The Tek 0177: Nobody Needs Unlimited Data, Do They? | Tek Syndicate

Level1Techs
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Deals: Surface Pro 3 $200 Off & 960GB SSD Only $285

14 hours 53 min ago


1st! Also, I just wanted to add one more PC... 

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Kill Your Console: Build a $400 Gaming PC - 2014

1 day 1 hour ago


can i use a bit fenix bfc case/tower? 

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Deals: Alienware Alpha Worth It Now At $399?

1 day 2 hours ago


I think its a *decent* deal still. If only there... 

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Grand Theft Auto V 25% Off as PC Pre-load Goes Live

2 days 3 hours ago


never mind it worked...just didnt recognize it... 

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Grand Theft Auto V 25% Off as PC Pre-load Goes Live

2 days 3 hours ago


Anyone have luck with the new 24% code, It wont... 

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Deals: Alienware Alpha Worth It Now At $399?

3 days 3 hours ago


damn. it's all good. i really wanted that deal. 

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Deals: Alienware Alpha Worth It Now At $399?

3 days 12 hours ago


Shoot sorry about that. Looks like the deal is... 

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Netflix new rules can end your service for using VPNs

3 days 13 hours ago


There's nothing in this that says you will get...



This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://teksyndicate.com/videos/tek-0177-nobody-needs-unlimited-data-do-they
2

I dont even know what i use on a monthly bases. I prefer it that way.

3

"it's going to slow down netflix"
oh then why isn't youtube super slow ? :/
(not counting if you use comcast in the US)

4

I don't mind the Microsoft Apps on the Cyanogen Android platform BUT Skype. that is going in a fire.

All my Android Devices have Cyanogen installed and i run the Office Apps and OneDrive on all my devices. One-Drive is surprisingly convenient for me. so in reality Cyanogen is just saving me about 5 minutes of installing productivity apps.

And to comment is it making android or microsoft better? it's not making any of them better. BUT for people that own the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 or 12.2 tablets and are already running Cyanogen. (Cause that is the only tablets that can be used for productivity in my opinion) it will be a convenience.

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I was thinking that.

6

Allentown, PA here. We recently received Verizon Fios in the area which provides those speeds. The kicker is that we have service from RCN which, from my experience, has had a lot better customer service and prices than Verizon for the same speeds. I welcome the competition here. I can say that beyond our city though, not many other places have seen this growth. We have three cities in the Lehigh Valley and Allentown is the only one to see anything from Verizon beyond really crappy DSL.

7

That thing about cells sounds like a cure for cancer. I mean, I'm only a layman, but stopping bad cells from multiplying? That sounds like the cure for cancer. Can somebody more knowledgeable pitch in here?

8

I use that model Seagate drive as my mass-storage drive in my main computer. I got a good deal on it a couple of years ago. No issues to date, but it's a good thing I regularly back it up. All the same, I guess I should think about replacing it given this news. It's starting to get a bit full and will be needing an upgrade in the near future anyway, so this just gives me an excuse to do so.

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damn, I just bought a 850 evo :(

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So, a few comments on that story about the toyota engineer not seeing any future for electric cars. This story really rustles my jimmies (yes, a reference to another thread on this forum) in that it is not untrue, but it vastly misses the point. And this subject, electric cars, is the industry I have been working in so I have some experience with this stuff.

The engineer said something like, if you charge up a car in 12 minutes for a range of 500 km you are using up the electricity to power 1000 homes. Yes, this would be true if it were possible. But it would only take up the power for those homes for 12 minutes, then the car would be charged and wouldn't be taking up the power for 1000 homes. But you cannot charge a car that quick. Take a Tesla model S for example, an 85 kWh battery pack (good for 426-480km), if you were to charge it in 12 minutes, you would need to charge it at 425 kW. This is not nearly close to being possible for a consumer. In your home, a 240V charging outlet would need to be rated for 1770 amps, which is ridiculous, I think the standard they are at right now is like 60A, maybe 100A. The craziest DC fast charging stations today max out at 120kW, so not the 425 kW required in this engineer's 12 minute scenario. The engineer is likely trying to equate the power demands on the grid if you were to charge a car in about the same time as it takes to fill up a gas tank. Never mind the stresses and wear on the battery charging it that quick.

But this brings up the other very interesting topic on my mind, Smart Grid technology or some similar name. When you have electric cars plugged in and hooked up to a central control, you can do some wondrous things. The company I worked at was starting to look into this stuff, a big up-and-coming technology. The smart grid technology can use the plugged in cars to balance the power draw, so when everyone comes home from work in the summer and the power draw peaks from AC and whatnot, the central control tells the cars to stop charging. Then overnight or during the day the cars can charge and keep the power grid at a more even draw. You could have priority charging for certain cases, when you need to go somewhere, but for the majority of the time, the majority of the cars could wait a bit to be charged. This can do some great things, like for example the power grid has to be built to handle the peak power draws, but for a lot of the time it isn't running at full tilt. So with nuclear reactors (not very popular in the US, but they should be :) ) or even with other power generating facilities, they need to be built to handle the peaks, but run at a much lower power for most of the time, and this can lead to inefficiencies, where if you could design the reactor to run at peak efficiency all of the time, the electric cars can load balance. They can even discharge back to the power network in times of peak demand. And they could do all sorts of good stuff with solar and wind power, storing that energy to be used later.

Just some ballpark figures to give you an idea of the amount of power stored in an electric car battery, if charging a car for 12 minutes takes the power consumption of 1000 homes, you could power a single home for 12,000 minutes, or over 8 days off of that battery.

12

thought i heard frozenCPU.com died this week?

13

I wish they would fix the internet in ohio..... The internet I have is not too terrible, but it's not very consistent, one minute im running at full speed then bam high ping and latency speeds are cut in half ugh so annoying.

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I would not order anything from them.? A fun tek this week. Thanks !

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Thank you for the great input, but what happens when you have a row of car charging-poles outside each house on a street at say 70A (sort of a standard in Sweden) each and people come home from work and plug their cars in?

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About the Toyota guy:

Electric motors have a use and a place but it might not be cars. Charging fast and then storing the electric energy brings all kinds of difficult problems with it you just don't have with fossil fuels. Solving those might be hard or require "solutions" that are worse than the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Besides they only sidestep the problem where to get the energy from.

So if the Toyota chief of engineering says something like:

"Look, these electric solutions work ok-ish for some cases but those cases are a fraction of all use cases:

we can't use it in large trucks because having a truck that can only be used a few hours a day because the rest has to be spent charging is not something people would buy.

one of the biggest advantages of just being able to jump in your car and drive somewhere real quick would be gone if it has to charge and you have to plan for that."

Think of your average desaster scenario. Do you take the car that you'll have to charge for hours or the one you pump in gas for a few minutes?

Doesn't mean that "hurr durr electrical drives are stupid" but if the chief engineer of Toyota says that he doesn't see a future for them, you should not dismiss it like something that comes out the usual PR machine.

17

I think home batteries and solar systems will be what makes it all possible and sures up the power grid. Tesla are working on home battery systems.

Solar systems have been around for years and are getting cheaper steadily.

Electric car charging time will always be an issue for travelling long distances however.

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"Just log in next time and say hi; instead of snooping around, like a bunch of weirdos".

Now that's funny.

1 Like
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About the mentioned Seagate hard drive issue ... this is not entirely new and is also not related to just the 3TB ST3000DM001 (any chance DM means "Death Master"?) drive ...

To add my observation: This sudden death problem also affects the ST2000DM001 drives (not new ones, I'm talking a bit older ones). I had a couple of them die after several months of normal usage.

The drive would operate just fine and not show any oddities (i.e. SMART data), but out of the blue the drive will suddenly start acting up and give write errors (first foreshadow of upcoming death) then reset (SATA bus reset - i.e. Windows "System" event log or Linux syslog) or "fall off the bus" till you reboot the system (SATA disconnect).

So, once the drive starts coming up with the write errors you only have that one shot to backup your data as fast as humanly possible, because once the drive gets into the reset or disconnect phase you won't be able to get anything copied off the drive anymore; it will just get worse by the minute to the point where the drive will, in the end, not even show up on the SATA port anymore.

I also saw that happen on a few ST2000DX001 (the faster sister to the DM).

Doesn't really come at a great surprise that Seagate drives do give severe troubles - I had to deal with their c**p in the one or another effort to backup the data before the drive totally dies.

That being said, quite some time ago I was actually surprised by the reliability of Western Digital drives. I replaced a "Green" WD15EADS (1.5TB) after 49962 operational hours (final SMART value at "pulling the drive out") - and that drive got abused as a 24/7 server drive though not meant for that scenario). The indication of the drive having a problem (SMART data only showed a quickly increasing relocation count and nothing else) was that you could hear the actuator "working its rear off" after you wrote data to the drive ... it would rattle on for minutes on end until it finally settled. Needless to say all of the data on the drive (~1.2TB) was copied over to a new one without any issues ... that's what I'd call "reliable" (in stark contrast to the Seagate drives).

So yes, I agree with your assesment that it would be wise to either use Hitachi/HGST or WD.

EDIT: Hi Tek Syndicate Community ... long time YouTube viewer, never went to the forums before.

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I would like to use this space to remind everyone that although Backblaze's data is certainly useful, we can not draw conclusions from it as the data from different drive families is incomparable because the drives are in different positions (thus heat, vibrations are different), sometimes different datacenters, and usually experience different degrees of load.
It would be like saying that I, as a private user, have never had a Seagate hard drive fail, but have had my only WD drive fail (a WD1002FAEX), and thus Seagate hard drives are automatically better than WD hard drives. No matter how convinced I am that I'm right, that claim would not be based on any scientific data and would thus not be relevant in any way.

21

I believe you when you talk about 60 Amp or 100 Amp chargers because that will still take around 6 hours to charge an 80KWh battery.

True, most people are going to slow-charge their cars overnight. But this still draws 60 amps for say 2 - 4 hours while the car charges. This is 2 to 4 times the amount of electricity that I currently use in my house each day. Its also almost as much as my house can draw in peak time (My house has a 100 AMP fuse on it) So if everyone had an electric car, the power companies would have to produce ~ 5 times the amount of electricity that they currently do -- this doesn't seem like anything that could happen in the near future.

As Logan mentioned, all this charging (apart from perhaps express chargers at "petrol" stations for people who are on a long drive - where they could store the extra power in supercapacitors or something) will occur at night in the off peak times. The power companies might be able to use this to balance electricity demand. Its unlikely that everyone will decide to buy an electric car tomorrow, so there will be plenty of time to upgrade the grid to make use of this.

And Toyota will probably hire someone with "more vision" to head their Electric Vehicle division. This guy was only the head engineer, someone will realize (and has realized since Toyota makes EVs) that electric vehicles are a necessary product line.