*RANT* HDD's

[Avacado]

Caveat: I have worked for the government since 2003. I know how it is. 

 

The VA facility I work at has really outdated Dell workstations as with most of the federal government. It took me 30 minutes to login this morning and get going. IT has been coming around and installing brand new 24 inch monitor flat screens, BUT IT CAN'T UPGRADE TO SSDS TO IMPROVE WORK FLOW?!?!? FFS. 

 

I mean look at this BS. 10MB a sec. Come the * on. Makes me want to kill myself going from my home computer to work. You can afford 200$ screens, but you can't afford 80$ SSDs to improve employee workflow?

 

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Avacado

[damric]

Now it makes sense why the VA is so backed up!

[Sir Beregond]

Yeah, talking just user workstations/laptops, I remember one company I worked at was finally getting SSD equipped machines in maybe 2015. I'm not sure why, they were always complaining about drivers and the Win 7 image they had at the time. I had since left but they finally got those in, and every place I've worked at since then have been SSD's in my laptops.

 

That said, the place I work at now has segments of the business still on mainframes! . Our group though is using MacBook Pros with SSD's. It's fast, but mine is a 2018 model so it has a really crappy butterfly keyboard which sucks and my screen is going out already.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Sir Beregond

[schuck6566]

2 hours ago, Avacado said:

Caveat: I have worked for the government since 2003. I know how it is. 

 

The VA facility I work at has really outdated Dell workstations as with most of the federal government. It took me 30 minutes to login this morning and get going. IT has been coming around and installing brand new 24 inch monitor flat screens, BUT IT CAN'T UPGRADE TO SSDS TO IMPROVE WORK FLOW?!?!? FFS. 

 

I mean look at this BS. 10MB a sec. Come the * on. Makes me want to kill myself going from my home computer to work. You can afford 200$ screens, but you can't afford 80$ SSDs to improve employee workflow?

 

 

They don't want your eyes to hurt while staring at the screen for the half hour it takes to log in and open a file....

[Cerberus]

1 hour ago, damric said:

Now it makes sense why the VA is so backed up!

don't get me started on the VA, the most laziest group of people i've ever had the unfortunateexperience of having routine procedures done by... yikes

[Sir Beregond]

8 minutes ago, Cerberus said:

don't get me started on the VA, the most laziest group of people i've ever had the unfortunateexperience of having routine procedures done by... yikes

No doubt. I remember when my grandfather was ill (brain cancer) and going to the VA with him. Man that place was the saddest place I have ever been to.

 

I ended up doing magic card tricks with folks waiting in the waiting room and such. I think I was 14 or 15.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Sir Beregond

[UltraMega]

People think the government is putting microchips in their brains and really the government can't even manage hard drive upgrades haha.

[Avacado]

45 minutes ago, Cerberus said:

don't get me started on the VA, the most laziest group of people i've ever had the unfortunateexperience of having routine procedures done by... yikes

 

36 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

No doubt. I remember when my grandfather was ill (brain cancer) and going to the VA with him. Man that place was the saddest place I have ever been to.

 

I ended up doing magic card tricks with folks waiting in the waiting room and such. I think I was 14 or 15.

I have been the unfortunate patient of a few bad ones myself. Though The one here in Asheville is a 5 star rated facility and #1 in patient satisfaction 3 years in a row out of 237 facilities nationwide. We do the damn thing here. Just not as fast as we could be. If you are a vet and need care this is the best place to get it, and it could still be better. 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Avacado

[damric]

Hmmn a lot of veterans here?

 

Navy myself 

[Avacado]

15 minutes ago, damric said:

Hmmn a lot of veterans here?

 

Navy myself 

[ENTERPRISE]

Ha yep that is bad I.T logic. I have seen that too many times unfortunately. Assuming you have images of a user workstation, doing an HDD to SSD swap out should be an easy procedure.

 

When I joined the company I am with now, all the machines were far too outdated for what the workflow. Fortunately the boss trusted me and allowed for the upgrades, again that was a time for throwing out those HDD's lol.

[Sir Beregond]

6 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Ha yep that is bad I.T logic. I have seen that too many times unfortunately. Assuming you have images of a user workstation, doing an HDD to SSD swap out should be an easy procedure.

 

When I joined the company I am with now, all the machines were far too outdated for what the workflow. Fortunately the boss trusted me and allowed for the upgrades, again that was a time for throwing out those HDD's lol.

Yeah wish they had let us switch to SSD's when I was doing Desktop back in the day. So many tickets were "I dropped my laptop" and of course the hard drive got damaged. Its why I never understood the Thinkpad love. I saw people drop them 2 inches and the hard drive was messed up.

 

With the limited tools they gave us, data recovery was a crap chute. If I couldn't get the laptop to boot up into Windows but could get the drive to read with my SATA to USB dongle then I was often able to just copy files to a new drive because of course nobody backed up to the NAS and they hadn't created any automatic backups tasks either. Sigh. If drive was still toast then it was done and they learned a valuable lesson in backing up. If they were high up enough then they could pay for a data recovery place to rebuild the drive...

 

Oh and Bitlocker was always a ton of fun dealing with when we had to swap drives too.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Sir Beregond

[ENTERPRISE]

1 hour ago, Sir Beregond said:

Yeah wish they had let us switch to SSD's when I was doing Desktop back in the day. So many tickets were "I dropped my laptop" and of course the hard drive got damaged. Its why I never understood the Thinkpad love. I saw people drop them 2 inches and the hard drive was messed up.

 

With the limited tools they gave us, data recovery was a crap chute. If I couldn't get the laptop to boot up into Windows but could get the drive to read with my SATA to USB dongle then I was often able to just copy files to a new drive because of course nobody backed up to the NAS and they hadn't created any automatic backups tasks either. Sigh. If drive was still toast then it was done and they learned a valuable lesson in backing up. If they were high up enough then they could pay for a data recovery place to rebuild the drive...

 

Oh and Bitlocker was always a ton of fun dealing with when we had to swap drives too.

Ha, I feel you. I have done many standard file recoveries as a full drive recovery was not an option as the client did not have any backup solutions whatsoever, painful sometimes. Bitlockers is also a PITA too. Laptops with HDD's with some people are a disaster waiting to happen. HDD's just cannot take too much abuse before they crap out. At least with SSD's you are likely to break the laptop as a whole way before the drive gets messed up, which is the way round you want it.

[Cerberus]

2 hours ago, damric said:

Hmmn a lot of veterans here?

 

Navy myself 

aye, Navy too.  The Hampton VA medical center is one of the worst, TBH its right next to 4 bases (NOB is the worlds largest naval base)

 

3 hours ago, Avacado said:

 

I have been the unfortunate patient of a few bad ones myself. Though The one here in Asheville is a 5 star rated facility and #1 in patient satisfaction 3 years in a row out of 237 facilities nationwide. We do the damn thing here. Just not as fast as we could be. If you are a vet and need care this is the best place to get it, and it could still be better. 

 

[Snakecharmed]

 

7 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Yeah, talking just user workstations/laptops, I remember one company I worked at was finally getting SSD equipped machines in maybe 2015. I'm not sure why, they were always complaining about drivers and the Win 7 image they had at the time. I had since left but they finally got those in, and every place I've worked at since then have been SSD's in my laptops.

 

That said, the place I work at now has segments of the business still on mainframes! . Our group though is using MacBook Pros with SSD's. It's fast, but mine is a 2018 model so it has a really crappy butterfly keyboard which sucks and my screen is going out already.

 

I've worked in software since 2012. Not all of the companies I've worked for understood or accepted that was their contemporary function regardless of their supposed primary industry, but as a company, you're not serious about technology if you don't invest in it. I've been fighting the SSD fight for 8+ years now.

 

Only two out of the five places I've worked for in the last nine years had any respect or understanding of their employees' needs, especially for their software development operations. That includes getting your employees hardware that won't be a bottleneck to their productivity.

 

With the first of these companies I worked for in 2012-13, I got on very good terms with the IT support guy and he told me privately that a salesperson wanted to swap out their 256 GB SSD for higher capacity storage in their laptop. Since management was too broke and too ignorant to spend money on hardware, he offered to swap that Samsung 830 into my workstation after hours one evening as long as I stayed quiet about it. No problem, but that said a lot about how miserly and clueless that company was. They were in the telecommunications industry, for what it's worth.

 

The next place I worked for in 2013-14, I got a new 2013 MacBook Pro 13" when I started. There was never a chance for me to be concerned about slow storage or the company not spending money on their employees considering I was just a contractor and they did that for me.

 

The next place I worked at from 2015 until last year, I got a brand new HP workstation with an i7-4790, 12 GB RAM, and...a damn hard drive. Like seriously? Once again, this company was in the telecom industry and was obstinately regressive when it came to software development. I got a brand new workstation bogged down by a tired and used 320 GB WD Blue from IT's spare parts bucket, which unsurprisingly ate dirt within the following year. IT then replaced it with a 1 TB Seagate, which also eventually ate dirt because it probably also exceeded its rated MTBF by a factor of 10 before it was installed in my machine. Now with my workstation out of commission, I finally had a request for a new SSD approved in 2017, but it took over a month for someone in IT to get off their ass to install it, forcing me to use my own personal ThinkPad at the office for a month in the meantime.

 

I consulted at a place last year that didn't have an SSD in my workstation at first, but I was also working remotely for a couple of weeks due to COVID-19. By the time I was actually using the workstation, it had a 256 GB SSD installed with a cloned image of Windows 10 from the hard drive that was in it previously, meaning that there was about 10 GB free on that SSD. All of the workstations there were bargain bin builder PCs. I remember the case of my workstation only had three feet, so I leaned it against the wall so it would stand up straight. It had either an i7-4770 or 4790, but it also had a GTX 970 in it for no logical reason. In hindsight, I wish I had snuck the 970 out of the machine after hours one night and resold it this year along with my personal EVGA 980 Ti Classified to make an upgrade to a 2080 Ti seem at least halfway reasonable in cost.

 

This year, I got a new 2020 MacBook Pro M1 from my new company upon starting.

 

Companies should have stopped dumpster diving for their software development operations before I was building my parents a new i3-6100 machine with a 480 GB Micron M500 SSD in 2016. It's completely inexcusable now.

[damric]

3 hours ago, Cerberus said:

aye, Navy too.  The Hampton VA medical center is one of the worst, TBH its right next to 4 bases (NOB is the worlds largest naval base)

 

 

I did a few tours based out of that area, pretty much hated that place. The traffic was the worst I ever dealt with anywhere including L.A. I remember we had to be on the ship in formation by 0715, and it was more convenient to drive to the base between 10pm and 2am and rest for a few hours in your rack than to try and fight the gridlock that started at 4am. Like seriously it would take 3 hours to drive 15 miles? Then you try and find a legal parking spot but it's another 3 mile walk to the pier. I still have nightmares about that place.

[BWG]

11 hours ago, Avacado said:

Caveat: I have worked for the government since 2003. I know how it is. 

 

The VA facility I work at has really outdated Dell workstations as with most of the federal government. It took me 30 minutes to login this morning and get going. IT has been coming around and installing brand new 24 inch monitor flat screens, BUT IT CAN'T UPGRADE TO SSDS TO IMPROVE WORK FLOW?!?!? FFS. 

 

I mean look at this BS. 10MB a sec. Come the * on. Makes me want to kill myself going from my home computer to work. You can afford 200$ screens, but you can't afford 80$ SSDs to improve employee workflow?

 

 

 

Am I the only one who noticed the Government upgraded from Windows 95? My Aunt might be a Risk Manager there VAMC.

Edited March 26, 2021 by BWG

[EHW Ai]

Guess I'll toss my two pennies in: I served 20 years in USAF maintenance specializing in airborne radar, navigation, and communication systems, and retired in '92  Half of that was on A-10s at RAF Bentwaters (2.5 years), following by one four year tour each at Forward Operating Locations (FOLs) Noervenich and Leipheim in Germany. 

 

Also spent two years at Soesterberg in Holland, and two years at Torrejon, near Madrid.

 

Now you know where I got my sense of humor from.

Edited March 26, 2021 by iamjanco

[ENTERPRISE]

Hidden some posts for the sake of keeping it polite. Let's not get personal chaps

 

Thanks,

E

[damric]

3 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Hidden some posts for the sake of keeping it polite. Let's not get personal chaps

 

Thanks,

E

There is great rivalry among the services but we veterans are quick to dog pile if someone digs on another vet