... EDIT: It doesn't work on any of the drives I have connected... Hmm. It could well be that I have APM disabled through BIOS. EDIT 2: From my dmesg log: [ 60.704201] apm: disabled - APM is not SMP safe. ... I think (not really sure though) that the Linux apm driver is not quite the same thing as ...

A second question (regarding the importance of TRIM): If the apparent (usuable) capacity of an SSD is somewhat smaller than the actual available (physical) blocks, such that the additional pool of reserved blocks or sectors is large enough, would that not result in avoid the kind of performance degr...

I can't help feeling that the arrival of TRIM has been accompanied with a certain about of hype. Is it just me that thinks that TRIM is rather less of a solution to a problem and more of a nice performance optimization or work around for a particular aspect of SSD behaviour. It seems to me that whil...

.... Thanks a ton for your input. As of now, the only thing I am worried about is the head parking issue. This seems relevant both as a noise factor and as a stability/durability factor. I would rather not have to use special tools to disable APM or such on each boot. I will tell you how I plan on ...

So it seems that head parking is an issue for many drives - even 3.5" ones. The EcoGreen doesn't have this, but I think a WD Scorpio Blue inside a Scythe Quiet Drive would be very quiet, or at least quiet enough. What are your thoughts on this, TBorgeaud? Also, does the head parking cause much wear...

The head parking problem that I came across, and one that has been seen by others with other drives, is that drives park the heads, often with a very audible click, after quite a short period of inactivity. Can the head parking be disabled? On some drives the parking can be disabled and/or the time...

There is one potential issue that crops up more often with 2.5" drivers than with 3.5". The smaller drives tend to be designed for low power usage and generally include more aggressive power saving features. I don't mind aggressive power saving features. As I said, performance is not an issue (as l...

There is one potential issue that crops up more often with 2.5" drivers than with 3.5". The smaller drives tend to be designed for low power usage and generally include more aggressive power saving features. In some cases one might find that the more aggressive default settings, of power saving feat...

Agressive head parking functionality appears to be pretty common for 2.5" hard disk drives. Western Digital drives are certainly not alone in having these features. I've used some Samsung drives in a small server that behaved the same way, but was able to turn of APM and stop the head parking. I hap...

I have recently purchased two Western Digital WD3200BJKT hard disk drives to use in a FreeBSD workstation. After some initial problems concerning my BIOS creating a small host protected area, the drives are installed and working. However, as I have found with other 2.5" disks, some head parking func...

I've been considering components for a new system. The kind of thing I am interested in would probably involve a PSU that uses a 120mm fan (probably a seasonic S12II 380 or 430) in something like an Antec SOLO case. I have been considering whether I should opt for a tower or top down heatsink. Initi...

I have no doubt that SSDs are more reliable than conventional spinning hard disks. However, I feel that reliability, durability (or MTBF etc) are not quite the same thing as an expected lifespan/endurance. SSD or not, backups seem pretty sensible for any data which I cannot (easily) afford to lose. ...

For several years I have been interested in (I've been considering) the possibility of using solid state storage. More lately, since I've become interested in having a quiet PC and flash memory / SSD prices have fallen, using an SSD, or even just compact flash, is looking more attractive. However, t...