Agreed. Though i took a laptop that's screen is broke, and have it on 24/7, and queue up downloads, doesn't use that much power. the NAS probably uses more... But 150Gb no matter how you look at it is a lot; So i don't see why it's brushed off as small change, like talking like you're ripping a CD in 15 minutes...

Actually few years ago there was the question of eye resolution, it was something like 20Mega pixels for the 3rd in your focus, and like 8Mega pixels worth outside of that. Now 4k is basically just double the resolution, other than things being slightly sharper i don't think there's a huge difference. Sides the pixels have to be packed so close together they may indeed blur for most people.

Let's see, it was something like...
1) If i don't need it, don't get it.

Deceptively simple. But this also includes candy, snacks, doodads, vending machine pop and many other things. And often random stuff that looks nice, especially with online shopping.
2) If i have the same thing (or does the same thing) at home, i don't need it.

Be it monitors, tools, computers, appliances, games, etc.

3) If i can't think of an immediate use for it (say within a week of buying it), i don't get it.

This one has exceptions. Building up tools that you don't have for DIY are exempt. But if say there's a TV on sale, but i have enough TV's/Monitors for all my systems, i can't justify it.

I really can't remember the 4th one; It's been a while since i needed to recall every rule. Might have been in regards to bulk (like 25lb of beans) vs single serving, getting off-brand better value price, or not getting excess fresh food when stuff needs eating in the fridge, or avoiding going out to eat; etc. Though i usually do get 2 of things when i shop food-wise (1 for use, 1 for backup), this is often good for seasonings, canned goods, velveeta, coffee and creamer, filters, etc.

Or maybe it was the rule of never getting things on credit/loan and only purchasing outright...

Sometimes, this can vary by person. For example:
* Someone who has low blood sugar might actually need candy.
* Similarly, sometimes the sort of things you mention might be needed to keep the person in a reasonable mental state.

I can´t tell if you are trolling or just misunderstood about the technology. Just because modern drives have a "write endurance" number printed all over, doesn't mean it's a crappy tecnology, quite the inverse actually. IMO solid state storage is one of the big 3 improvements to general computing in the last, say, 15 years.
It doesn't mean that the SSD will stop working sudently past the rated TBw either

Indeed, the first afordable consumer SSD's had very litle "write endurance" but that issue is looong gone and my experience is similar to Spectrum_Legacy, specialy on laptops where spinning rust seem to fail regulary..

I have a box with over 10 HDD that failed over the years (not all were mine) and not a single SSD. Since I started using them, around ~2014, I only experienced one failure during a power outage wich took a graphic card, a usb pen drive and the SSD, later traced the problem to a faulty power supply. The SSD lost data but after formatting was still funcional and still used as a USB drive for a couple of years.

I'm not saying you should use a SSD, you do what you feel safer but just because old spinning rust don't have a TBw number all over the place doesn't mean mean it last forever, remember, ALL mechanichal parts wear after some time, like it or not. On servers with plenty of redundancy HDD's are fine but on the inverse, can't imagine using a laptop with a HDD nowadays. The noise, power, slowness, heat and increased care to not bump the laptop while the disk is writing is unbearable.

Also, Windows 10 and 11 are slow as heck on a HDD since the system is constantly reading and writing, low RAM devices are the worst due to system constantly swapping. I believe Microsoft stopped licencing consumer devices without SSD's a couple of years ago (memory could be playing tricks here).

Edit: forgot to add that most consumer HDD have some sort of solid state cache (although is closer to RAM than SSD technology), I would laugh like a maniacal seeing people using a general purpose computer with a disk without cache :)

Does most chromebooks have a x86 CPU or ARM?

The cheapest refurbished laptop I can find around here is a 100€ N4200 powered HP x360, I would love to be able to get some cheap low powered devices like you Americans do.
I'm using a couple of devices plugged 24/7 (one Raspberry and Intel pc stick ATM) but am looking for a battery powered device, like a laptop to replace the Intel Pc Stick.

BTW, I used Slax in the past (and Puppy Linux) but recently started to use Bohdi Linux, is lightning fast even on ancient hardware and works more like current mainstream Linux distros.

x86/x64 surprisingly, when i found that out it was a bit of a shock. But when you think about it, it's just a cheaply produced laptop, the makers include Asus, Dell, HP, why do an entirely different architecture?

From the looks of it, SOCs (system on a chip) and SOB (system on a board) are becoming more popular. You probably have a few already. Roku boxes are basically repurposed pi's, along with routers and specific use systems out there. You might get one and see if you can't flash the OS, and if you can that would work for a always-on background process you'd want.

Though not sure on battery powered... as protection in case of power outage is nice, but otherwise... Who knows, second hand stores also have a lot of old systems and hardware. Maybe you'll get lucky and nab something for like 10€.

Mhmm. I was just trying the latest Slax version 11.6, they updated all the debian packages and likely the kernel; So it's a modern OS. Other than the sound not working on my chromebook, the entire OS fits in like 260Mb on my 1Gb SD card. Seemed pretty fast to me, though i'll run my script to recode to zlib for faster decompression on the fly, lose 100Mb space but the speed tradeoff vs LZMA is likely worth it.

HDDs usually have a small RAM cache, which is not a NAND because the HDD cache is volatile, so... if power is lost the data will be gone as well. For this reason, it is possible to disable HDD cache, this will slow down the performance but there is no volatile data anymore.

A RAM cache got no "write limit" but the data is volatile... so power off = data gone.

Every high end SSD got a RAM cache as well, so this is not a HDD only thing. However, the cheaper SSDs may not use a RAM cache but they may use some of the NAND (for cache duty) instead. Those SSDs got lower performance (because RAM is simply faster) but at a lower cost... and it is somewhat more secure because no volatile cache-data.

However, there is some high performing SSDs with RAM AND some sort of "capacitor-puffer" inside. So, if the power is lost and there is still data inside the volatile RAM cache, those data will be "flushed" over to the NAND and in this term will not be lost. Although only few SSDs got this technology... mainly in the datacenter-usage. Some gamer-boards are still able to use those datacenter-SSDs which could be useful as a OS drive, as it may prevent data-corruption.

Generally i rather would avoid Seagate, WD is somewhere in between and Toshiba seems to be the most reliable. A reliable HDD is not a bad choice but it makes only sense as a big datacenter HDD... not as a OS or game-drive.

I got a 20 TB Toshiba HDD too on my huge gamer PC... used to store my setup and video files.

For downloads i do recommend a cheap USB 3.2 SSD, (1-2 TB) so this SSD will slowly deplete its write endurance and if someday (which will take very long) the endurance is depleted you can simply switch it out with another cheap external SSD. This will help not to "bug" the expensive and valuable internal SSDs to much... as those are used either for OS or install-files.

The HDD is only here for long time storage of Setup and Video files, no other function but there is huge space needed.

No drive is supreme, every drive got its advantage.

Sure, if you download: Put it to external SSD and use install toward internal SSD, and use HDD for backup. Data can be deleted after.

If Setup is already on the HDD, copy the file from the HDD to the external SSD and use install toward a internal SSD, easy and effective.

So, i truly love SSDs and HDDs too.

Strictly speaking, it's only the write cache that you would need to disable.

With a read cache, the data you read will be copied into the drive's RAM. This copy is technically redundant; while the RAM cache will speed up further reads, it won't be a problem if it suddenly disappears, as there's still a copy on disk. So, if the power fails, and the RAM's contents are lost, no data is lost.

A similar situation arises with RAID1: You get increased reliability, and increased read speed, with the only downsides being the extra storage required and reduced write speed.

It may sound logical but on the other hand still impossible because the read cache from drive A is the write cache from drive B, if you copy data over from drive A to drive B. The issue is, the cache is handling both, read and write, dependable on the "direction". I see no clear way how to separate the data into "write cache" and "read cache", as this will simply be the drives cache. Everything from any of the cache that is making its way to a certain write location need to be "flushed" or made non volatile, else it will be lost.

Just as i said, technically, because the cache is handling read and writes dependable on the task, this separation between read and write may not be possible. However, only the data that is pending for a write need to be "flushed"... so usually it is called "write cache" and this write cache have to be disabled if you want to "play it safe"... the read task will not matter but this one is always enabled anyway.

I was mistakenly under the impression that Chromebooks were running ARM, that's nice to know.

Had a fast look on the website and the "modules" page is gone. On the past, I had some compatibility issues with software and the "modules" were quite limited, that's why I mention it works more like mainstrem OS's, but thats a few years ago.