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[wierd]

Pretty much what Reelya said, but there is still some minimal advantage to having contiguous blocks on an SSD.

Namely, the IO pipeline has less protocol traffic, since more efficient requests can be given, assuming the OS is written sensibly. (The OS is unaware of how the blocks are actually allocated inside the SSD's flash memory array. Instead, it asks for high level blocks/sectors, as described by the MFT (for windows), or the inode chain (for Linux), or the FAT table (for legacy partitions).  When the data is fragmented, it has to issue more total cumulative read request packets to the drive, which the drive then has to respond to. When the data is contiguous, and the OS knows it needs to read a large file, it can issue larger read requests to the drive, reducing the total number of requests.

We are talking at most a few microseconds of gain from this though (at the extreme), and it is a purely academic point. Random reads from an SSD are still lightyears ahead of the response speeds you get from random reads on a mechanical drive.

There might be some other, OS-level benefits to having fully contiguous blocks, such as improved performance with block deduplication, or FS level compression (such as from btrfs). Those things are not really intended for normal end users though.

The general answer is that it is not really beneficial to defragment SSDs, because the sector wear it causes is not worth the teeny tiny benefit it gives. (excepting in certain edge cases, and if you have such an edge case, YOU WILL KNOW IT.)

[Eric Blank]

What are some decent harddrive manufacturers/models? My laptop, an acer aspire, fried its hdd and i need a new one. Id love something sizeable, and not dirt cheap like a Seagate that runs like a potato, those fuckers are slow shit. I got like maybe $120 bucks to spend usually

[Reelya]

I pretty much always go for Western Digital, never have had issues with those, but I did with Seagates years ago. but it's probably a good idea to look up failure rates etc since YMMV with drives. I also have Toshiba externals (laptop size) and they seem ok.

3TB laptop-sized externals are $139 at OfficeWorks here, which isn't even a cheap place. And that's in Australian dollars, which would be around $US 110. So I'm sure you can get a decent 3TB laptop sized drive for under $120.

[Reudh]

I pretty much always go for Western Digital, never have had issues with those, but I did with Seagates years ago. but it's probably a good idea to look up failure rates etc since YMMV with drives. I also have Toshiba externals (laptop size) and they seem ok.

3TB laptop-sized externals are $139 at OfficeWorks here, which isn't even a cheap place. And that's in Australian dollars, which would be around $US 110. So I'm sure you can get a decent 3TB laptop sized drive for under $120.

I have an SSD and a HDD in my PC. I have a 2TB Seagate Barracuda; it's been fantastic since I got it in 2015. I have had issues with Maxtor, but they've long since gone defunct. Oh, and my SSD is a Samsung Evo, but they're not cheap per GB compared to hard drives.

If I recall the prices, it tends to jump up in increments of about $30AUD-$40AUD / TB for external drives, no idea about internal drives, or what it costs in USD. My Barracuda cost something like $99AUD, the 1TB variant is $69AUD, and the 3TB was $139 iirc.

[BigD145]

Samsung for SSD's. Generally WD for platter HD's.

[Lord Shonus]

In the last few days, my Firefox updated to the latest version. Performance is absolutely terrible. Unless I restart it every ten minutes or so, pages randomly hang for several seconds while scrolling, typing lags full sentences behind, and loading takes forever. Is there a fix for this issue, or am I going to have to switch to Chrome again?

[wierd]

No idea.  I just had my own run-in with firefox related chicanery though.

Apparently, after about firefox 52.0, the mozilla team lost touch with reality, and made SSE2 instruction set a hard requirement.

Naturally, for devices without intel/x86 CPUs, (like rPI and pals), this presents a problem. The code compiles, but when you run FF, it crashes instantly.

Had to revert to FF 52.0, and put apt hold to prevent it updating.
(Set up a friend's rPI 3 B over my vacation. Hooked it up with xubuntu instead of Raspbian, got his touchscreen shield working and callibrated, and all that fun stuff.)


Just putting that out there because of recent "lapses in judgment" from the FF dev team.  It is entirely possible that they have done some additional stupid thing with 56.0

[AzyWng]

So I've tried to make a Windows 10 installation media on a flash drive.

Is it supposed to take fucking forever?

I mean, the laptop I'm using downloaded Windows 10 without much trouble, but when "Creating" the media I left to have dinner, had it, then went back (overall took about half an hour?) and found that the progress meter was still at 0%.

Gonna wait for a few more hours, hopefully nothing terrible has happened.

[Tellemurius]

bad usb drive? Cheap ones usually have slow ass speeds even on usb 3.0

[AzyWng]

It's some sandisk drive that's got 15GB of data...
Dunno exactly how old it is, but it's been around for a while.

Still at 0%, even now.

[wierd]

It could be that the disk is "in use", and the media creation tool wants to unmount the volume. The thing holding the volume in use (possibly an explorer window) wont let go, and the two softwares are in a stalemate.

That would be my guess.

[Reelya]

I've had issue s with the create media thing before as well, but I put that down to my shitty connection. Had more luck making ISOs than USB. A possible workaround is making an ISO, mounting it, then copying that to USB, and following online instrudctions that exist for making a USB bootable.

[wierd]

Aside from the "volume in use" thing, the only other issue I have had is with the media creation tool mistakenly thinking removable disks were permanent disks, and not letting you pick them.

Once you understand that it is the "volume in use" thing, it is easy to fix.  Just yank the media, wait 3 seconds, and reinsert it. If an autoplay window pops up, close it. (because it will hold the volume in use. Stupid assed OS and its bullshit-- but meh.)  then you can go about your merry business with it.

[AzyWng]

This time I selected the option to make an ISO file and not a recovery media on USB.

It's taking another forever. It's been about 50-40 minutes since the software's gotten to the "Creating Windows 10 media" stage and it's still at 0%.

You think maybe I should run it when in Safe Mode?

Reason I'm making this backup is I got suckered and wound up getting malware on my system... Some of it's not going away so I"m thinking of reinstalling windows...

[BigD145]

The Windows 10 on a USB should not take that long to make. Not sure how to fix your issue though. For now, try these on your malware. Nothing to lose.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/junkware-removal-tool/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/rkill/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/roguekiller/