Rob Lang, the person behind the excellent FreeRPG blog, did an excellent job on his 24 hour RPG challenge. Within the space of just 24 hours, Lang put together a complete RPG, Cloudship Atlantis.
Day: July 8, 2009
SSDs – Write Endurance Myths
I happened to be reading a comment on another website the other day where the commenter claimed SSDs would never be viable alternatives to traditional magnetic hard drives until manufacturers solved the “100,000 rewrite cycle issue.” StorageSearch.com’s SSD Myths and Legends – “write endurance” attempts to put this claim to bed once and for all.
The main point is that most of the SSD drives being sold today have write endurances ratings in the 1 to 5 million rewrite cycle range. The 100,000 limit was the maximum available in the late 1990s, but has long since been superseded.
The upshot of this is that even using extremely data intensive applications that write and rewrite large amounts of data over and over again to and SSD, the user is looking at decades of such intensive use of an SSD before it fails.
This is why typically, SSDs released today have MTBF ratings equivalent to those of magnetic hard drives (not that there aren’t issue with MTBF as a guide to hard drive reliability, but rather that there is nothing about recent SSDs that will make them fail more frequently than their magnetic bretheren).
Munchkin Level Counter iPhone/iPod Touch App
Steve Jackson Games has created a Munchkin Level Counter app for the iPod Touch and iPhone. The app not only provides a helpful level counter to keep track of your progress, but also includes a “Boon” option which the player can use once per game and awards one of 150 in-game advantages such as treasure or yet another way to stab your friends in the back.
A bit pricey at $4.99, but I’m sure they’ll sell plenty of these.
