Other minor curiosities: How does heat generation compare with a spinning drive of equal capacity? Power usage? I’m not seeing the fins or even fans typical of processors or graphics chips.

Does the operating system treat it exactly like a normal hard drive, with functions like format or even the probably useless “defragment?” Can it be partitioned?

Electrostatic striptease:

And here’s the money-shot. Caption: “Plug compatible”

Here are the Installation “Guidelines”:

3. Schliessen Sie die SSD-Festplatte ihrem Computertype entsprechend an:
(1) Desktop: Verbinden Sie

Wait, sorry, the instructions are one of those huge posters folded like a service-station map (remember those?) and cramming 27 languages…Spanish…Turkish…several ideographic languages…ah, here:

3. According to the machine type:
(1) Desktop: Connect the SanDisk SATA SSD to the SATA data cable and insert the SATA cable into the SATA connector on the motherboard. Connect the SATA SSD drive to the SATA power connector. Once you have installed the SanDisk SATA SSD into your Desktop close the case and then reconnect power to the desktop.

…

4. SATA Uses a point-to-point protocol, therefore, no setting of jumpers…is required.

5. Power on the system to verify that the installation was successful.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it sure sounds like SanDisk thinks it’s perfectly plug-compatible with an mechanical drive.

I’ll let ya know. Can’t get to it today…

As for paper, I have found that I can do without a printer except for those rare times when you absolutely have to print something. A little like using a horse to pull your car out of a bog when a tow truck can’t get to it.

I have subscribed to the newspaper all my life because I have enjoyed drinking coffee and perusing the news and the sports pages. I have finally arrived at the point where I have decided to cancel my subscription due to the mass of waste paper that it represents, when the paper is printed word for word on the web. It will be a hard habit to break but saving the 200 bucks a year and not having to deal with the thrash, I hope will be enough to get me through the withdrawal.

Nothing protects me more than my unimportance and lack of significant worldly things that can be taken from me. I endured some aggravation recently when my email password was hacked and all my contacts started getting spammed. As much as it pissed me off it was only a minor bump in the road, and was easily fixed.

Having been in the business of finding hidden things, I know that like the old Mafia saw, “anyone can be killed”, no information outside your brain is safe if the right people care enough to find it. I can’t count the times when we stopped digging because what we wanted did not pass cost/benefit considerations.

Actually, even what’s in our brain is not safe for most of us if it is important enough to pry out, but that’s getting totally all paranoid for 99.9 percent of us.

Everything else (my data and files on my D-drvies) is backed up on different hard drives and USB thumb drives, often manually.

I recently got a couple of external portable hard drives on sale and finally set up a C-drive image backup. I had no backup at all for my system/applications drive (the one thing I would have to rebuild from scratch given a C-drive crash.

My laptop is the only computer where I have no real choice to keep my C-drive and D-drive on the same physical disk.

The most likely computer disaster is a hard drive failure, and local backups work for that. If my house gets hit by a meteor, there’s still Carbonite, but you don’t know the meaning of patience unless you’ve tried to restore three hundred GB of files across the internet.

I grew up with terminals, where the only thing in my personal control was the keyboard and screen. I have no particular urge to go back to that

But I fooled them.