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Tech News & Commentary
Sharon in Kansas City, Missouri listens to the podcast asked: “I’m thinking of changing my hard drive to an SSD. A friend of mine told me that you cannot write to an SSD, you can only read and that if you try to write more than three times, it would quit working. I wanted to know if that was true and if it would be a good idea to switch to a solid state drive.”
Sharon, Your friend is unbelievably wrong… like “summer is the coldest season” levels of wrong.
SSDs are more taxed by writing than by reading, and they have a finite number of write cycles, which really doesn’t change much, considering that HDD don’t last forever either.
Now, modern drives are rated differently, but think 20TB as a reasonable official limit… TechReport.com tested 5 drives rated at around 20TB of data, they calculated that the average endurance between the drives should make it possible to write 20 to 40 GB of data a day for the entire life of the warranty of each of the drives.
After that they ran an endurance test, none of the drives failed until they were between 600 TB and 1Petabyte of data written, and the sturdiest only died after going over 2PB of data written.
2PB is roughly the equivalent of downloading all of Wikipedia 9,524 times… that’s a little more than 3 writes.
writes would mean that you can’t even install the operating system. Even overwriting the whole drive 3 times wouldn’t make much sense, it’s not a lot of data. SSD drives are in a lot of consumer electronics devices and pretty much every consumer electronic device this day either stores data periodically or gets updated sometimes… writing is a must.
Now that we’ve corrected your friend, yes, switching to an SSD is probably a very good idea, an older computer with a new SSD feels like a new computer, you will absolutely notice the difference, it will be something like having replaced the hard drive and having gotten new RAM at once.
For what it’s worth, traditional rotating magnetic hard drives also have limits to how much they can be used. While the number of read/write cycles on a hard drive does exceed an SSD, even though an SSD is plenty long as we just explained, hard drives will eventually wear out also. Everything made by man eventually wears out and fails.
But it takes long enough to wear out an SSD that we don’t even think twice about recommending them. Many of us here have computers using SSDs now, and we endorse them heartily. You will love yours!
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Victor in Smyrna, Tennessee listening on SuperTalk WTN 99.7 FM asked: “What kind of product would you recommend for home surround sound systems in the $300-500 price range? I am looking to upgrade mine and just wanted to know what you would recommend.”
Victor, Prices for home surround sound systems will vary depending on where you choose to purchase them; but there are plenty of options within your price range that you may want to look into.
Samsung offers several that are both high-quality and quite affordable for people who are not looking to break the bank in order to enhance sound. For example, at Best Buy you can purchase the Samsung 6 Series 1000W Smart Blu-Ray Home Theater System for $450. This system is probably one of the best within your price range and supports plenty of playback formats in addition to Blu-ray.
However, in case you’re looking for something that requires a bit less installation, you may want to look into the Bose Solo 15 TV Sound System which is also sold at Best Buy for $450. In terms of sound quality, it just seems you can never go wrong with Bose as they are pretty cutting-edge. This system works with one single speaker but is said to resonate unbelievably lucid sound-quality.
If you are looking to spend a little less, still get the same bang for your buck, and impress friends and family– there is a more affordable option with the Panasonic 1000W 5.1 Home Theater System which comes in at a cool $350, also at Best Buy (though we’re not trying to make this a Best Buy commercial!). This one is comparable to the Samsung we previously mentioned and comes with two LARGE, very impressive-looking speakers that could make your home theater look quite spiffy.
When searching for your surround sound system, you may want to stick with an electronics store so you can actually hear the differences and a store that offers a price guarantee as well as warranty on their products, so you can rest assured in the event anything goes wrong.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Cliff in Chattanooga, Tennessee listens via the App asked: “What contacts program/app do you recommend that works with most emails, outlook and social media. Thanks for the advice. Right now I’m using “contacts+” it seems to work well except I don’t see how to get it on my laptop as well.”
Cliff, This is actually a pretty tough question, there aren’t many products that meet your requirements.
The best mix we have been able to find would be to continue using Contacts+ on your phone, and to use Apowersoft’s Android Manager on your computer.
Android Manager, allows you to sync contacts with Outlook and manage your phone’s contacts from your computer.
Between both of those, you should be able to get what you want, but unfortunately, unless you can do it through an email provider (and all of the major free ones will let you sync contacts), you won’t find a much easier way to keep everything synced.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guest Segment:
John Cariola, AuD, Doctor of Audiology – Beltone
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
Magnetic recording has a long history. It began early in 1925 with the invention of the electro-acoustic recording method. In 1926 the Austrian engineer Fritz Fleumer who was working in Dresden, Germany received a patent for a steel powdered paper tape, the grandfather of all tapes. As this technology wasn’t market ready, in 1929, Dr. Curt Stille built a machine with a steel tape. It was used by the BBC from 1930 on for magnetic recording of sound, but it was very complicated and not very reliable. IFA has been the birthplace of many recording technologies since that time.
Leonard in Raleigh, North Carolina listening on WPTF 680 AM asked: “I have a Sprint HTC phone, an older model. I also have an iPhone. I want to transfer my apps from the HTC phone over to the iPhone. Is that possible?”
Unfortunately you won’t be able to transfer your old apps.
Android and iPhone run on different systems and don’t understand each other’s apps, and even when an app is on both systems, they’re on different stores and neither one is going to give an app away for free to someone who paid a competitor’s app store.
On the plus side, most apps are free and paid apps are cheap, so if you already know there’s an app you use regularly, paying a dollar or two may be acceptable, at least by now you know which ones you used to use and not use on your old phone.
The good news is that many apps can share information between iPhone and Android, so if you’re using the correct version of the app for each phone, you could still share data. But you will have to have separate Android and iOS versions of each app.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Burg: Burg 16A Smartwatch – connects with iOS and Android phones, offering handsfree calling, text and e-mail notifications and more!
Education.Com: Several “Brainzy” 12-month codes for online early-learning programs for math and reading. If you’ve got Kids … you WANT one of these!
HD Radio: “Into Tomorrow” branded Portable AM/FM/HD Radios – these are in high demand and give you more FREE radio — the way it should be!
LG: An LG ‘G’ Vista Smartphone with an extra large display and good battery life.
NanoTech: Several UltraFlix Gift Cards for 4K Content, like movies and a ton of other cool stuff. Let us know if you have a 4K Ultra HD TV!
NovaPhotos: A couple of their cool Bluetooth off-camera FLASH units for iPhone (that we featured in a recent ITTV piece). Perfect for Selfies. They have 40 LEDs!