SSD vs. HDD (Updated)

IDC & TrendForce data
via Aaron Rakers

Chris Mellor's How long before SSDs replace nearline disk drives? starts with a quote I think the good Dr. Pangloss would love:

Aaron Rakers, the Wells Fargo analyst, thinks enterprise storage buyers will start to prefer SSDs when prices fall to five times or less that of hard disk drives. They are cheaper to operate than disk drives, needing less power and cooling, and are much faster to access.

Below the fold, some skepticism.

Optical Media Durability: Update

A year ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered:

Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.

It is time to repeat the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the reader and verifying their checksums. Below the fold, this year's results.

A Tribute To Don Waters

Michael Keller has written, in Exploiting the opportunities of the maturing digital age: the first twenty years of the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, what is effectively a richly deserved tribute to Don Waters as his retirement looms. Below the fold, some commentary and my two cents worth.

Wine on WIndows 10

Source

David Gerard posts Wine on Windows 10. It works.

Windows 10 introduced Windows Subsystem for Linux — and the convenience of Ubuntu downloadable from the Microsoft Store. This makes this dumb idea pretty much Just Work out of the box, apart from having to set your DISPLAY environment variable by hand.

So far, it's mindbogglingly useless. It can only run 64-bit Windows apps, which doesn't even include all the apps that come with Windows 10 itself.

But I want to stress again: this now works trivially. I'm not some sort of mad genius to do this thing — I only appear to be the first person to admit to having done it publicly.

Gerard recounts the history of this "interesting" idea. Although he treats this as a "geek gotta do what a geek gotta do" thing, the interest for Emulation & Virtualization as Preservation Strategies is in the tail of the post:

TO DO: 32-bit support. This will have to wait for Microsoft to release WSL 2. I wonder if ancient Win16 programs will work then — they should do in Wine, even if they don't in Windows any more.

Of course, if they run in Wine on Ubuntu on Windows 10 on an x86, they should run on Wine on Ubuntu on an x86. But being able to run Wine in an official Microsoft environment might make deployment of preserved Win16 programs easier to get past an institution's risk-averse lawyers.

Emulation as a Service

I've written before about the valuable work of the Software Preservation Network (SPN). Now they have released their EaaSI Sandbox, in which you can explore the capabilities of "Emulation as a Service" (EaaS), a topic I discussed in my report Emulation and Virtualization as Preservation Strategies. Below the fold I try EaaSi for the first time.