Warning

The second part of this post is rather “computer geeky” so feel free to stop when you reach it.

The rain hammered down during the night but by dawn the rain had departed leaving everything rather damp and the sky grey.  It looked like we might receive a repeat performance later and elected to go for a walk around the local retail park before morning tea.  We’re getting good at this non-shopping business walking around with hands firmly stuffed in pockets and wallet/purse suffering from asphyxiation!  Jan managed to visually feast herself on the Arts & Crafts shop whilst I drooled over the carpet in Curry’s PC World.

We were back on Waiouru by 10.30am when the heavens opened again.  Jan spent the day knitting a fair isle jersey whilst I rubbed down some of the paint in the cratch and then attempted to repaint the area.  With a little luck my painting might be improving as the latest paintwork only has slight brush marks.  I’m aiming for no brush marks but have yet to reach that standard.  I think I’m too impatient and moving the brush too hard and fast.

As it’s getting close to winter we’ve decided to ‘winterize’ the Kipor generator.  This winter we’ll be on shore power and it won’t (I hope) be required.  It’s running as I type this doing the final absorption and float charge on the domestic battery bank.  If; as planned; it runs out of petrol I’ll do an oil change tomorrow and prepare it for storage.

Now the ‘geeky’ part.  The laptop is starting to show it’s age with the fan making some terrible grinding sounds and the odd hard drive error appearing.  It has had a significant amount of use over the last five years, initially as my business computer and now on the boat.  I started off thinking about an immediate replacement and my policy with computers is always to look two levels below the current “top line” machines where the price is usually very high.  My initial thoughts were to replace the laptop before it failed.  After considering two factors I reconsidered my approach!  First, we are in the early years of our retirement and need to manage the money. Second, if the laptop failed it would be the data we missed the most.  So a cheaper option would be to have a backup of the data on the laptop which could be transferred to it’s eventual successor. 

With all this free time to research I’ve been looking at the specification of the more modern laptops and ultrabooks.  The latter are smaller and probably more appropriate for life in a confined space.  Some of the cheaper Ultrabooks have small capacity Solid State Drives (SSD’s).  This is the emerging technology replacing the hard disk drives (HDD) which have been around since the 1950’s.  They are very small, no moving parts, run cooler, have very high speed data transfer rates, and use less power.  My current thoughts are that we should copy the data from the laptop to a SSD which could subsequently be fitted into the replacement computer.  It would need to be an external SSD.  The SSD’s come in two formats, SATA and mSATA.  The latter is a small printed circuit board that can plug directly into a socket on the laptop whilst the form usually replaces the old HDD.  Cheap Ultrabooks have a large HDD and a small mSATA SSD to supplement the work done by the HDD.  Obviously we will buy a cheap machine so I need to consider an mSATA format SDD which can be fitted into an external enclosure. 

This afternoon I let my fingers do the walking around the internet.  The following table shows the result of my research into mSATA SSD’s.

A 256GB drive is about the right size for the laptop data.  The four manufacturers quote different read and write speeds (speed of data transfer).  After tabulating the data it was apparent the Mushkin had the best read/write speed.  Fortunately the supplier was also the cheapest.

The SSD will need to be fitted into a small enclosure (case) which can be plugged into the laptop using one of the USB ports.  I could only find two suppliers of suitable enclosures.

The preferred option would be to selected the UK supplier.

in summary, the mSATA SSD could be fitted into the enclosure and connected to our existing laptop via a USB port.  This would enable the data on the laptop to be copied across the the SSD.  When the laptop needs to be replaced the SSD could be removed from the enclosure and replace the smaller SSD in the new laptop/ultrabook.  By doing this we would defer the need to replace the current laptop until it failed but retain the data on the SSD which could then be fitted into the new machine.  Well that’s the theory!