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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • As a kid I thought this was just a weird hotel thing. Got the backstory eventually.

    TL;DR: ice became commonplace around the time motel chains spread across the US.

    Ice was once an exotic import only nice hotels could offer. Its perceived luxury remained decades after refrigeration allowed manufacture. Hotels could still charge for it, so they did, but in the ‘50s and ‘60s ice went from cheap to essentially free.

    Concurrently, roadside motor-hotel (motel) chains spread across the US. Among these, “Holiday Inn” was the first to offer ice as a complementary amenity. Competitors followed suit. National roll-out at every motel franchise happened quickly. Soon nearly every hotel offered self-serve ice as a standard amenity.

    Hence our icy embarrassment of riches.




  • Maybe yeah. Also got the sense from the strong opinions that this is a preexisting debate, presumably in the context of continuous workloads or cached arrays with minimal spindown intervals. In that context it’s true that rotational disks still often win in energy efficiency and robustness (assuming we’re comparing them to consumer SSDs and not the latest enterprise u.2 stuff that’s rated for continuous work).


  • Not sure what everyone is arguing about here. Clearly SSD is better for intermittent r/w, whereas HDD can be more efficient at continuous r/w (especially in terms of watts/TB)

    Just looking at specs should be enough to see that. SSDs can idle in ready state at close to 0 draw (~0.05w) whereas HDD requires continued rotation to remain ready. So consider an extreme case of writing for 1 minute then maintaining ready state for the rest of the day. For that the SSD will be far more efficient, obviously.