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Hello, Tech Tails readers!
Happy first Tech Tails article of the spring season! As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, spring is my favorite of all seasons. The brisky mornings, afternoon sunshine, chilly evenings and the waning and waxing temperatures certainly keeps one on their toes. And that could not ring truer than it did this past weekend. In the Burlington area, we were just shy of a 60º day on Saturday afternoon- glorious! I could not have asked for a better weekend to relocate into a new apartment. And if I may subtly pitch some of our home automation products, I am beyond excited to get my new living space decked out in Homepod and some Philips Hue bulbs and strips, for starters. I highly recommend keeping the idea of home automation in the back of your mind while you conduct your seasonal spring cleaning this year. You’re never too late to hop on the evolving home automation market. Sometimes folks will ask me, “What’s so cool about home automation?” to which I respond, “You ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? It’s like that only without the monkeys.” After that, it’s easy to venture down the rabbit-hole and demonstrate the wide-reaching and ever-expanding utility our home automation products have. Next time you’re in a Small Dog Electronics, tell a sales associate you want to see some of the cool features our home automation products have. You won’t be disappointed! Come to think of it, if you swing by our South Burlington store, there’s a very good chance our friend Erich Sullivan is already preaching the gospel of home automation by the time you get there.
We have some good material for you in this edition of Tech Tails courtesy of myself and our friend and fellow technician, Moses Laporte. We hope you take something away from it. As always, we’re happy to answer any questions you may have.
Stay groovy, Tech Tails readers!
Connor “Keep calm and open the pod bay doors, HAL” McGinnis
connormcginnis@smalldog.comSolid state, not as solid as it could be?
It’s not like there’s a much better option at the moment, SSDs are crazy fast and getting faster every year. It turns out that flash-based memory, the storage that all modern machines are coming equipped with, has it’s drawbacks like anything else. Before you all riot, I will point out that Apple and drive manufacturers have worked really hard to find the best vNAND PCIe based storage. Just like they’ve have worked to get the most reliable RAM, to the point that it’s integrated into most MLBs these days. When it comes to building these chips there is still only so much that the industry is capable of.
Don’t get me wrong! I love Solid State storage and it’s definitely the future of our hardware in so many ways, however, I have seen a few issues here and there specifically in regards to their longevity and consistency. Though these symptoms are also just indicative of drive failure in general, I’d like to point out that many conventional rotational Hard Disk Drives or even the older more hard-coded tape backups can last for many years without any power applied to them and left on a shelf to get dusty. If you did that to an SSD, even in the slim chance it powered on again, it likely would be corrupted and have no data to access or it would experience slowness and freezing. Even with their drawbacks, the future is SSD drives. They remain more reliable and significantly faster than spinning drives. They are the new standard for internal storage, just do not get comfy having anything stored on your internal drive by itself. You will always need to have a back up no matter how reliable to drive is boasted to be. Apple encourages iCloud backup and sync along with regular time machine backups for a reason, any drive has the ability to fail, no matter how solid it is claimed to be.
When it comes to solid-state drives the manufacturers seem to be improving and learning from past mistakes over the years. Apple has worked to integrate the SSDs into the MLB of the 2016/2017 MacBook Pros equipped with the Touch Bar and four ThunderBolt 3 ports a lot more reliable, but please don’t forget to backup! Remember, we can never say it enough, your data is not safe in only one place. All storage can fail, and expect that to happen to you at some point. Preparing means that should your drive fail, you will significantly reduce your downtime.