I don't like the offered configuration options for laptops

phenriot

Member
Backing up windows in this day and age is totally redundant IMHO, it's a waste of resources and effort, installation and config takes about 30 minutes. And if you're buying decent hardware, a failure would never happen within the lifetime of the machine anyway.

that statement is pretty disqualifying.
 

phenriot

Member
an interesting report for the SSD fanboys here:

incidentially, one of the SSDs that failed me was a Crucial MX500 ...

so much for "if the SSD crashes it's configured wrong"

so I'm going to purchase my high end laptop from somewhere else. Maybe from same as my previous one.
When I bought my dad's laptop here, I got really excited about a European alternative to especially one providing a Swiss Keyboard layout :-(
 
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Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
an interesting report for the SSD fanboys here:

incidentially, one of the SSDs that failed me was a Crucial MX500 ...

You are being very crass in your responses now. Please take this as a warning, if you continue to be derogatory you will be banned.

You are absolutely free to choose your own path in how you operate your system. If you ask for advice, you'll get up to date advice so referring to anyone on here as a fanboy when they are trying to help is out of order.
 

phenriot

Member
You are being very crass in your responses now. Please take this as a warning, if you continue to be derogatory you will be banned.

You are absolutely free to choose your own path in how you operate your system. If you ask for advice, you'll get up to date advice so referring to anyone on here as a fanboy when they are trying to help is out of order.

I had started to write a longer reply, but I will keep this short.
False information (i.e. SSD don't fail), blaming me for the crashes and belittling my requirements for stability had put me in a negative state of mind and prevented me from simply moving on, which I will do now.
Apologies for reacting.
 

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
I had started to write a longer reply, but I will keep this short.
False information (i.e. SSD don't fail), blaming me for the crashes and belittling my requirements for stability had put me in a negative state of mind and prevented me from simply moving on, which I will do now.
Apologies for reacting.

Noone said they don't fail, we all said they are extremely reliable. I think the link that you posted shows that. Their reliability is commended with only a 1% failure rate.

You would need to buy 100 SSDs to have 1 of them fail on you, putting it into context, and this is in a heavy use server environment (about as extreme as it gets). The fact that you have had multiple failures either suggests extremely bad luck (which you can never plan for) or a habitual behaviour that can be predicted. We don't know which brands you have been purchasing or what your usage habits are, but the statistics don't lie on the reliability of hardware. The best part is that a datacenter will actually have skewed reliability statistics in favour of non-SSD drives. The reliability of a 2.5" standard HDD in a laptop is far less than a 3.5" HDD in a server rack, hopefully that won't need justification. Purely the lack of inertia susceptibility makes SSDs more reliable in such a use case.

We were all trying to help you and give you modern solutions to the problems you faced and the requirements you had. Look at the time some of us took to go out of our way to try and help you..... genuinely, how long do you think it took all of us out of our day to attempt to help you?

IMO you have sought out the negative rather than take on board the information and experience that was provided to you and then reacted.

We all have bad days though.
 

Surreal_Killer

New member
Actually, with all due respect, I'm totally with phenriot.
Clearly the people belittling him have no idea what "business critical" means, and I also am prevented from buying another PCS laptop for these very same reasons.
I CANNOT afford, at all, in any way, for my laptop to fail when working away from home. When I am trying to review my drone footage on top of the tallest building in Chernobyl, on a Volcano in Iceland or Montserrat, review & edit photos in Africa or Japan, I CANNOT afford for my laptop to "just not boot".
In all of these locations, I have no power, no Internet, no resources at all to "just rebuild" Windows, or restore from a backup or the cloud. MY LAPTOP MUST JUST WORK EVERY TIME. If it doesn't, and I cannot review footage and reshoot anything I'm not happy with, I'm into anything up to £10,000 to go back and do it again, which is way more than the cost of 2 disks in a RAID1 configuration.
I've had my system for 7 years now, and it hasn't failed. I love it. BUT, one of those boot SSDs can fail at anytime, and just because you say I would have to buy 100 to have one fail shows you have no appreciation of error rates and failure rates in a business critical situation. I also design these systems for my "day job".
This is why, in large companies, with large SAN arrays, they use RAID60, because they cannot afford one single second of downtime.
My laptop is an older Octane, i7, 32GB memory, 2 x 1TB SSDs (RAID1), a 4TB Samsung NVMe drive and a 1TB WD SATA3 SSD, and a 4K screen (necessary for reviewing 4K drone footage).
Everything phenriot wants was available a while ago as I have it. I'm also frustrated that I cannot have more than 2 disks, but more so that a 4K screen (15.6" - so it fits in my backpack) is also not an option any more.
For all this said, my Octane has been bounced around 100s of airports, planes, cars, busses, trains and covered probably 500,000 miles in over 80 countries, and it still boots every time I power it on.
I'd love to buy another as my current one will not run Windows 11, but without extra disks and a 4K screen in a 15.6" chassis, it's simply not an option
 

AgentCooper

At Least I Have Chicken
Moderator
Actually, with all due respect, I'm totally with phenriot.
Clearly the people belittling him have no idea what "business critical" means, and I also am prevented from buying another PCS laptop for these very same reasons.
I CANNOT afford, at all, in any way, for my laptop to fail when working away from home. When I am trying to review my drone footage on top of the tallest building in Chernobyl, on a Volcano in Iceland or Montserrat, review & edit photos in Africa or Japan, I CANNOT afford for my laptop to "just not boot".
In all of these locations, I have no power, no Internet, no resources at all to "just rebuild" Windows, or restore from a backup or the cloud. MY LAPTOP MUST JUST WORK EVERY TIME. If it doesn't, and I cannot review footage and reshoot anything I'm not happy with, I'm into anything up to £10,000 to go back and do it again, which is way more than the cost of 2 disks in a RAID1 configuration.
I've had my system for 7 years now, and it hasn't failed. I love it. BUT, one of those boot SSDs can fail at anytime, and just because you say I would have to buy 100 to have one fail shows you have no appreciation of error rates and failure rates in a business critical situation. I also design these systems for my "day job".
This is why, in large companies, with large SAN arrays, they use RAID60, because they cannot afford one single second of downtime.
My laptop is an older Octane, i7, 32GB memory, 2 x 1TB SSDs (RAID1), a 4TB Samsung NVMe drive and a 1TB WD SATA3 SSD, and a 4K screen (necessary for reviewing 4K drone footage).
Everything phenriot wants was available a while ago as I have it. I'm also frustrated that I cannot have more than 2 disks, but more so that a 4K screen (15.6" - so it fits in my backpack) is also not an option any more.
For all this said, my Octane has been bounced around 100s of airports, planes, cars, busses, trains and covered probably 500,000 miles in over 80 countries, and it still boots every time I power it on.
I'd love to buy another as my current one will not run Windows 11, but without extra disks and a 4K screen in a 15.6" chassis, it's simply not an option
I don’t think anyone was belittling the OP, looking through these posts. People here generally want to give the best advice they can to anyone looking for assistance or information. And I think the info is bob on, RAID is a medium that’s pretty much had it’s day in the home user spectrum. When there’s options such as NAS, external and cloud storage available to people, opting for RAID is not an ideal choice.

Whilst I fully accept that people may have their own preferences when it comes to these kinds of things, all OP is getting is honest, and more importantly when it comes to tech, up to date advice.
 

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
Actually, with all due respect, I'm totally with phenriot.
Clearly the people belittling him have no idea what "business critical" means, and I also am prevented from buying another PCS laptop for these very same reasons.
I CANNOT afford, at all, in any way, for my laptop to fail when working away from home. When I am trying to review my drone footage on top of the tallest building in Chernobyl, on a Volcano in Iceland or Montserrat, review & edit photos in Africa or Japan, I CANNOT afford for my laptop to "just not boot".
In all of these locations, I have no power, no Internet, no resources at all to "just rebuild" Windows, or restore from a backup or the cloud. MY LAPTOP MUST JUST WORK EVERY TIME. If it doesn't, and I cannot review footage and reshoot anything I'm not happy with, I'm into anything up to £10,000 to go back and do it again, which is way more than the cost of 2 disks in a RAID1 configuration.
I've had my system for 7 years now, and it hasn't failed. I love it. BUT, one of those boot SSDs can fail at anytime, and just because you say I would have to buy 100 to have one fail shows you have no appreciation of error rates and failure rates in a business critical situation. I also design these systems for my "day job".
This is why, in large companies, with large SAN arrays, they use RAID60, because they cannot afford one single second of downtime.
My laptop is an older Octane, i7, 32GB memory, 2 x 1TB SSDs (RAID1), a 4TB Samsung NVMe drive and a 1TB WD SATA3 SSD, and a 4K screen (necessary for reviewing 4K drone footage).
Everything phenriot wants was available a while ago as I have it. I'm also frustrated that I cannot have more than 2 disks, but more so that a 4K screen (15.6" - so it fits in my backpack) is also not an option any more.
For all this said, my Octane has been bounced around 100s of airports, planes, cars, busses, trains and covered probably 500,000 miles in over 80 countries, and it still boots every time I power it on.
I'd love to buy another as my current one will not run Windows 11, but without extra disks and a 4K screen in a 15.6" chassis, it's simply not an option

Given your prolific impact on this support forum in the past I'm going to take all of this with the tiniest pinch of salt.

To create an account only to post on this very topic suggests either a remarkable coincidence or a pre-determined agenda to starting a debate with absolutely no standing whatsoever other than words on a screen.

Suggesting that we have no idea what business critical means is, honestly, laughable. Most of us work in heavily IT reliant environments.... so much so that we follow the opportunity and trend of modern solutions with our relating departments & companies. Not following the modern options and alternatives shows a real resistance to change and would also follow in line with a need to defend that resistance by offering an opinion on a random forum.

If you genuinely believe the professionals on the cutting edge of business critical processes are using RAID in their laptops you are completely off the boil with what you profess to be in touch with.

Just to add.... you could set fire to my work laptop right now. I could have a new one back to working operation in around 40 minutes without anything other than a new laptop itself & an internet connection. If I can come back from such a brink, I have no problem coming back from any middle ground scenario that you can come up with. Dropping a laptop with a RAID array built in wipes out everything, it just isn't a good offering for such a scenario. If you, and the OP, can't see that and it doesn't absolutely ring true for anything other than the scenario you want to paint.... there's not a lot we can suggest to make you think otherwise. The rest of the world has moved on though, you honestly just need to accept that and either adopt or stick with older tech. Floppy drives are quite resilient also, in case you want to go back a bit further.
 
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Surreal_Killer

New member
To create an account only to post on this very topic suggests either a remarkable coincidence or a pre-determined agenda to starting a debate with absolutely no standing whatsoever other than words on a screen.
To be fair, I found the post when researching whether a PCS laptop could be purchased with a 4K screen, something that I need.

The whole RAID issue also shows that you know little about people's needs. As I explained in my original post, when you are isolated in Prypiat, or up the side of an active volcano, you cannot simply rebuild a machine on the spot over the wire.

If you genuinely believe the professionals on the cutting edge of business critical processes are using RAID in their laptops you are completely off the boil with what you profess to be in touch with.
This I never said. *MY* business requires no interruptions when I am filming in remote locations. The most likely scenario for a failure is the boot disk. Any other disk is used for viewing and editing what is already safe on memory cards, so it doesn't matter if one of those fails.

We design systems for what we need. I have these requirements for my travelling laptop. The No.1 identified risk is my laptop not booting, and the most likely scenario is a boot disk failing, so you design the risk out. My main desktop has 6 x 8TB disks in a RAID6 array and my backup NAS has 8 x 8TB disks in a RAID5 array, this mitigates the calculated risks.
 

barlew

Godlike
To be fair, I found the post when researching whether a PCS laptop could be purchased with a 4K screen, something that I need.

The whole RAID issue also shows that you know little about people's needs. As I explained in my original post, when you are isolated in Prypiat, or up the side of an active volcano, you cannot simply rebuild a machine on the spot over the wire.


This I never said. *MY* business requires no interruptions when I am filming in remote locations. The most likely scenario for a failure is the boot disk. Any other disk is used for viewing and editing what is already safe on memory cards, so it doesn't matter if one of those fails.

We design systems for what we need. I have these requirements for my travelling laptop. The No.1 identified risk is my laptop not booting, and the most likely scenario is a boot disk failing, so you design the risk out. My main desktop has 6 x 8TB disks in a RAID6 array and my backup NAS has 8 x 8TB disks in a RAID5 array, this mitigates the calculated risks.
I go back to my previous post. What you are asking for in this day and age is not standard even in the professional IT space. You really need a bespoke enterprise solution with a considered support wrap. I would contact PCS as a business customer and see what they can do for you.
 

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
I go back to my previous post. What you are asking for in this day and age is not standard even in the professional IT space. You really need a bespoke enterprise solution with a considered support wrap. I would contact PCS as a business customer and see what they can do for you.
This is kind of the crux of it, there is no mainstream supplier or manufacture in the world who offers the solution you're looking for, those technologies went out of support in laptops a long time ago.

You'd need something specially made or very niche.
 
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