Re: [orca-list] Hard Drive Suggestions?

[Christopher Chaltain <chaltain gmail com>]

I've been running Linux and Orca as my main operating system and screen 
reader since 2010, and I've never had a hard drive failure in that time 
frame. My laptops have been Asus or HP, and I'm still using rotary 
drives. I also don't have issues with Orca shutting down. I can't see 
how Orca would drive IO activity unless we're talking about very little 
memory and the swap has to keep kicking in, although again, I'd think 
other applications would use more real memory then Orca. It isn't like 
Orca has an off screen model, which I think would require a lot of 
memory in screen readers that use that technology.



On 5/11/19 6:13 PM, Matt - Envrin Group via orca-list wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> If it matters, I'm running Linux Mint 19.1 MATE 64 bit.
>
> Went blind about 2.5 years ago, and have had constant hard drive
> issues, which I'm certain is due to I/O operations of Orca.  For
> example, with a decent hard drive, I can get about 8 months use of it
> and Orca only shuts off maybe 3 or 4 times a day.  Running a cheap
> haard drive now, and Orca shutsdown maybe 6 or 7 times an hour.
> Anotheerr example is you simply can not run Orca when booting from
> USB, as it always immediately shuts down upon starting, except maybe 1
> out of every 50 times you start Orca you can get maybe 15 seconds
> before it shutsdown.
>
> It's definitely Orca, as I'm a software developer, and doing nothing
> resource intensive.  Base Linux Mint install, and only ever really
> have Firefox, xem text editor, and terminal open.  Guess I'm running
> Nginx and mySQL, but can't see that doing it.  Granted, I do have
> speech rate at 100%, and do move around the windows pretty quick, so
> it's understandable that Orca gets overloaded and shuts down time to
> time.  These are decent laptops -- Dell Inspiron, say 2.4ghz, 8GB RAM,
> 1 TB HD, etc...  so it's not that either.
>
> Anyway, not frustrated or anything, as just part and parcel of being
> blind.  Nonetheless, about to get new hard drives installed on a
> couple laptops I have here.
>
> Just curious, any recommendations for the best hard drive to get?
> Money not really an issue, as definitely willing to spend more for
> better quality on this.  I'm not great at hardware, but Seagate SCSI
> 1TB 15000 RPM good, or?  Am I maybe supposed to be getting a larger
> SSD hard drive, and somehow forcing Orca to utilize that, or?
>
> Any tips appreciated.  Shortly here, I'll send over to this list a
> Ubiquity proceed.cfg file for automated Linux Mint installs if it will
> help anyone.  It will simply allow me to do Linux Mint installs
> without help from a sighted person, as that's always a headache. :-)
> With this, will simply have to ensure BIOS boots from USB, then stick
> the USB in, boot, and ~30 minutes later the computer will boot with a
> fresh install of Linux Mint and will say "screen reader on".  Perfect!
>   Will share once done and tested, in case it's useful for anyone else.
>
> Thanks,
> Matt
> _______________________________________________
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> Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
> Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
> GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html
> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org

--
Christopher (CJ)
Chaltain at Gmail