Solid State Drive...really, Jeff?

[pH]

Hey, Jeff Leibermann...

Did I really see you recommend a solid-state drive as a computer's *only*
disk (hard) drive in the bike forums?

Really? Have they really progressed to that level of reliability and (more
importantly in my book) longevity?

If I get a drive, I really want it to last a decade if possible. I agree to
back it up to portable drives, of course.

Maybe I'm being too grumpy...at least *five* years, lets say.

Also, Captain Scruggs and all the thousands of other ba-mf folks are waiting
for your storm stories.

(Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)

pH in Aptos

[David Arnstein]

In article <trpcl6$2o4am$1...@dont-email.me>, pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> wrote:
>(Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)

Yes.
--
David Arnstein (00)
arnstei...@pobox.com {{ }}
^^

[Andy Valencia]

pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> writes:
> Did I really see you recommend a solid-state drive as a computer's *only*
> disk (hard) drive in the bike forums?

Yes, they really have gotten that good. Just over-size it quite a bit,
because that way it wear levels over ALL of that storage (BTW, even if at
your level you think you're writing the same block again and again, the SSD
device is doing wear leveling behind the scenes). My only caution is that
more than once a drive went from working to dead silent without any
intervening period of warning. SMART might help with that; I don't have any
experience there.

I've had spinning media go away in the blink of an eye, too. But the vast
majority of the time there's degradation (and SMART counters) to warn you
what's on the horizon.

Andy Valencia
Home page: https://www.vsta.org/andy/
To contact me: https://www.vsta.org/contact/andy.html

[BCFD36]

On 2/5/23 17:14, David Arnstein wrote:
> In article <trpcl6$2o4am$1...@dont-email.me>, pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> wrote:
>> (Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)
>
> Yes.

I am not sure that Tim, Geoff, or Glen would end up in Heaven. But that
is just my take on the whole thing.
--
Dave Scruggs

[BCFD36]

On 2/5/23 15:04, pH wrote:
> Hey, Jeff Leibermann...
>
> Did I really see you recommend a solid-state drive as a computer's *only*
> disk (hard) drive in the bike forums?
>
> Really? Have they really progressed to that level of reliability and (more
> importantly in my book) longevity?

They are supposed to be better than they were. I bought an external HSD
that died rather quick. One guy I talked to said it was because it
wasn't really meant to be the boot drive and probably got used too much.
I bought an SSD and it has worked OK so far.

>
> If I get a drive, I really want it to last a decade if possible. I agree to
> back it up to portable drives, of course.

It apparently depends on how many times you write to it. One source said
5-10 years for the good ones.

>
> Maybe I'm being too grumpy...at least *five* years, lets say.
>
> Also, Captain Scruggs and all the thousands of other ba-mf folks are waiting
> for your storm stories.

That was my storm story. I retired from BCFD almost 7 years ago, but
called back in for the CZU fire in a phone support role. )Should I have
tried to affect a Punjabi accent?) Anyway, I wasn't needed at the FD so
I hung around home.

>
> (Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)
>
> pH in Aptos

--
Dave Scruggs
Captain, Boulder Creek Fire (Retired)

[pH]

On 2023-02-06, David Arnstein <arnstei...@pobox.com> wrote:
> In article <trpcl6$2o4am$1...@dont-email.me>, pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> wrote:
>>(Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)
>
> Yes.

Oh. Thank-you for the info. Are there any others I forgot?

pH in Aptos

[pH]

You mean
Tim "I love Jeff" May,
Geoff "Horn of Doom" Miller (?)
and Glen "curmudgeon" Appleby?

I'm twice the curmudgeon that Glen could ever be.

Who was the teacher in Boulder Creek who had his dogs made fun of by Geoff?


pH

[pH]

On 2023-02-06, BCFD36 <bcf...@cruzio.com> wrote:

> On 2/5/23 15:04, pH wrote:
>> Hey, Jeff Leibermann...
>>
>> Did I really see you recommend a solid-state drive as a computer's *only*
>> disk (hard) drive in the bike forums?
>>
>> Really? Have they really progressed to that level of reliability and (more
>> importantly in my book) longevity?
>
> They are supposed to be better than they were. I bought an external HSD
> that died rather quick. One guy I talked to said it was because it
> wasn't really meant to be the boot drive and probably got used too much.
> I bought an SSD and it has worked OK so far.
>

I know on the Raspberry Pi's of which I have a couple, they really turn down
the "swappiness".

Wife uses a 4GB Raspberry pi 4.0 as her main computer.
She really thrashes the thing, has as many as 32 tabs open (does not quite
understand the concept of "bookmarks"...that doesn't help)

It really does quite well as a day to day use machine. I have not had an SD
card wear out yet. (I do back them up now and again).

pH

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2023 23:04:06 -0000 (UTC), pH <wNOS...@gmail.org>
wrote:

>Hey, Jeff Leibermann...

Ahem. It's Liebermann. Please adjust your spelling chequer.

>Did I really see you recommend a solid-state drive as a computer's *only*
>disk (hard) drive in the bike forums?

Yep. All my currently functional desktops use SSD drives for both the
OS and data. The only exception is my TrueNAS CORE server, which uses
an SSD for boot and a RAID array of hard disks for bulk storage.

>Really? Have they really progressed to that level of reliability and (more
>importantly in my book) longevity?

If you ask Microsoft and most hardware vendors, the expected lifetime
of a computer is about 5 years. That coincides nicely with the
maximum warranty period. Lifetimes in excess of the warranty period
is considered was waste of money by the manufacturers.

I recently had my first SSD failure. I've been buying only Samsung
SSD drives. My NewEgg history shows 21 drives purchased. The one
that failed is a Samsung 870 EVO 500GB. Purchased new but only lasted
1 year. I still haven't returned it for a warranty exchange (5 year
warranty) mostly because I'm lazy.
<https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/warranty/>

>If I get a drive, I really want it to last a decade if possible.

10 years? It won't happen. Manufacturers target their designs to
fail just after the warranty expires. In most cases, that's 5 years.
If some SSD component lasts longer than 5 years, they will REDUCE the
quality of the component until it fails after 5 years. Eventually,
all the parts in the SSD will fail at the same time. Yes, I know.
We're all doomed.

>I agree to back it up to portable drives, of course.

Please use an image backup, not a file by file or incremental backup.
With an SSD, and image backup is so much faster that the time saved
doing incremental is minimal. I haven't benchmarked my Linux backups
because the machine it's running on is ancient and slow. For Windoze
10, I'm backing up 160GB in 45 mins.
<http://www.learnbydestroying.com/jeffl/crud/Macrium-Reflect-Log-2023-01-24.jpg>

>Maybe I'm being too grumpy...at least *five* years, lets say.

5 years is reasonable. 10 years is not.

>Also, Captain Scruggs and all the thousands of other ba-mf folks are waiting
>for your storm stories.

Oops. I forgot.

>(Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)
>pH in Aptos

Reminder... I'm retired.
--
Jeff Liebermann je...@cruzio.com
PO Box 272 http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

[pH]

On 2023-02-07, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 5 Feb 2023 23:04:06 -0000 (UTC), pH <wNOS...@gmail.org>
> wrote:
>
>>Hey, Jeff Leibermann...
>
> Ahem. It's Liebermann. Please adjust your spelling chequer.

Oui oui, monsieur.

>
>>Did I really see you recommend a solid-state drive as a computer's *only*
>>disk (hard) drive in the bike forums?
>
> Yep. All my currently functional desktops use SSD drives for both the
> OS and data. The only exception is my TrueNAS CORE server, which uses
> an SSD for boot and a RAID array of hard disks for bulk storage.

Are they faster? Is the booting time appreciably faster?

>
>>Really? Have they really progressed to that level of reliability and (more
>>importantly in my book) longevity?
>
> If you ask Microsoft and most hardware vendors, the expected lifetime
> of a computer is about 5 years. That coincides nicely with the
> maximum warranty period. Lifetimes in excess of the warranty period
> is considered was waste of money by the manufacturers.
>
> I recently had my first SSD failure. I've been buying only Samsung
> SSD drives. My NewEgg history shows 21 drives purchased. The one
> that failed is a Samsung 870 EVO 500GB. Purchased new but only lasted
> 1 year. I still haven't returned it for a warranty exchange (5 year
> warranty) mostly because I'm lazy.
><https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/warranty/>
>
>>If I get a drive, I really want it to last a decade if possible.
>
> 10 years? It won't happen. Manufacturers target their designs to
> fail just after the warranty expires. In most cases, that's 5 years.
> If some SSD component lasts longer than 5 years, they will REDUCE the
> quality of the component until it fails after 5 years. Eventually,
> all the parts in the SSD will fail at the same time. Yes, I know.
> We're all doomed.

Clay and stone tablets....thousands of years.

Apple CP/M 5-1/4 diskettes.... < 10 years.

>
>>I agree to back it up to portable drives, of course.
>
> Please use an image backup, not a file by file or incremental backup.
> With an SSD, and image backup is so much faster that the time saved
> doing incremental is minimal. I haven't benchmarked my Linux backups
> because the machine it's running on is ancient and slow. For Windoze
> 10, I'm backing up 160GB in 45 mins.
><http://www.learnbydestroying.com/jeffl/crud/Macrium-Reflect-Log-2023-01-24.jpg>
>

I do use "dd" for the Raspberry pi image, but rsync for my normal backups.

>>Maybe I'm being too grumpy...at least *five* years, lets say.
>
> 5 years is reasonable. 10 years is not.
>
>>Also, Captain Scruggs and all the thousands of other ba-mf folks are waiting
>>for your storm stories.
>
> Oops. I forgot.
>
>>(Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)
>>pH in Aptos
>
> Reminder... I'm retired.

How did that happen....

pH

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 04:21:17 -0000 (UTC), pH <wNOS...@gmail.org>
wrote:

>On 2023-02-07, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:

>> Yep. All my currently functional desktops use SSD drives for both the
>> OS and data. The only exception is my TrueNAS CORE server, which uses
>> an SSD for boot and a RAID array of hard disks for bulk storage.

>Are they faster? Is the booting time appreciably faster?

For read, SATA III SSD's 3 to 5 times faster for everything (boot,
load, run, crash, etc). Boot time is much faster. For write, not
quite as fast. For sequential reads and writes, which do not benefit
from the internal SSD cache, even less faster.

The read/write speeds of an SATA III drive is limited to 6
gigabits/sec by the SATA interface speed. NVMe is even faster. If
your computah can handle M.2 NVMe SSD drives, do it.
7200 RPM HD - average read/write speed of 80-160MB/second
SATA 3 SSD - read/write speed up to 550MB/second
NVME SSD - read/write speed up to 3500MB/second

>Clay and stone tablets....thousands of years.
>Apple CP/M 5-1/4 diskettes.... < 10 years.

At the present rate of progress, what will computing be like in 10
years? All optical? Predictive computation where the answers appear
before you've presented the problem? Direct interface to your brain?
Immersive computing where you are literally buried or submerged in the
output? Self replicating computers that also improve themselves? Etc.
It can go either way, utopia or dystopia. Looking back at stone
tablets and CP/M-86 will produce neither utopia or dystopia. It will
only stop everything in its tracks.

>I do use "dd" for the Raspberry pi image, but rsync for my normal backups.

The problem with dd, tar, cpio, etc is that they have no internal
error correction or recovery. There's nothing more discouraging than
having a one byte error in the middle of a 100 gigabyte file which the
backup program can't repair. Backing up is easy. Restoring, not so
easy.

>> Reminder... I'm retired.
>
>How did that happen....

The short version is the building in which my office was located was
sold. The main tenants slowly moved away, leaving a homeless services
group:
<https://www.warmingcenterprogram.com>
This attracted some undesirables to the area. Vandalism, theft, glass
breakage, trash, etc became the norm. When I couldn't get my customer
to pickup their computers, I decided to move out and work out of my
home. At about the same time, Covid-19 arrived, causing a rather
spectacular drop in revenue. When the CZU fire arrived, I was almost
totally moved out of the office. I move almost everything out of the
office and into my house. Next time we talk (not on ham radio), I can
fill in some details (if you're interested).

[Andy Valencia]

Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> writes:
> Please use an image backup, not a file by file or incremental backup.

With 16TB, this becomes questionable. When they're part of four disks in a
single filesystem, it's not a good idea at all. I use btrfs for file
servers, and it has worked very well in production, WRT backups, and it
nicely supports moving a disk to a new one (same size or larger) while in
production. If you don't want to roll your own, Synology has some nice
devices which are powered by it.

OTOH, if you have a filesystem on a single disk, I have products like these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/314238381638

(I haven't used this particular one; my own is not listed any more.)

They seem to run at full media speed, I haven't found a faster way to move
bits to a new disk.

[pH]

On 2023-02-08, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 04:21:17 -0000 (UTC), pH <wNOS...@gmail.org>
> wrote:
>
>>On 2023-02-07, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>
>>> Yep. All my currently functional desktops use SSD drives for both the
>>> OS and data. The only exception is my TrueNAS CORE server, which uses
>>> an SSD for boot and a RAID array of hard disks for bulk storage.
>
>>Are they faster? Is the booting time appreciably faster?
>
> For read, SATA III SSD's 3 to 5 times faster for everything (boot,
> load, run, crash, etc). Boot time is much faster. For write, not
> quite as fast. For sequential reads and writes, which do not benefit
> from the internal SSD cache, even less faster.
>
> The read/write speeds of an SATA III drive is limited to 6
> gigabits/sec by the SATA interface speed. NVMe is even faster. If
> your computah can handle M.2 NVMe SSD drives, do it.
> 7200 RPM HD - average read/write speed of 80-160MB/second
> SATA 3 SSD - read/write speed up to 550MB/second
> NVME SSD - read/write speed up to 3500MB/second

When I revived my Mom's Shuttle computer (no model # handy but it's about
the size of a Hardy Boys or Tom Swift book if you remember those) I replaced
the 2.5" drive with a "normal" drive....too late now, I guess.

But your writing gives me confidence in a SSD next time. Another writer
(forget who right now) recommended gettting much larger than you think do
the to leveling over time locking out sectors.

No moving parts is a great idea.
I had a 1MB RAM disk for my Apple ][+ at the end before my brother forced
one of his old IBM clones on me. It used four banks of
256K DIP type memory chips. I really would have been fine with just 512K.

I loaded it up w/ WordStar and my CBASIC compiler after booting and was good
to go.

Ahh, youth.

I would be interested. Be good to hear you on the air once in awhile, too.
But I know ham radio ebbs and flows...

pH in Aptos

>

[pH]

On 2023-02-08, Andy Valencia <van...@vsta.org> wrote:
> Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> writes:
>> Please use an image backup, not a file by file or incremental backup.
>
> With 16TB, this becomes questionable. When they're part of four disks in a
> single filesystem, it's not a good idea at all. I use btrfs for file
> servers, and it has worked very well in production, WRT backups, and it
> nicely supports moving a disk to a new one (same size or larger) while in
> production. If you don't want to roll your own, Synology has some nice
> devices which are powered by it.
>

When I first got into Linux it was ext2, now I think I'm using ext4.

I read about btrfs (is it pronounced "better file sys" or "butter file sys")
and that it was the latest greatest bees knees and almost ready for prime
time.

The short story is, I'm totally clueless about these things so am really
afraid to stick my neck out. I guess a spare computer is a way around that.

I'm using Mint 20.1 Ulyssa Mate right now and Xfce on the 2GB Shuttle
computer I revived from my late Mom's that I drug home. It's slow but
perfectly fine.

> OTOH, if you have a filesystem on a single disk, I have products like these:
>
> https://www.ebay.com/itm/314238381638
>
> (I haven't used this particular one; my own is not listed any more.)
>
> They seem to run at full media speed, I haven't found a faster way to move
> bits to a new disk.
>
> Andy Valencia
> Home page: https://www.vsta.org/andy/
> To contact me: https://www.vsta.org/contact/andy.html

So, Mr. V.....which mountains are you residing in currently?
I"m in Aptos. Mr. Mcassey is in the hills of Scotland. Jeff and Capt.
Scruggs in the San Lorenzo Valley.

Tim May was near Eureka Canyon out of Watsonville, I recall.

(I know it's none of my business so apologies in advance)

pH

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Wed, 08 Feb 2023 10:27:53 -0800, Andy Valencia <van...@vsta.org>
wrote:

>Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> writes:
>> Please use an image backup, not a file by file or incremental backup.
>
>With 16TB, this becomes questionable.

None of my customers have huge data storage requirements. The worst
case customer is a collector of ripped videos and music with lossless
compression. I think he has about 200TB of these, all scattered among
multiple NAS servers. For backup, he mirrors the partitions (not the
drives) to other NAS servers, some of which are offsite. Since drive
capacity continues to grow, the expansion rate is about 4 times the
data for every new NAS drive. EXT3 can handle volumes up to 32TB, so
mirroring to NAS drives should be functional for a few more years.
When that hits the wall, EXT4 will go to 1 Exabyte.

However, he's an exception. I'm officially retired and no longer
service companies and corporation. All of my customers are either
home users or small businesses. Typically, their laptop or desktop
machines will run Windoze 10 or 11 and have between 50 and 100GB of
used space. Workstation SSD drive capacity is typically about 500GB.
The backup drives are typically 2TB USB-3 drives. A 100GB backup
typically will compress to about 75GB, which allows for 20 image
backups on each 2TB drive. Android and IOS pretty much take care of
themselves.

The basic idea is to inspire users to actually perform their own
backups. None of my users have an IT staff available. The problem is
they all have excuses not to do backups. What image backups bring to
the table is speed. The image backup doesn't take very long. 100GB
might take about 20 minutes. That's fast enough to do over a lunch
break. If it's not a major ordeal, and I remind them often, they will
usually do backups.

>When they're part of four disks in a
>single filesystem, it's not a good idea at all.

I don't have any customers that use RAID storage on their laptops or
desktops. They might have a NAS that uses RAID. By breaking up
everything into smaller partitions, that can be backed up
individually, image backups are still useful. When someone tries to
do an image backup of everything in one giant gulp that things go
awry. It's like eating a big meal. It works if you eat it in small
bites, but your can choke on it if you try to eat the entire meal in
one swallow.

>I use btrfs for file
>servers, and it has worked very well in production, WRT backups, and it
>nicely supports moving a disk to a new one (same size or larger) while in
>production. If you don't want to roll your own, Synology has some nice
>devices which are powered by it.

Synology is what I used to use for NAS. I had some problems which I
don't want to discuss (because some were my fault). Currently, I'm
using TrueNAS CORE (FreeNAS). However, most of remaining customers
have minimal storage requirements and don't need a NAS box.

>OTOH, if you have a filesystem on a single disk, I have products like these:
>
> https://www.ebay.com/itm/314238381638
>
>(I haven't used this particular one; my own is not listed any more.)

I have something like that which I used to use for formatting, testing
and mirroring hard disk drives. I haven't had much need for something
like that recently. Reminder... I'm retired, which means I'm lazy.

>They seem to run at full media speed, I haven't found a faster way to move
>bits to a new disk.

The next generation of machines will probably use NVMe drives running
at PCI bus speeds or seven times faster than SATA. The only way to
move data quickly between NVMe drives is a PC motherboard with dual
PCIe-x16. I'm too lazy to calculate which generation of PCIe will be
required. I haven't seen the need or the hardware to do this yet, but
I'm fairly certain they will arrive shortly. My customer that
collects videos has seen Linus Tech Tips on YouTube, where Linus
demonstrates his 10gigabit ethernet (fiber) network. Copying files
across 10g is amazingly fast. It's one of these videos:
<https://www.youtube.com/@LinusTechTips/search?query=10g+network>

>Andy Valencia
>Home page: https://www.vsta.org/andy/
>To contact me: https://www.vsta.org/contact/andy.html

Interesting nostalgia on your web site.

Good luck. In computers, everything you know today, is wrong
tomorrow.

[gymRatRedneck]

On 2/5/23 17:14, David Arnstein wrote:

> In article <trpcl6$2o4am$1...@dont-email.me>, pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> wrote:
>> (Did Tim May join Glen Appleby, Geoff and Lenore in heaven already?)
>
> Yes.

Funny thing about Tim May.

There was a fellow named Jeff who used to hang out in front of the
Bookshop Santa Cruz all padded up in winter clothes with a guitar all
the time.

Years ago I saw him sitting downtown with Tim on a bench, just hanging
out and I mentioned Tim to him one day a few years later in passing when
he was getting a cup of coffee at the now defunct Peets cafe.He seemed
fascinated that I knew who Tim was.

Fastforward a year or so... Someone on the [Cypherpunks] email list
mentioned Tim had passed. I saw Jeff and told him.

A day or two later he vanished off the face of the planet and hasn't
been seen since. I figure he knew where Tim lived in Corralitos and
squatted there or...



Gymrat...

[Andy Valencia]

pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> writes:
> So, Mr. V.....which mountains are you residing in currently?
> I"m in Aptos. Mr. Mcassey is in the hills of Scotland. Jeff and Capt.
> Scruggs in the San Lorenzo Valley.

Alas, this group and a house we still own (and rent out) are the two
remaining connections to California:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vashon_Island

> (I know it's none of my business so apologies in advance)

Not at all. I would be delighted if some wrinkle in the universe landed me
back near say, Pescadero. My birth state will always be, to me, the most
beautiful stretch of land on the planet. (Silly Con Valley notwithstanding.)

[BCFD36]

I don't know if I mentioned this, and I am not going back and looking,
but I did run into some problems I had not anticipated.

Awhile back, my MAC was getting slower and slower and more unstable.
(Kind of like me in general.) AND the latest version of TurboTax
insisted on Catalina or later. So I got a new HSD (I was too cheap to
buy an SSD) type drive and cloned the hard drive on my MAC. Then I
upgraded the new drive from Mojave to Catalina. After booting from the
new drive I logged in with no problems. Great! Well, great until I tried
to use Word, Excel, and Quicken. It seems they were 32 bit versions and
would not run under Catalina. ARRRGH!

So I went ahead and did my taxes and sent them out. I did not print them
at the time. The next morning, the confuser was DRT (an EMS term meaning
Dead Right There, meaning non-breathing, pulseless, and cold to the
touch). I tried all the usual stuff and got nowhere. Just fucking wonderful.

So I went back to the unstable and slow internal disk. Many months later
I talked to a place in Santa Cruz who thought they would be able to
recover the PDF file of my tax return, and they did so for a price. I
told the guy my tale of woe and asked if an SSD would be a better
choice. Of course it said it would be. So I got one.

I cloned the SSD booted from it, and things were great, except for one
little thing. Word and Excel come up as read only. I don't know about
Quicken yet. I poked around a bit and the info I found indicates that I
am stuck. Even the servers that did the checking to see that the version
you are running don't exist any more. The only choice now is to pay the
yearly fee to MS to use the product I already paid for.

Google Docs and Sheets it is. I'm not happy about that either.

--
Dave Scruggs
Captain, Boulder Creek Fire (Retired)

Sr. Software Engineer (Retired, mostly)

[pH]

All the Linux distros come with LibreOffice or OpenOffice and there are
others you can download.

If you do fancy things with your Word Processor they might not be good
enough for what you do.

I mostly text edit with the 'jstar' invocation of the 'joe' word
processor...plain old text...and use LibreOffice for my annual christmas
letter since I can insert photos (pics).

I'd like to revive my brother's old mac but don't want to make a full-time
job of it, even though I *am* retired.

pH

[pH]

Thanks, Mr. V.
The Big Sur Coastline and the Sierra Nevada really are beautiful parts of my
State in my book.

pH

[Andy Valencia]

BCFD36 <bcf...@cruzio.com> writes:
> Awhile back, my MAC was getting slower and slower and more unstable.
> (Kind of like me in general.) AND the latest version of TurboTax
> insisted on Catalina or later.

YMMV, but my daughter stumbled on FreeTaxUSA.com. Obviously a scam, right?
However she used it, and it... worked. I had come to hold a great revulsion
for TurboTax due to many, many reasons. So, with trepidation, I used it the
following year. And... it worked. Well. We aren't Bill Gates, but we have
investments, a rental house, a business, some decent baggage. And it handled
it all, including online filing if we wanted.

Web based, just make sure your browser is up to date. Shockingly, not a
terribly bloated web experience, either. It can import .tax files, or import
from the PDF of your previous year's return. So jumping from TurboTax isn't
as bad as you might fear.

I am just a customer, but I'm happy I found it, and maybe it'll work well for
somebody on this group.

[Julian Macassey]

On Sat, 11 Feb 2023 19:27:12 -0800, Andy Valencia
<van...@vsta.org> wrote:
> BCFD36 <bcf...@cruzio.com> writes:
>> Awhile back, my MAC was getting slower and slower and more
>> unstable. (Kind of like me in general.) AND the latest
>> version of TurboTax insisted on Catalina or later.
>
> YMMV, but my daughter stumbled on FreeTaxUSA.com. Obviously a
> scam, right? However she used it, and it... worked.

No, but Turbotax is a scam. The IRS spanked them, so they
agreed to allow you to file for nothing, but this is buried on
their web site.

Here are some options:

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/taxes/best-free-tax-filing-options/


--
Few companies are sleazier than @Intuit. - Cory Doctorow Feb 22 2022

[BCFD36]

I will have to keep this in mind. I am thinking my taxes will be a bit
too complicated for me to do them this year on my own due to a bunch of
1099s and stuff inherited from my Mom. But we shall see.

[pH]

This is a good tip. But the curmudgeon in me insists that there is a
gimmick somewhere...money *has* to change hands somewhere in
this...otherwise how could the domain name be paid for?

I've jotted it down, though. Looks good.

I'm already done reading about those Orange marchers...gad, goes back to
1690, looks like.


pH

[pH]

Unless your Mom was super wealthy, aren't most inheritances a non-taxable
event up to some large number? (Cue Jeff's search skills....)

pH

[BCFD36]

There is still all the stuff about selling the house and some goods.
More than I want to deal with. I just have to fill out some stuff for
the tax guy.

[Andy Valencia]

pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> writes:
> Unless your Mom was super wealthy, aren't most inheritances a non-taxable
> event up to some large number? (Cue Jeff's search skills....)

Watch out if there's a trust, and even better when the IRA's name the trust
as the beneficiary (double check with a professional if that's how you
currently have it set up). At _some_ point, you will be realizing income
from tax deferred amounts in the estate. The house was in a survivor's
trust, so its basis was only reset at my father's passing, thus there was a
taxable event when we sold it after my mother's passing and our inheritance.
(It had appreciated quite a bit.)

So you're sort of right, but there's a lot of details.

"By lawyers, for lawyers."

[pH]

Understood. My Mom recently passed away and my brother insisted we sell her
rental...a good decision since I'm not cut out to be a landlord.

But, a *lot* of people sure make their living off the buying and selling of
real estate and I don't mean just the buyer and seller!

pH

[pH]

Groan. I *knew* that the powers that be have their hands out for a share
somehow. I'll be glad when this tax year is over.

pH

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2023 23:01:31 -0000 (UTC), pH <wNOS...@gmail.org>
wrote:

>Unless your Mom was super wealthy, aren't most inheritances a non-taxable
>event up to some large number? (Cue Jeff's search skills....)

California does NOT have estate or inheritance taxes.

There is no federal inheritance tax. However, there is an estate tax:
<https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/estate-tax>
<https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/inheritance-tax>
<https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i706>
The federal estate tax applies to assets over $12.06 million in 2022
and $12.92 million in 2023. Everything over this exclusion is taxed
at 18% to 40%.

According to my former tax person, the biggest and best tax deductions
and credits apply only after you're dead.