Another day of ripping and slashing today. I got some struts put into place to replace the ones I need to remove, and some of the existing ones removed. I got a load of scrap wood shifted down to the basement, and my friend took away a honking great sack of the stuff, as well as a pile of ceiling tiles. Before placing struts I needed to pull down some more ceiling, so now have another 40lb or so of drywall pieces in a fourth bag. I got a load of dust and debris scraped out from a few joins, squirted sealant across a couple of joins and sprayed a can of foam to start filling the spaces as I expose them. There's still quite a draft in the room and it seems to be getting stronger. I think what is happening is that the air used to seep out from many holes and now it's blowing harder out of fewer holes. Tomorrow's task is to continue wth what I've been doing today. Hopefully I'll get to a point where I can wield at least one more can of spray and maybe two. For good measure, since my friend took the big sack of wood scraps I now have space to start the next sack of scraps. It already has three bucketfuls of bits in it. Because I'd freed up the space I was able to cut away a lot of the really nasty trim from the room, and then cut it into little pieces ready to be taken away and burned. I've still got a huge great stack of scrap wood and I'm debating whether to make some rustic-themed ornaments with it or just cut it up and give it to my friend to burn it.
If anything, it would be a minor lifespan reduction depending on what's enabled on the SSD (I think wear-leveling was the most pressing concern historically). I've been running LUKS/LVM on the Linux side, and Bitlocker on the Windows side, for a few years and haven't faced any issues yet.
From what I can see from trying to get useful information online it sounds like the biggest issue is that encrypting a volume (which is what I've got on my existing magnetic drive) means the SSD essentially looks like it's 100% full, even though most of what's shown as used space is actually unused within the TruCrypt volume. Guess it's something else to check into. I had considered some kind of encryption algorithm using some hardware dongles I've been working with but if I have a total amount of data written limit I don't want to be endlessly overwriting files with encypted/decrypted versions. But then if someone steals my laptop I don't want to find they can suddenly access all my files either. Do you work with volumes of data large enough that encrypting and decrypting it all would be a potential concern when you've got TBW limits?
Not on my (currently) encrypted drives, no. Probably only a few GBs a day, depending on the day. That said: since I use these drives to do work, the question of encrypting vs. lifespan was moot: better to encrypt, and if the drives die, I'll have to replace. The first 850 I bought in 2015, and according to Samsung's SSD tool, it's still in good health, with ~18TB having been written to it in those ~5 years. Its stated TBW is ~150TB. If we do rough math, that's a ~40 year lifespan at current usage patterns. As it is, the drive is old enough that it's out of warranty, anyway.
Not such a productive day today. I started replacing pocket screws with construction grade lag screws and then figured I could still feel a draft and thought it was blowing through the ceiling cavity. So I decided I might as well do all the ripping, then all the strut replacing, then all the foam spraying. So I got the ladder against the opposing wall as best I could, pulled down a bunch of ceiling tiles and a couple of feet of drywall and then cleaned it all up. Now I have five bags of drywall scraps, which will take me 10-12 weeks to feed out to the trash service a little at a time. It saves putting all that nasty stuff in the back of my car with the cream interior.... I just need to find myself a trash can and shift all the garbage out onto the porch so it's out of my way. It was interesting to see the looks I got at the hardware store having counted out 60 lag screws into my hand. Normally if I need more than a couple of dozen screws I just buy a box of them but usually a box is 100 screws and these came in a box of 320. I didn't really want to pay north of $100 for many times more screws than I need right away. It's a different proposition when I'm deciding whether to buy a few screws at 12c each or a box of 100 for $9.99 Along the way I got three wall cabinets taken down to the basement, and a couple of big long beams moved out of the way in the basement. They were a little too long for where I had hoped to store them but a quick visit from Mr Jigsaw and they fit.
I'll be using it partly for work purposes but it's my own work so I can't really expense stuff cleanly. If they die I need to replace, I'd just really rather not deal with that any more frequently than is absolutely necessary. Having never really thought about total volume written I'd need to figure just what software might be writing - my collection of photos is somewhere in the region of 600GB so I don't want to find my photo management tool does anything with a lot of files. It's old enough that it's probably not designed with the peculiarities of SSDs in mind, and I've never been in a rush to update it because I quite like the idea of paying once for a software license rather than paying every month. Things like my code libraries are probably small enough that I don't need to worry, when I think that source code is a text file and so very small and even a compiled executable with debug functionality is typically maybe 30-40MB, so I can write that file 25,000 times before I hit a single TBW. If I can compile 100 times per day for a year and barely scrape over 1TBW that's not something I need to be concerned about
For 'cold' storage I'd still recommend an HDD (my photos are also 'in ze clout'), where you could get 4TB+ for fairly cheap, these days. That doesn't help the SFF ideal, though. Anyway, definitely some things to consider. And yeah, code is usually pretty tiny.
LOL. A good description. Though I've known days when the coldest of those temperatures was the high for the day. BTW, I used an app for the conversion so no calculations for me.
Reminds me when I was visiting people in the US back in about 2005 and literally couldn't hold back a laugh when someone commented on how gas was so expensive. At the time it was around $3.50/gallon. I had fond, if distant, memories of when it was that cheap. At the time the UK gas price was closer to $7.50.
I feel like I made good progress on the house today. I got a load more of the struts pried out and foam sprayed around the ends of the joists. Where I've got a stud wall against a textured concrete block wall I sprayed foam into the gap between the two. Then there was a little bit of foam left so I sprayed it into a window well. I suspect this will make the cubby area the other side of the stud wall extra cold, since the cold air can't seep out any more, but hopefully before long I can pull the ceiling down in there and do some more of the same. At least in that space I'll only need to spray foam at one end of the joists - the other end is inside so it won't be a problem. With so much accumulated crud taken out of the room, and units removed from the walls, it feels quite spacious in there. Hopefully now it won't be so cold in there, which will be nice. If nothing else it will start saving me money on both heating oil and electricity, as it becomes easier to maintain a more sensible temperature in there. Surprisingly I still have three full cans of foam left. I bought six, expecting to be spraying a lot more of it than I have actually needed. I still have one window cavity to spray but aside from that I'm pretty much done, as far as I can see. I can still use the foam in window cavities in other rooms, so it won't go to waste. Now I'm going to take a day or two off from wrecking the house and do something else. I've got some code I need to write so maybe I can do that over the weekend.
All those years later, it's basically the same over here (maybe slightly cheaper where we live). We only fill up once a month though, so despite it being more expensive, it's cheaper than when we were filling up more regularly, in Canada... which also had higher per-litre gas prices than the US. Maybe they're onto something with all those resource wars.
What is the gas price in the UK at the moment? I know the overwhelming majority of the price is tax of one form or another, so much so that even news articles highlighting how bad the taxes are miss the point completely. Here the gas prices recently ticked up to $2.60/gal. I gather PA has one of the highest gas taxes in the US. When we go out of state we usually take the chance to fill up at cheaper rates. Thanks to the pandemic we're not going through gas anywhere near as fast as we did before everything went silly.
Friends in Cali, a married couple, might have just escaped death. He, one week hospitalized, seems to be turning the corner without respirator. She severely relapsed after a day of feeling better and is now gradually improving, not hospitalized. Neither has pre-existing medical conditions. I have loved ones around me who would be vulnerable but are very much alive and vibrant. The younger extension of the clan is seemingly careless about the possibility of exposing it to Grandma in a county that is currently under siege with daily infections - if they had the choice, they would never suggest that Grandma is in any way expendable, and neither would I. I never take the chance. On one hand, I'll be glad when this crap is over but on the other hand realize that this virus will be lurking forever and am sobered by the reality that the world, in spite of marvelous technology and infrastructure is currently not adequately prepared for seriously virulent, deadly pandemics. IMO. The ease of instant, massive travel, per example, renders the world more vulnerable to rapid infestation of rapidly mutating bugs. Too much is reliant on politics, and there is really no practical, common sense protocol in place to minimize early spread and one would think that a dependable and easily accessed stockpile of emergency supplies would be maintained. And why not try to wipe out potentially dangerous hot-spots, like wet markets and the marketing of potentially dangerous, exotic animals. Compared to the hazards of a crippled economy it would be cheap.