limited number of drive slots + moving to a smaller, but faster platter in one or more of those slots.
OTOH, do note that new distros are still being created. But also note that they tend to be created by forking an existing popular distro. The system is currently too complex for one person, and probably for one team of people, to manage a complete general purpose distro, like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Suse. Slackware seems to be a counter example to this claim, but I don't know it well enough to know that it actually is.
Looks like it breaks down by package manager as: Debian (apt), RPM-based (yum), Pacman-based, Gentoo (portage), Slackware. Then there are the handful of oddballs which are probably those without a package manager and require you to install everything from source?
Some of that is the IKEv1 design issue. You had an exponentially increasing combination of hashes, authentication methods and encryption methods. Which has been fixed in IKEv2 where you only offer "suites" to the client, plus a bunch of other improvements.
- The content that is there, mostly works. There's still some wonky stuff like Tornadoes getting stuck in cliffs, mobs that get stuck in geometry, mobs that spawn in strange places, etc.
- They've done something intelligent by making the ARES missions dynamically generated. While you may know the terrain of a particular cave / interior, there's half a dozen different missions that can play out in that location.
- The overworld is seamless and reasonably large (3-4km from end to end, about 1.5km wide). But they've hit the technical limits, so future areas will have to be done like the "melding pockets" where you have some sort of zone transition. (In fact, I believe they are currently going back and reworking the melding pockets to be full-sized or larger zones then they are in the current beta.)
- Resource acquisition with thumpers is something new. No cliched swinging of picks to tap off a few resources. Instead, you have to defend it against the local wildlife.
- The locations are very well designed. One cave feels different then another cave, most of the locations feel very unique. Whoever designed the world did a very good job of giving the different outposts a specific feel and then decorating them accordingly. Much better then the cut-n-paste dungeons or outposts from some other games.
- The chatter from Aero and Oilspill (in-game NPCs who talk to you over the radio) still needs a lot of work. They tend to natter on a bit much and if you complete a mission quickly, they may end up telling you things that happened 2-3 minutes ago or give you information that is not needed. That being said -- their lines are very well done, and you will get different lines in different locations based on the local design. It's a feature that I think is unique to Firefall.
- The gunplay is reasonably solid and has a decent feel. The enemy AI still needs work, but does okay.
All-in-all, it's not a bad way to spend 40-60 hours of playtime without having to pay a penny. And I've had enough fun so far that I went and plunked down $75 for the ARES starter pack. Although I'm not sure that I will sign up for a membership package where I pay $15/mo. The content is still a little too thin for that level of commitment.
Yes, it's an "open beta" - which means that things may not work correctly or be changed/removed.
(The other part of the issue is that there just weren't enough people willing to play PvP. But I'm not sure if that due to population or whether people just got tired of PvP in its current shape.)
Yeah. The company I worked for started migrating to Windows 7 earlier this year. We're maybe 30% there. We're going to skip 8.whatever and see what's available when 7 nears end of life.
We started our migration to Windows 7 in 2012 and plan on being finished by the XP cut-off date. After that, there are a few possibilities:
1. Microsoft implodes in some fashion and MSOffice now runs on Linux.
2. Win8 flops so hard that they release Win 7.1
3. We figure out how to run MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint in WINE on Linux. Or OpenOffice / LibreOffice get to parity on Word/Excel files (they're close now, but not close enough to swap files with clients who are using the Microsoft product).
4. We switch to Linux and run Win7 inside a VM for certain applications.
5. We switch to OS X.
In short, we're about 3-6 applications away from dropping Microsoft Windows on the desktop. Any new technology added in the past few years has to be either platform-neutral (web-based solutions) or multi-platform (runs on Windows, OS X and Linux) and open source. We never bought into MS Exchange or MS SharePoint.
that's largely the point of the SSD: the CPU is now the bottleneck
Yep, it moves that bottleneck around. I have an older Core Duo chip in my 2007 era laptop and I can tell when I'm CPU-pegged now. It's the only thing I don't like about my Thinkpad right now (8GB RAM, Win7, 300GB SSD). But everything else works perfectly, so I put up with the slower CPU and don't plan on upgrading until 2015 or 2016.
(At which point my laptop will be 8-9 years old.)
It helps that I have a 4-core Linux server and an 8-core Win7 desktop that I can use to offload CPU-heavy stuff to (such as video encoding / transcoding).
I'm still using my Thinkpad from 2007 (an early Core Duo model). It has 8GB of RAM, Win7 and a SSD in it. While the Core Duo is showing its age (and I'd love 6 or 8 cores and 32GB of RAM), I can't complain much. I was ready to replace it 3 years ago because the old HD was so slow that it bothered me constantly.
Our office desktops are AMD64 x2 machines from 2006-2009. We're in the process of upgrading them to Win7, 4GB+ of RAM and 128GB SSDs. At which point, they'll be good to go for another 6-7 years.
Cheap upgrade at this point and it makes the machine almost vanish from user-perception.
Otherwise, a faster CPU or GPU or more RAM is likely to be far more useful.
That depends on how often you need to do two (or more) things at once on the computer, both of which touch the hard drive.
If you are a heavy multi-tasker, constantly opening up new programs, opening up new files, scanning directories for changes (version control), the CPU/GPU/RAM only takes you so far.
Once you have enough RAM to keep your normal working set in memory, additional RAM doesn't add much speed at all (except use as a bigger drive cache). The GPU only helps if what you are doing can be offloaded to the GPU in the first place. A faster CPU only helps, up to the point that you are waiting on that spinning platter of rust.
Having spent almost 3 years using a SSD on my laptop (I jumped in once prices dropped below $2.50/GB), I can't stand desktops that use 7200 RPM drives (and heaven forbid it is a 5400 RPM or flex-speed drive). Trying to start up something like Firefox, Thunderbird, or other applications takes 5-10 seconds or longer. And if you try to do anything else with the machine at the same time (like open up an office application or check on something), you are just prolonging the agony.
IOPS matters, even for the lowly end-user desktop/laptop. With the SSD, you no longer have to take a 5 minute coffee break while you open up all of your applications.
And while scanning the SMART data is a nice start... you aren't going to get an e-mail when a branch office's first floor is under five feet of water.
You will, if you have a proper set of environmental sensors hooked up to something like the Watchdog 15. They make temperature, humidity, power, water, intrusion sensors. The water sensor is a special cable that you lay on the floor somewhere (in a low spot) and which triggers an alert if it gets wet.
But, for those of us that regularly recompile the OS and kernel, an SSD isn't going to stand up to that for very long.
Mostly bullshit. Good steps to take are:
1. Use a file system that understands TRIM.
2. Get a good quality SSD. If you have a choice between the 128GB unit and the 120GB unit, go with the 120GB unit because it probably has more spare blocks in the first place.
3. Under-provision the device. If it's a 128GB unit, only partition out about 100GB of space. Leave the last part of the disk unused. Which gives the wear-level algorithm more "lightly used" blocks to play with.
There's currently three tiers of SSDs. The bargain-basement, do anything to get under $0.75/GB units. The middle-of-the-road units such as the Intel 330 which are aimed at the Consumer, but are not bottom-of-the-barrel designs. Then you have the enterprise SSDs which are designed for heavy write-loads and cost about $2-$3 per GB.
And that's ignoring the SLC SSDs, which are "industrial grade" and cost $5-$15 per GB.
I've never understood why encryption isn't already built in to everything we do in modern technology.
Because encryption is easy, but key management is HARD.
How do you know that the key which you are using to encrypt the stream of data is the right key? And not Eve's key?
The current answer with SSL/TLS is that your application has to trust *someone* (the CAs) to give you proof that you are talking to Bob and not Eve.
But SSL certs signed by CAs are expensive, and some of the CAs are bad actors who will sign anything at all, even for hostnames that you do not actually own.
The next step forward is probably going to be roll-out of DNSSEC, and then storing your keys in the DNS system (see DANE). Which removes dependency on the CAs and limits the potential damage of a bad actor.
Also, while they did make it stronger against differential cryptanalysis, they got the key length reduced, which means that today, DES is terribly weak, and 3DES is needed to patch it up.
Most of what I've read on the subject indicates that key length was reduced in order to make it easier to implement in silicon. Maybe IBM was a bit short-sighted at the time, thinking that 56bit keys was still going to be strong enough. After all, "export grade" crypto was still limited to 40bit keys back then.
Elliptic curve cryptography looks great on a machine running HollywoodOS at your local cineplex, but I have yet to see a single convincing argument for using it for real life cryptography beyond the cool factor and a bunch of hand waving.
RSA is not perfect either. Every time you double the key length, performance drops by a factor of about 6x. Currently, in order to get about 128 "bits" of strength, you need to use to use either a 3072 or 4096 RSA key length. To get to 192 "bits", 7680/RSA or 8192/RSA.
ECC is interesting to cryptographers because it seems to offer the same amount of encryption strength, with far less bits required, and it can be used in a public key manner. You only need about 256-383 bits in the ECC key to be equivalent to 128 "bits" of strength, and 384-511 bits for 192 "bits" of strength. The problem, as usual, lies in either poor implementation or picking the wrong curves.
History is another reason. RSA has been around since 1978 and all known patents expired by 2000. So researchers have been beating on RSA for about 35 years now and there are lots of proven implementations (TLS/SSL, SSH, GPG/PGP, etc.). RSA also relies on how hard it is to factor prime numbers, which is a problem that mathematicians have been studying for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
ECC was introduced c1985 and some patents have yet to expire.The math has only been examined for 25 years, and the entire field of elliptical curves is very young compared to prime numbers. Which doesn't make it a bad choice, it's just not as well vetted.
It is slower at public key operations (signature verification, key exchange) then RSA. The speed at doing bulk encryption is a wash, because all public-key encryption implementations create a random symmetrical key and use a symmetrical encryption algorithm (3DES, AES) to do the encryption of the content. The public-key pairs are only used to exchange those symmetrical keys and to validate two sides of the conversation.
RAID is fine on the enterprise / data-center quality SSDs. Granted, you'll be paying $2-$3/GB for those (Intel DC 3500, Intel DC 3700, etc.) instead of under $1/GB.
The data-center SSD ship with "super-caps" (large capacitors) inside that store enough power for the SSD to do what it needs to do to flush tables to the flash chips when power is lost.
They are also under-provisioned. While a consumer level "128GB" drive will advertise 128GB of capacity, data center drives will only advertise 120GB of capacity. Which gives them more "spare" blocks. And you can help this along by only using say 100GB of a 120GB SSD. By leaving the last 20GB untouched, you're giving the wear-level algorithm more "unused" blocks to play around with.
The Intel DC series SSDs are pretty well designed with a very long life.
Well, for 2.5" drives, it depends on the "height" of the drive.
2.5" drives seem to come in (3) sizes. 7mm, 9.5mm and 15mm.
You're pretty much guaranteed that the 7mm drives are single-platter. There just isn't enough room in there for a 2nd platter along with the requisite spacing.
Harder to say for the 9.5mm units, but they're probably a mix of single and double platter.
The 15mm units are going to be almost all double (or triple?) platter.
Power usage is also a hint. The more platters, the more power the drive consumes to keep those platters spinning. The older 3.5" drives with 4 or 5 platters in them were real power hogs.
Yeah, localized problems are survivable. Such as the impact of Sandy on the NYC area. Some areas were without power for 7-10 days, but you only had to travel 20-30 miles away to get relief.
The main advantage with Sandy was that we had 24-48 hours to prepare. Such as stocking up on a few packs of batteries, food that doesn't require cooking, setting aside a few pitchers of fresh water, etc.
It still sucked a bit by day 5. Got really hard to fill up your car's gasoline tank and I was running on fumes by day 7 and facing multi-hour waits at the pumps.
It was also early November, so temperatures dipped into the 40s each night.
Slashdot Mirror
"DANE" is the RFC that is in-progress for storing SSL certificates inside DNSSEC.
Main advantage is that if ".com" is compromised, they still can't sign DNSSEC requests for ".biz". So damage (bad actor) is a bit more localized.
Try "FreeNX/NX" or "x2go" which are far better solutions then VNC. There's even an RDP server for Linux, but I can't recall the name off-hand.
Eh, the better question is "why does your computer leak data other then the MAC address"? Which is exactly what the PNL (preferred network list) is doing.
Sure, it might save battery life, but information leakage like that should be off by default.
I am genuinely excited at the idea of BTRFs becoming production ready.
Don't hold your breath. I've been watching the btrfs development and it's simply not there yet. A good clue for when it will be considered "production ready" would be when RHEL advertises it as something other then a technical preview. And it's still labeled as experimental in Fedora 19 (released July 2013), even after it was slated to become the default in Fedora 16 (which didn't happen).
So, maybe it makes it in time to be included in RHEL7 as "ready".
Although Red Hat is already talking about RHEL7 since 2012 of last year, and they'll probably be using one of the Fedora releases as their base. So unless btrfs makes it into FC20 or FC21 as "ready", I think they might miss the RHEL7 release.
2x8GB of DDR2 ECC is still expensive when compared to DDR3. The price of DDR2, once you want to get up into the 16-64GB per machine range is enough that you should probably consider scrapping the motherboard & CPU and buying something that uses DDR3.
If you are talking about zpools, there are commands to add or remove devices as needed, and the pool can even use a bigger (why would you put an smaller?) device as soon as it is detected, starting the resync automatically.
Limited number of drive slots + moving to a smaller, but faster platter in one or more of those slots.
OTOH, do note that new distros are still being created. But also note that they tend to be created by forking an existing popular distro. The system is currently too complex for one person, and probably for one team of people, to manage a complete general purpose distro, like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Suse. Slackware seems to be a counter example to this claim, but I don't know it well enough to know that it actually is.
List of Linux distros
Looks like it breaks down by package manager as: Debian (apt), RPM-based (yum), Pacman-based, Gentoo (portage), Slackware. Then there are the handful of oddballs which are probably those without a package manager and require you to install everything from source?
Some of that is the IKEv1 design issue. You had an exponentially increasing combination of hashes, authentication methods and encryption methods. Which has been fixed in IKEv2 where you only offer "suites" to the client, plus a bunch of other improvements.
I've been playing it for about 2 weeks:
- The content that is there, mostly works. There's still some wonky stuff like Tornadoes getting stuck in cliffs, mobs that get stuck in geometry, mobs that spawn in strange places, etc.
- They've done something intelligent by making the ARES missions dynamically generated. While you may know the terrain of a particular cave / interior, there's half a dozen different missions that can play out in that location.
- The overworld is seamless and reasonably large (3-4km from end to end, about 1.5km wide). But they've hit the technical limits, so future areas will have to be done like the "melding pockets" where you have some sort of zone transition. (In fact, I believe they are currently going back and reworking the melding pockets to be full-sized or larger zones then they are in the current beta.)
- Resource acquisition with thumpers is something new. No cliched swinging of picks to tap off a few resources. Instead, you have to defend it against the local wildlife.
- The locations are very well designed. One cave feels different then another cave, most of the locations feel very unique. Whoever designed the world did a very good job of giving the different outposts a specific feel and then decorating them accordingly. Much better then the cut-n-paste dungeons or outposts from some other games.
- The chatter from Aero and Oilspill (in-game NPCs who talk to you over the radio) still needs a lot of work. They tend to natter on a bit much and if you complete a mission quickly, they may end up telling you things that happened 2-3 minutes ago or give you information that is not needed. That being said -- their lines are very well done, and you will get different lines in different locations based on the local design. It's a feature that I think is unique to Firefall.
- The gunplay is reasonably solid and has a decent feel. The enemy AI still needs work, but does okay.
All-in-all, it's not a bad way to spend 40-60 hours of playtime without having to pay a penny. And I've had enough fun so far that I went and plunked down $75 for the ARES starter pack. Although I'm not sure that I will sign up for a membership package where I pay $15/mo. The content is still a little too thin for that level of commitment.
Yes, it's an "open beta" - which means that things may not work correctly or be changed/removed.
(The other part of the issue is that there just weren't enough people willing to play PvP. But I'm not sure if that due to population or whether people just got tired of PvP in its current shape.)
Yeah. The company I worked for started migrating to Windows 7 earlier this year. We're maybe 30% there. We're going to skip 8.whatever and see what's available when 7 nears end of life.
We started our migration to Windows 7 in 2012 and plan on being finished by the XP cut-off date. After that, there are a few possibilities:
1. Microsoft implodes in some fashion and MSOffice now runs on Linux.
2. Win8 flops so hard that they release Win 7.1
3. We figure out how to run MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint in WINE on Linux. Or OpenOffice / LibreOffice get to parity on Word/Excel files (they're close now, but not close enough to swap files with clients who are using the Microsoft product).
4. We switch to Linux and run Win7 inside a VM for certain applications.
5. We switch to OS X.
In short, we're about 3-6 applications away from dropping Microsoft Windows on the desktop. Any new technology added in the past few years has to be either platform-neutral (web-based solutions) or multi-platform (runs on Windows, OS X and Linux) and open source. We never bought into MS Exchange or MS SharePoint.
You may want to look into a power conditioner.
Or the quality of the PSU inside the case. Bad PSUs are probably the #2 enemy of spinning hard drives or any electronics (heat is the #1 enemy).
that's largely the point of the SSD: the CPU is now the bottleneck
Yep, it moves that bottleneck around. I have an older Core Duo chip in my 2007 era laptop and I can tell when I'm CPU-pegged now. It's the only thing I don't like about my Thinkpad right now (8GB RAM, Win7, 300GB SSD). But everything else works perfectly, so I put up with the slower CPU and don't plan on upgrading until 2015 or 2016.
(At which point my laptop will be 8-9 years old.)
It helps that I have a 4-core Linux server and an 8-core Win7 desktop that I can use to offload CPU-heavy stuff to (such as video encoding / transcoding).
+1
I'm still using my Thinkpad from 2007 (an early Core Duo model). It has 8GB of RAM, Win7 and a SSD in it. While the Core Duo is showing its age (and I'd love 6 or 8 cores and 32GB of RAM), I can't complain much. I was ready to replace it 3 years ago because the old HD was so slow that it bothered me constantly.
Our office desktops are AMD64 x2 machines from 2006-2009. We're in the process of upgrading them to Win7, 4GB+ of RAM and 128GB SSDs. At which point, they'll be good to go for another 6-7 years.
Cheap upgrade at this point and it makes the machine almost vanish from user-perception.
Otherwise, a faster CPU or GPU or more RAM is likely to be far more useful.
That depends on how often you need to do two (or more) things at once on the computer, both of which touch the hard drive.
If you are a heavy multi-tasker, constantly opening up new programs, opening up new files, scanning directories for changes (version control), the CPU/GPU/RAM only takes you so far.
Once you have enough RAM to keep your normal working set in memory, additional RAM doesn't add much speed at all (except use as a bigger drive cache). The GPU only helps if what you are doing can be offloaded to the GPU in the first place. A faster CPU only helps, up to the point that you are waiting on that spinning platter of rust.
Having spent almost 3 years using a SSD on my laptop (I jumped in once prices dropped below $2.50/GB), I can't stand desktops that use 7200 RPM drives (and heaven forbid it is a 5400 RPM or flex-speed drive). Trying to start up something like Firefox, Thunderbird, or other applications takes 5-10 seconds or longer. And if you try to do anything else with the machine at the same time (like open up an office application or check on something), you are just prolonging the agony.
IOPS matters, even for the lowly end-user desktop/laptop. With the SSD, you no longer have to take a 5 minute coffee break while you open up all of your applications.
Enterprise grade SSDs have physical capacitors that store enough energy so they can flush any writes and such into flash memory when they lose power.
See tear-downs of the Intel DC3500 / DC3700 series drives.
And while scanning the SMART data is a nice start... you aren't going to get an e-mail when a branch office's first floor is under five feet of water.
You will, if you have a proper set of environmental sensors hooked up to something like the Watchdog 15. They make temperature, humidity, power, water, intrusion sensors. The water sensor is a special cable that you lay on the floor somewhere (in a low spot) and which triggers an alert if it gets wet.
But, for those of us that regularly recompile the OS and kernel, an SSD isn't going to stand up to that for very long.
Mostly bullshit. Good steps to take are:
1. Use a file system that understands TRIM.
2. Get a good quality SSD. If you have a choice between the 128GB unit and the 120GB unit, go with the 120GB unit because it probably has more spare blocks in the first place.
3. Under-provision the device. If it's a 128GB unit, only partition out about 100GB of space. Leave the last part of the disk unused. Which gives the wear-level algorithm more "lightly used" blocks to play with.
There's currently three tiers of SSDs. The bargain-basement, do anything to get under $0.75/GB units. The middle-of-the-road units such as the Intel 330 which are aimed at the Consumer, but are not bottom-of-the-barrel designs. Then you have the enterprise SSDs which are designed for heavy write-loads and cost about $2-$3 per GB.
And that's ignoring the SLC SSDs, which are "industrial grade" and cost $5-$15 per GB.
I've never understood why encryption isn't already built in to everything we do in modern technology.
Because encryption is easy, but key management is HARD.
How do you know that the key which you are using to encrypt the stream of data is the right key? And not Eve's key?
The current answer with SSL/TLS is that your application has to trust *someone* (the CAs) to give you proof that you are talking to Bob and not Eve.
But SSL certs signed by CAs are expensive, and some of the CAs are bad actors who will sign anything at all, even for hostnames that you do not actually own.
The next step forward is probably going to be roll-out of DNSSEC, and then storing your keys in the DNS system (see DANE). Which removes dependency on the CAs and limits the potential damage of a bad actor.
Also, while they did make it stronger against differential cryptanalysis, they got the key length reduced, which means that today, DES is terribly weak, and 3DES is needed to patch it up.
Most of what I've read on the subject indicates that key length was reduced in order to make it easier to implement in silicon. Maybe IBM was a bit short-sighted at the time, thinking that 56bit keys was still going to be strong enough. After all, "export grade" crypto was still limited to 40bit keys back then.
Elliptic curve cryptography looks great on a machine running HollywoodOS at your local cineplex, but I have yet to see a single convincing argument for using it for real life cryptography beyond the cool factor and a bunch of hand waving.
RSA is not perfect either. Every time you double the key length, performance drops by a factor of about 6x. Currently, in order to get about 128 "bits" of strength, you need to use to use either a 3072 or 4096 RSA key length. To get to 192 "bits", 7680/RSA or 8192/RSA.
ECC is interesting to cryptographers because it seems to offer the same amount of encryption strength, with far less bits required, and it can be used in a public key manner. You only need about 256-383 bits in the ECC key to be equivalent to 128 "bits" of strength, and 384-511 bits for 192 "bits" of strength. The problem, as usual, lies in either poor implementation or picking the wrong curves.
History is another reason. RSA has been around since 1978 and all known patents expired by 2000. So researchers have been beating on RSA for about 35 years now and there are lots of proven implementations (TLS/SSL, SSH, GPG/PGP, etc.). RSA also relies on how hard it is to factor prime numbers, which is a problem that mathematicians have been studying for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
ECC was introduced c1985 and some patents have yet to expire.The math has only been examined for 25 years, and the entire field of elliptical curves is very young compared to prime numbers. Which doesn't make it a bad choice, it's just not as well vetted.
It is slower at public key operations (signature verification, key exchange) then RSA. The speed at doing bulk encryption is a wash, because all public-key encryption implementations create a random symmetrical key and use a symmetrical encryption algorithm (3DES, AES) to do the encryption of the content. The public-key pairs are only used to exchange those symmetrical keys and to validate two sides of the conversation.
RAID is fine on the enterprise / data-center quality SSDs. Granted, you'll be paying $2-$3/GB for those (Intel DC 3500, Intel DC 3700, etc.) instead of under $1/GB.
The data-center SSD ship with "super-caps" (large capacitors) inside that store enough power for the SSD to do what it needs to do to flush tables to the flash chips when power is lost.
They are also under-provisioned. While a consumer level "128GB" drive will advertise 128GB of capacity, data center drives will only advertise 120GB of capacity. Which gives them more "spare" blocks. And you can help this along by only using say 100GB of a 120GB SSD. By leaving the last 20GB untouched, you're giving the wear-level algorithm more "unused" blocks to play around with.
The Intel DC series SSDs are pretty well designed with a very long life.
serverfault answer
Well, for 2.5" drives, it depends on the "height" of the drive.
2.5" drives seem to come in (3) sizes. 7mm, 9.5mm and 15mm.
You're pretty much guaranteed that the 7mm drives are single-platter. There just isn't enough room in there for a 2nd platter along with the requisite spacing.
Harder to say for the 9.5mm units, but they're probably a mix of single and double platter.
The 15mm units are going to be almost all double (or triple?) platter.
Power usage is also a hint. The more platters, the more power the drive consumes to keep those platters spinning. The older 3.5" drives with 4 or 5 platters in them were real power hogs.
Yeah, localized problems are survivable. Such as the impact of Sandy on the NYC area. Some areas were without power for 7-10 days, but you only had to travel 20-30 miles away to get relief.
The main advantage with Sandy was that we had 24-48 hours to prepare. Such as stocking up on a few packs of batteries, food that doesn't require cooking, setting aside a few pitchers of fresh water, etc.
It still sucked a bit by day 5. Got really hard to fill up your car's gasoline tank and I was running on fumes by day 7 and facing multi-hour waits at the pumps.
It was also early November, so temperatures dipped into the 40s each night.