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| 11/23 |
| 2005/2/26-28 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36440 Activity:nil |
2/26 I just ripped some stuff off of a supposedly copy protected VCD
from China or Hong Kong (I didn't care about the content, but
I was curious about the protection) using Alcohol and DVDGear.
I could not see the mpeg streams from
either the VCD or the ripped image from my PC unless I did that.
First, what is DVDGear reading to get the mpeg stream out? Are
the physical tracks the actual stream with no filesystem?
Second, the ripped mpegs correspond one to each track, there are
a total of 8 tracks. I can play the first track with any software
player like Windows Media Player. However, I cannot play the other
tracks. The only way to view the other tracks is through a program
called Nero Media Player. Is there missing header information
on the subsequent tracks which chokes all the other players and
Nero Media Player just ignores this? How would I fix this?
I assume that this method of encoding a VCD is to prevent casual
people from being able to play the VCD on their computers and
be able to just rip the disk by doing a simple file copy.
\_ The .dat files on a VCD are basically just MPEG1 streams. Just
copy them. |
| 2005/2/26-3/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36437 Activity:kinda low |
2/26 What hard drives do you recommend? To stay away? Reliability is
top priority.
\_ regardless of brand, I've found a strong correlation between HDs
that fail with enclosures that don't have good airflow. I've had 3
consecutive WD-200 Caviar failures in 6 months on this particular
computer while the same WD-200 Caviar didn't fail on any of my
other computers. It turns out that the airflow sucks and the HD
gets really really hot, to more than 130F. Nowadays I use special HD
fans in conjunction with good filtered in and out fans that bring
down the temperature to 80-90F. It's been 1 years since I did that
and I haven't had any failure.
\_ If reliability is top priority, then SCSI-Anybody. The SCSI discs
are aimed at business users and are built to much higher standards
and typically come with a 5yr warranty vs. 1 year on consumer-level
ATA drives.
\_ SCSI is on its way out. Get SATA with a 3 year warranty.
Western Digital and Seagate seem to be high quality.
\_ Seconded. If you really care about reliability then you should
go with SCSI (either u160 or u320) drives. If you are unwilling
(or unable) to pay the SCSI reliability premium, SATA drives
from either WD or Seagate are not bad. Like the poster below
says stay away from Maxtor.
\_ If reliability is top priority use RAID and keep backups. Stay
away from Maxtor drives.
\_ In all my years of dealing with hardware, I've found that
no one drive manufacturer is consistently reliable. I would
have to say that Maxtors do have a perceived reliability
problem, but I've only had one maxtor about to fail and
one which is somewhat unreliable, they did
replace one within a reasonable amount of time. The worst
drive failure I've had so far was an IBM, and it was out of
warranty by less than a year. I've had Seagate fail on me
also, but those were old seagates from Ultra10s, which are
known to have used cheapie parts.
\_ I had a Hitachi (formerly IBM's disk division) drive fail
within the warranty period. I have a few acquaintances who
had IBM drive failures. My ancient Maxtor's still ticking.
-- ilyas
\_ I had a Hitachi that was DOA, then its replacement (shipped
from factory) was also DOA, and then another, and finally
another. That was all one incident. I vowed to never
again buy a Hitachi.
As for perceived reliability, I've had mixed experiences
over the years. Maxtor and WD have been *equally* reliable
in that I think I've only RMA'd one or two of each in the
50+ hard drives I've owned. I had one IBM deathstar which
did exactly what its name promised.
I figure that the internals are all come from the same
place, so as said below, buy for warranty. Always assume
that the drive will fail and that you'll have to replace
it. Since *all* PATA drives are being knocked down to 1
year warranties now, I just watch the deal sites and buy
the cheap and big maxtor or wd drive of the week. - jvarga
\_ actually, on the contrary, all seagate drives now
come with a 5 year warranty. there are still other
drives out there with at least a 3 year warranty.
\_ how the hell do you own 50+ hard drives? Are you a
sysadm or an avid porn DVD collector?
\_ 50 hard drives over my geek lifetime. My current
main system has 5, my server 3. 160GB hard drives
are also cheap enough as to where I can buy one,
back up everything to it, then just go stick it in
my fire safe. I currently have 2 or 3 160's just
sitting in my safe. - jvarga
\_ Where do you put your safe?
\_ The safe is under the right side of my bed. The
combination is 26-36-15. I go to work at 9am
and do not come back home until 6pm. The alarm
code is 23049. The front door key is under the
hollow rock to the left of my front door. Why
do you ask? - jvarga
\_ Heh, that's amusing. -mice
\_ "Egad Brain, what are we gonnna do tonight?
Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try
to take over the world."
\_ finger pinky
\_ finger brain
\_ finger mice
\_ Truthfully, in terms of reliability it does not
matter. They are all very close. IBM, Fujitsu,
Seagate, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Buy for
warranty and performance. I prefer SCSI drives for
performance, but they don't seem to last any longer
(in fact, less long - probably because of heat with
the higher RPMs).
\_ Well put!
\_ Strangely, my impression is much different.
In terms of mainstream IDE drives with at least three years
of warranty:
Hitachi > Western Digital > Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate
In terms of notebook drives:
Hitachi >> everyone else.
In terms of IDE drives with 1 year warranty, you got me,
since I don't buy those.
\_ I've had 2 Hitachi (IBM) notebooks drives die on me
relatively quickly, replaced with Seagate. Quantum drives
died pretty fast as well. I noticed most high end stuff
uses Seagate, that's my current brand of choice. |
| 2005/2/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36358 Activity:nil |
2/21 Are the magnets in a hard disk drive (the ones in the servo basse)
strong enough to erase the data on the platters if the patters
are removed and the magnets slid in contact with the platter
surface? I was surprised how strong those magnets are!
\_ I believe anything's possible. Too bad I don't have a spare HD
to test this with. Magnetic field can't be shielded so I wonder
how easy it is to erase your nemesis' computer by waving a strong
magnet around his/her laptop. |
| 2005/2/21-22 [Computer/Networking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36347 Activity:high |
2/21 Does anyone have good recommendations for an external USB hard drive
enclosure?
\_ Maxtor OneTouch. I really like mine. -John
\_ They're pretty much all the same.
\_ Thanks. Does this one seem pretty typical:
http://tinyurl.com/4xokj
\_ Not really. It's USB and 1394. USB only runs about $20.
Looks like this one has a proprietary power cable (I like my
USB 2.0 enclousure that uses a standard ATX power cable).
Looks pretty similar to my USB+1394 enclosure though.
\_ I would go to http://newegg.com, click on Shop by Category, External
Enclosure, select the parameters you want on the left (USB Yes, Size
3.5 for desktop HD, 2.5 for notebook HD, or 5.25 for optical drive)
and Search, sort by Best Rating, and then pick one near the top
which has only one cable for power (none of this power brick crap
with one cable drive->power brick and another cable power brick ->
wall), kind of like this:
http://csua.org/u/b4x ($38, AMS 3.5" USB 2.0 only)
The other category of external drives is backup for your pointy-
haired boss on the ThinkPad or relatives. In this case I would go
Western Digital, the two-option backup version (see their web site),
but I'm still trying to figure out how to do encryption with
(bundled) Retrospect Express.
\_ Search for the "Metal Gear" enclosure-- they're not the cheapest, but
simple, fanless, support firewire and USB, and they're pretty high
quality-- the entire aluminum case acts as a heatsink, so it's very
quiet but won't toast your drive(s). I think I paid $40.
\_ fyi, I'm the guy recommending AMS above, and I was also the guy
that recommended the Metal Gear enclosure on soda half a year
ago. The Metal Gear uses the 2 cable power-brick thing.
ago. The Metal Gear uses the 2 cable + power brick thing.
See the photo on http://newegg.com: http://csua.org/u/b4z
Anyways, a couple of the AMS comments talk about how the design
is better than the Metal Gear's, although it is not as flashy. |
| 2005/2/8-9 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36099 Activity:kinda low |
2/8 I would like to destroy/wipe the data in a particular directory
of a portable linux computer without wiping the whole disk. Any
suggestions for how to do this easily?
\_ rm. If you are worried aboyt someone undeleting and
discovering your porno collection you can write a script
and overwrite each file with /dev/zero bits.
\_ any experience with "wipe"? http://abaababa.ouvaton.org/wipe
\_ When you write data to a linux file, does it write the data to
new sectors, or does it overwirte the original data in the same
sectors?
\_ Overwriting with 0 isn't good enough. /dev/random might be
better, but still isn't good enough.
\_ If you are very concerned about getting rid of it, some
definitions of "military" grade wipe specify something
like 19 overwrites with as-random-as-possible 010101
strings. Forensics outfits like Kroll and Guidance (and
even commercial SW like EnCase) can do some pretty unlikely
data recovery. The only way to reliably completely
destroy drive contents is to physically shred the disk
after multiple sequential white noise overwrites. -John
\_ dropping it from Empire State Building is the best
\_ rm -P
This won't actually do the job (see
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/sdelete.shtml for a windows
utility that will do the job--source available) but it's better than
nothing. (Oops, I have no idea if that option is available on
linux.)
\_ The rm manpage recommends "shred". Anybody know if shread
would work on ext3 with data=journal mode?
\_ It should. If in doubt, mount the partition as ext2,
run shred, unmount and remount as ext3. |
| 2005/2/3-5 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36055 Activity:moderate |
2/3 So, I'm really confused about this notion of computer science
metrics where everything's kind of 2^n, but sometimes not. For
example, if I have a 4 GIG hard drive, does that mean I have
exactly 2^32 bytes of space? Does that translate to 4000000000
bytes, or some number that's close to it? How about megahertz?
Say I have a 2.5GHz computer, does it run at exactly 2500000
hertz? Or 2^n for some multiple of n?
\_ As a few other people have said, just about everything is ordinary
decimal units now. A 4G hard drive is (about) 4,000,000,000 bytes,
and a 2.5GHz processor runs at (about) 2,500,000,000 Hertz.
Operating systems still tend to report file sizes in binary units,
though, so a 4G file is probably 4,294,967,296 bytes. (Sometimes
it's configurable: GNU du and df let you specify -h for binary
units or -H for decimal.) The only hardware still sold in binary
units is memory -- a 1G flash memory card is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
Also note that all storage devices are sold by raw capacity, not
counting filesystem overhead.
\_ I'd actually argue that in computers, all standards and measurements
are 10^n with the exception of RAM and addresses. HDDs, bandwidth,
frequency, resolution (megapixels) are all base ten.
\_ The ISO standard (IIRC) is Gibibytes for 2^30 and Gigabytes for
10^9. Memory is addressed by logic which is friendly to powers of
2. Non-memory doesn't matter.
\_ Frequencies (Hertz) are not stated in powers of two obviously.
You can usually find the exact frequency in the tech specs.
Computer data quantities are normally referred to with binary
prefixes (kilo=1024). Hard drive producers use 1000 because
they are fuckers. A frequency is not a data quantity.
\_ The whole k=1024 thing was a cute hack invented by computer
folks, but it becomes imcreasingly strained as you move into
mega- and giga- prefixes. At some point you need to admit it's
more trouble than it's worth. The computer should be the one
worrying how to address it's memory in base-2, rather than the
end user wondering how many bytes are in a gig.
\_ Memory is sized in 2^n because that's how the chips are laid out.
The capacity of a hard drive is determined by the track width
and magnetic domain size. This gives you a non-binary capacity.
It makes sense to therefore measure it using the SI system. The
fact that CS people started calling 1024 and 1048576 kilo- and
mega- when those prefixes had been in use for ages says to me
that the CS people are the fuckers, not the engineers who are
just adhereing to standard terminology. I personally count all
file and data sizes in base-10, except when refering to memory
usage. Anyway, this debate has been done to death before.
\_ so 1M is what really? 1000000 or 10^20?
\_ Officially, 10^6 (you mean 2^20, right?).
M = 10^6, Mi = 2^20
See:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
\_ No, it doesn't make sense when you're talking about computer
storage capacity to use a different meaning of GB than
everybody normally uses when talking about computer storage.
It's not like the drives are storing non-binary data. It's
going to have a filesystem and store vanilla kilobytes and
megabytes. Nowhere else does Gbyte refer to 1000*1000*1000.
In a computer environment, files are loaded into memory and
to disk, it's idiotic to change the terminology just because
the underlying media is different. CD and DVD storage is
referred to in binary. Sorry, you're wrong.
\_ FWIW, floppies are counted under a bastardized hybrid
system where 1.44 'megabytes' = 1440 KiB, or 1.44k-KiB
\_ No. CDs and DVDs are counted base-10, as is bandwidth.
The fact that the drives are storing binary data has no
bearing on the method you use to count the bytes, which
this debate shows, is a matter of dueling conventions, not
some underlying fact. I'm not wrong, you're just an ass.
\_ The orange book standard says a cd has a capacity
of 650*2^20 bytes.
\_ A DVD+-R(W) is 4.7*10^9
\_ Hard to argue, since they charge $5,000 for a
copy of a DVD format spec ($500 for each
additional spec) and require an NDA. Do you
actually have access to the four specs you
mention? The holder of DVD Forum's specs is
http://www.dvdfllc.co.jp |
| 2005/2/2 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36037 Activity:nil |
2/2 I have a 7 year old PC (with display) that I'd like to get rid of. Can
I just dump it outside of my house and expect it to be picked up
by the Berkeley garbage service?
\_ http://www.otxwest.org
\_ No, it is hazardous waste. Take it here: http://www.accrc.org |
| 2005/2/2-3 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36030 Activity:low |
2/2 What are the differences and pros/cons of POP3 vs. IMAP? I'm asking
both on the admin side and for the end-user.
\_ Hm the nuker strikes again. IMAP is good because it lets you see
mails from several clients (including via CLI and web mail.) If
you're going to do imap, I recommend Dovecot/imaps + Postfix with
TLS and SMTP AUTH. I also run an openwebmail server over SSL, the
whole combo works a charm. -John
\_ The most irritating aspect of POP3 is when you are migrating
someone to another computer, and their new workstation downloads
5,000 duplicate e-mails that weren't deleted from the mail server
yet -- and each duplicate e-mail is re-filtered into separate
folders in their e-mail client.
\_ IMAP uses more disk space on the server, and pop is a pain for
the end-user-side if they have more than one computer. POP
is good if the user has one computer. overall IMAP is nice.
\_ How much more? One file per message vs. one file per user, or
multiple copies of each message? Are we talking 5% or 200%?
\_ The number of messages per file varies depending on the
implementation, but with IMAP, mail stays on the server,
so that is a whole lot more disk space if you user keeps
a lot of mail, and the storage grows over time. I don't
think any sane email system would keep "multiple copies
of each message".
http://www.google.com/search?q=pop+versus+imap
\_ Disk size doubles every 12 (or is it 18 month). Not using
IMAP because (shock and horror) users will store mail on
the server (kind of the point, now isn't it) is a) insane
and b) means you need don't understand exponentials and
should probably get out of this computery business...
\_ IMAP is great if you have mail clients that do reasonable caching
of messages after downloading them. It also allows you to run
a concurrent webmail service without problems. I recommend trying
dovecot imaps. -John
\_ The really sad thing is that IMAP as a protocol is a superset of
POP3. You can make IMAP act just like POP3 if you want. In
practice, people seem to write IMAP clients to tend to leave mail
on the server and POP3 to tend to download it all every time.
\_ POP3 is fucking deprecated. Don't use it anymore. The main
(only?) benefit of POP3 is that it allows lazy fucking admins to
do less set up and (short term) maintenance. The main problem
with IMAP is that because lazy fucking admins kept using POP3
the immature, poor IMAP servers and clients haven't died the
painful death at the hands of the market they deserve. If
you're going to run an open-source IMAP server, run Cyrus.
Courier and UW-IMAP both suck hard if you throw a large number
of users or a handful of users with large mailboxes at them. If
you want a good tool to extract messages from the clutches of
your existing mailserver and transfer them via imap commands to
your shiny new mailserver, dig up the uw-mailutils utility(ies?)
which are part of the UW-IMAP package or available alone in
debian (apt-get install uw-mailutils). |
| 2005/2/2-3 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36025 Activity:nil |
2/1 <nevermind, i found: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishrip \_ If you do this, the easiest way I've found is to open the box, yank the IDE and power cables from the motherboard side (leave the HD in the cage), and plug them into an external drive enclosure. You'll need to make a molex gender changer (unless you can find one somewhere) -- remember to match colors. |
| 2005/1/28-29 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35954 Activity:moderate |
1/28 Anyone have any creative ideas for things to do with old CDs?
Does campus recycle them?
\_ create art. Make CD mail armor.
\_ This is the most brilliant goddamn thing I've
seen all week. You just defined my purpose in
life.
\_ Use a lot of duct tape on the backside so the
splinters from the cracked CDs don't get
jammed into your skin.
\_ true, good for reflecting lasers, at least... |
| 2005/1/28-29 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35949 Activity:low |
1/28 I'm thinking of building a cluster of diskless, low-end low-noise
PCs (one to attach a monitor to a wall to make it look like a
moving painting, one in the kitchen to display weather/traffice),
are there motherboards that boot up from LAN and without having to
have a HD?
\_ Try Mini-ITX from VIA. Many of them are fanless. AFAIK,
all of them have the ability to boot off the net.
\_ Also just to get some ideas, look at http://www.mini-itx.com .
They're in the UK, so ordering may abe problematic, but their
page has some cool resources. -John
\_ You can get the same shit here in the U.S. Just go down to
Central Computer if you're in the Bay Area. They'll either
have it or get it for you.
\_ how about 802.11? Any board that can boot from that?
\_ I don't think so. |
| 2005/1/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35868 Activity:kinda low |
1/23 Recommendation for free software that will take DVD as input and
generate an mpeg,avi,wmv,etc file from it. I'm not looking for
fancy stuff. I really just want something that is like "ripping
DVDs for dummies" as I'm not a pc hacker guy. Is there such a free
tool? If not, what for-profit sw is out there to do this. I need
something that works, nothing fancy. Thanks.
\_ PIRATE! PIRATE! Somebody call the MPAA!
\_ DVD Decrypter will rip it to your HD. DVD Shrink will fit it
onto one DVD+R. Both are excellent freeware programs. |
| 2005/1/23-24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35864 Activity:kinda low |
1/23 If I were to put a small 12V 2-3" fan nearby my hot HD, is it better
to blow on the top silver side, or is it better to blow on the lower
bottom (motor) side? My HD is really really really hot and I'm afraid
it might break down if I don't do anything about it.
\_ Heat rises. Blow on the top side. That's what Yermom told me.
\_ So Hismom told you to start blowing?
\_ Heat rises. Blow on the top side. |
| 2005/1/21-24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35844 Activity:moderate |
1/21 Some PC hardware questions, any advice much appreciated:
1) Anyone have experience with Maxtor Diamond 250GB SATA drives?
2) I read once that it's not smart to buy all drives in a RAID array
from the same mfgr/vendor (batch). Is this still the case?
\_ What a bunch of rubbish. You are MORE likely to run into problems
when mixing different drives which are more likely to have
different disk geometries and other parameters. Not all
controllers can deal with this well.
3) On a RAID controller (in this case a 3Ware 9500-S) does the # of
ports refer to how many drives can be attached, or does it have
something to do with data transfer channels? http://3ware.com is a bit
vague on this. Thanks for any clarifications!
\_ I've been hearing bad things about the reliability of 250MB+ drives.
Also, I hate maxtor drives because they all get noisy within a year
or two.
\_ Thanks. Any drive model recommendations for SATA 200-250GB?
\_ 8 port means 8 drives. You may want to look into hitachi
300GB drives. They're supposedly more stable compared to WD
and Maxtor 250GB drives.
\_ Don't by CRASHtor drives unless you hate your data and love
sending your drives in for RMA. I have had several 120GB
drives and 250GB drives made by Maxtor die w/in six months
of buying them. I switched to WD and Seagate and haven't
had any problems with either.
\_ Thanks for all your comments, it's nice to get 1st-person
opinions. This is a great help.
\_ I've had a maxtor drive that's worked for over 6 years now.
I have a 120GB maxtor that's been working fine for over a
year. YMMV, in many cases it's just the luck of the draw. |
| 2005/1/20 [Science/Electric, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35809 Activity:moderate Edit_by:auto |
1/20 So how much power does my P4 with 350w PS consume? 350w or less?
I am trying to figure out how much electricity I am wasting...
\_ Less than 350W, plus your monitor and any powered peripherals. If
you really care, you can buy a device called 'kill-a-watt' which can
tell you the usage of anything that plugs in.
\_ My Athlon 64 3200+ Newcastle (0.13um) with 450W power supply uses
70 watts at idle, around 120 at load.
\_ Thanks!
\_ oh yeah, it's probably like 25-50 more (I forget) when I'm
also playing a 3D game.
\_ Is this measurement through "Kill A Watt"?
\_ Yes. You can also buy a Seasonic version (just search
for that) on http://newegg.com for $35. I think they're both
accurate. FYI, ThermalTake has an ATX power supply
that gives you a front-panel LED of wattage, but it
underestimates by ~ 20%. That's the non-PFC version
at least. Lameness.
Someone else said the ThermalTake was accurate, but
it's very likely to be the PFC version.
\_ Thanks!
\_ I don't know the answer. Just tell it to turn off your monitor and
hard disk after X minutes of idle time. And put the PC to
hibernate and switch off the monitor when you leave your office.
\_ http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,109379,pg,2,00.asp
Calculating PC wattage |
| 2005/1/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35776 Activity:nil |
1/18 This seems kind of odd.
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=656377
26.5 million pounds... they call it a "raid" but it sounds like it was
two guys carrying money out in boxes? |
| 2005/1/18-19 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35762 Activity:moderate |
1/18 A bunch of CD-ROMS I have are corrupted. They're in a nice
CaseLogic case, closed, stored in a temperate (70-85F), dry
location. I have no idea why they're corrupted, but I know
one thing-- they've been sitting close my Sharper Image Ionizer
[plus UV mode turned on], for maybe 6 months. I'm suspecting
that either the ions or the UV killed them, but is it actually
possible with the CD case closed? How about ions, are they
bad for electronics, etc? ok thx.
\_ Nah, most likely you got a bad batch of CD-Rs. Some CD-Rs
were just badly manufactured and the dye just broke down.
I'm assuming these are CD-Rs and not regular CDs. If they
are regular CDs then there's something wrong with your drive,
assuming that the CDs aren't melted or something. Otherwise,
pressed CDs are very sturdy.
\_ I thought about that, but both of my Memorex and
Maxell batch are dead. And the weird thing is that
initially the disk read were alright till maybe the
last 10% of the files, which end up to be corrupted. So
I think maybe one side of the CD got exposed to
something harmful, but I don't know...
\_ How old are they? CDs are known to "go bad" after 7-10 years.
\_ I made them since 2000-2001. Never really subjected them to
sunlight or extreme heat. Must be the UV+ionizer -op
\_ the data is written from the middle outward, so your experience
of the "last 10%" failing first indicates that the seal on
the outer rim failed and the dye layer degraded from the outside
towards the middle. do you see any funny patterns on the data
side, e.g. corrosion or weird non-concentric variations? i too
would blame the ionizer. |
| 11/23 |
| 2005/1/18-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35761 Activity:kinda low |
1/18 Western Digital vs. Maxtor, round one. I have 2 drives, a Maxtor
250G and a WD 200G. Both have been running for a while since
this summer, and out of curiousity I checked out their warranties.
WD has a 3 year warranty while Maxtor only has a 1 year warranty.
Is there anything I can conclude about the reliability,
availability, and serviceability of the two drives?
\_ Most manufacturers switched to 1 year warranty on most of their
ATA drives last year. WD kept the 3yr warranty on their 8MB cache
models. So I doubt you can make any assumptions based on the
warranty period. But there appears to be a big difference in
reliability between 200GB and 250GB drives that's common on pretty
much all of the manufacturers, which 300GB drives failing more than
any others. Based on that, I'd say your Maxtor 250GB would be more
likely to prematurely fail. I also had to replace 2 Maxtor 250GB
drives in one of our ATA raid systems just last week, whereas I've
yet to replace any of the drives on the same ATA raid system that
has WD drives. But the WD one is newer, so nothing can be concluded
from that either.
\_ All drives fail it's a matter of luck. Ive had all types. IBM
Seagate, Maxtor, WD, Hitachi, etc.. I would suggest going with
the manufacturer that has the best warranty. that's why I've stuck
to only Seagate drives now since they have 5yr warranty.
\_ As the former owner of 3 Maxtor drives (2 120 GB and 1 250 GB)
drive, my experience was that Maxtor had really poor reliability
and frequently failed before the 1 yr warranty was up. I switched
to WD and Seagate and haven't noticed any problems to date (1yr +). |
| 2005/1/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35759 Activity:nil |
1/17 Thank to all the people trying to help me configure ATA133.
I fixed it. Basically, WinXP was configured to auto use DMA,
and it was using DMA Mode 2 automatically. According to the site:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/modesUDMA-c.html
...the max expected rate was 33.3MB/s. However after playing with
the BIOS I got WinXP to go up to DMA Mode 6. Now I'm getting
a transfer rate that is 3-4X faster than before. The difference
is astounding. Thanks for all the gurus who helped out!
\_ just curious: what did you change in the BIOS? By default in
newer mobos the HD access mode is set to Auto, which usually ends
up as the highest speed.
\_ my MB is kind of weird. It has built in SATA and built
in RAID. I disabled both of them long time ago because I
didn't use them. When I noticed the performance hit 2 days
ago I tried turning them on/off again to see if WinXP
would jump from DMA Mode 2 to DMA Mode 6 and it didn't, and
as a last resort I reset (default) the entire BIOS,
turned SATA/RAID off, and voila, DMA Mode 6!!!
In another word, I have no idea what happened, but I
guess I should have tried resetting in the first place. |
| 2005/1/17-18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35742 Activity:high |
1/17 My DMA is in fact turned on, but I'm hardly getting the 133 rate
in my ATA133 as claimed by my motherboard and hard-drive. What
are some culprits in the lack of performance? ok thx.
\_ How are you measuring the throughput?
\_ You know nothing can sustain ATA133 throughput, right?
\_ And you're running which OS?
\_ Bottleneck is hard drive heads reading data off the spinning
platter. I think you max out around 20-30 MB / second these days
for a 7200rpm drive for not too fragmented large files.
Heck, notebooks have ATA133, why are their hard drives slow? Duh.
\_ I've tried transfering 50Gig of content (mostly movies,
very little HD head movements) and according to the XP
estimation it will take 160 min. So that means the
rate is approx 5.2M/sec. That is nowhere close to 20-30MB
rate you're saying. I'm very dissappointed...
\_ if your source hard drive is defragged and your dest
hard drive is empty, you are not doing this across a 100Mbps
network or some crappy FireWire / USB 2.0 controller, and
5.2 MB/s turned out to be the user-measured result (as opposed
to what Windoze estimates), I'd be disappointed too.
\_ yes. Drive 1 is Maxtor 250Gig drive, empty.
Drive 2 is WD 200Gig drive, no fragmentation.
Both are on the same ATA133 cable. Transfering
from 2 to 1 is about 5MB/sec. WHAT IS GOING ON?
Why is it so slow???
\_ That *is* slow. Do you have any anti-virus apps doing
on-the-fly scanning?
\_ nope! Disabled the "real-time" scan. ARGGGGGGGGGGG
\_ Okay, now why didn't you give this information from the
start? If they're on the same cable, you're running in
half-duplex. So your theoretical best is half the max.
\_ no. 133ATA means 130000Mb/sec, or 16.6MB/sec.
So theoretical limit is 16.6, and assuming
half-duplex, it's 8.3MB/sec. I'm getting 5.2MB/sec.
I guess 5.2 out of 8.3 is not too bad, but still
very disappointing. -op
\_ 133 means 133 MB/s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths
Anyway, re-install Windoze and measure again.
\_ Is your NTFS drive compressed?
\_ NOPE -op
\_ Did you check your primary/secondary IDE channel settings
(in Manage Hardware) and verify that DMA is in fact
selected?
\_ I have run performance tests on literally dozens of
drives and they are all like that. 5MB is kind of slow,
but you are never going to see 10MB/sec.
\_ I just timed a dump of a 2 GB DVD image from drive
to /dev/null on my Thinkpad T41. Average 20 MB/s, and
watching a realtime monitor it was more like 24 MB/s
and then a pause at 0 MB/s while Linux did some
poorly timed swapping. I am sure I get better speeds
than OP copying from drive to Ipod over USB2.
\_ There's also seek time when the sectors you try to read are non-
contiguous in the same track, and when the sectors are in
different tracks.
\_ I believe it's called "latency" when the data resides in
the same track. Seek time is moving heads, as you noted.
Access time is the overall result.
\_ The only time you'll see 133 is when it's reading data that's in the
drive's memory buffer.
\_ if the little pixies are on strike there will be some slow down
\_ Dude where are the true SCSI-files? ATA has always make outrageous
claims. It is a combination of the fact ATA just not "robust"
enough to support that many drives and Windoze sucks at FS. |
| 2005/1/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35681 Activity:high |
1/12 DVD can't be read by windows. How do I convert to Mpeg-4?
\_ google afterdawn. then teach me how. thx!
\_ Is there a complete sentence in there struggling to get out?
\_ You're just being snotty. --!op
\_ Nope. I actually don't understand what is being asked.
\_ How are you going to convert a disc if you can't read it?
Or do you mean that:
a) you don't have an MPEG2 decoder
b) the disc is region-locked and of a different region
?
\_ DVD players on a DVD player. When you put it in my computer
DVD, you can't read any files using WinExpl. You can't play
it on my DVD player either. However, I can copy the DVD using
my computer.
\_ "DVD players on a DVD player"? Huh? |
| 2005/1/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35672 Activity:very high |
1/11 Using SATA (serial ATA) as the one and only primary HD, any
problem with boot up? How about with motherboards built in say,
2002? Any problem with that? Pros/cons with SATA? Comments?
\_ You expecting to install Windoze on SATA and have it boot?
\_ I had to get a special driver floppy to install Win XP on a recent
box w/ onboard SATA. It wasn't too hard, though. YMMV. --dbushong
\_ Does post SP2 work? If so, why can't you just slipstream
in SP2 into the base Windows and burn a CD? A lot of newer
desktop comps don't come with floppies. -williamc
\_ slipstreaming worx theoretically but i'm lazy
\_ adding to this, you need to keep around a spare floppy drive
even if you don't intend to leave it in the system just for
this reason (unless you have a bootable Windows XP SP2 CD
with working CD key). WinXP won't accept the SATA drivers on CD.
\_ uh, painful. Why in hell would anyone upgrade to SATA? It
seems more trouble than it's worth.
\_ I just built a new PC with SATA disk. I didn't have to go
through all that when installing XP (pre-SP1). It was
quite flawless.
\_ you mean you didn't need a driver floppy?
also, somewhat related, the link below says both serial
and parallel ATA drives will have problems formatting
to a full 160GB using pre-SP1
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/137_winxp.html
okay, here's an article that says a Soltek mobo didn't
need a floppy
http://www.3dxtreme.net/index.php?id=asusa8vdeluxe7
\_ No. And I don't have 160GB. Mine is 80GB from
Western Digital.
\_ yeah, after some research, it looks like your
mobo is doing some emulation that pre-SP1 is happy
with. Even some of the newest mobos require a
floppy, though, like the Asus A8V (90nm Athlon 64)
\_ No, get an Mac Mini.
\_ it's not practical as a router unless you want to go wireless
only for all your equipment since mini comes with only one
network port.
\_ I'm not recommending doing this, but I believe one could
add USB network adaptors to supplement the internal
ethernet port.
\_ ifconfig en0 alias ...
\_ I was hoping that Apple would include a PCI slot so that
I could drop in a dual or quad port PCI 10/100 card and
get a fast firewall. The usb 2.0 10/100 adapter is an
option that is probably okay for dsl firewalling but not
for other stuff.
\_ Yeah I personally don't see why having it quite that tiny
is useful. I think most people would find a larger size
with an extra DIMM slot, AGP slot, and 1 PCI slot more
practical than the "OMG it's tiny!" factor. But that's
marketing for you. I'm not in the target market.
\_ The extra dimm slot isn't a huge issue for me b/c
my firewalls don't need more than 512 MB ram. The
AGP slot is also not an issue b/c I have a separate
system to play games and the builtin video is enough
for TV output (DVD/AVI). I can see how having an AGP
slot would make it easier to upgrade but this would
also increase the size and perhaps make it harder to
cool w/ a tiny laptop fan. The lack of a PCI slot is
my biggest gripe, but I bought one anyway. |
| 2005/1/11-12 [Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35666 Activity:moderate |
1/11 So the iMac Mini is basically an evolution of the old Cube thing. Or
those little Shuttle PC boxes. Or a Gamecube. But it doesn't seem
to make much sense compared to an iBook. Why no digital audio output?
\_ you can still do digital audio over usb. Probably the reason
there is no spdif connector is b/c of space/price. I think
it makes a lot of sense (I bought one for my living room),
hopefully it works w/ my HD-TV and I can ditch my noisy
xbox and maybe get eyeTv and do HD capture w/ it.
\_ And you can also do digital audio over firewire. The Mac Mini
is also much cheaper than the Cube. I think it's basically the
cube done right.
\_ Yeah, and you could've been doing this for the past two years
now for about $350 by buying a small multimedia PC at Fry's.
Plus you get expansion slots that will fit in a decent
VIVO card and you're not stuck with 40 gigs. Apple, the
company that's great at repackaging things that already
exist for a higher price.
\_ I bought a small multi-media PC from Fry's two yrs ago
to use as a home theater pc. It was a complete flop.
The damn thing was too loud, it ran way too hot to put
\_ Really? What was loud about it, the hard drive?
The EPIA MB that comes with these devices are
fanless otherwise. Perhaps it was the PSU? I have
a microtower PSU and it's pretty noiseless. As for
heat issues, not quite sure about that one. I guess
if you stick in a Radeon XT800 in there it will
fry.
\_ Mine was a P4/Celeron mb. I got the slowest
celeron I could find and I down clocked it
so that it would generate less heat. I also
got the biggest damn zalman hs that fit in
the case. I replaced the 2 40 mm fans w/
3 quiet (17 db) 40 mm fans. The ps fan was
pretty quiet (~ 27 db), but a new quiet ps
in that ff would have cost $150 or more (not
quiet worth it). I had a GeForce 4 Ti 4600
in the box b/c I wanted the video out. Later
I went down to a GeForce 2 which helped a
bit in terms of head b/c it was passively
cooled.
The HD wasn't too noisy b/c I had a cuda4,
the main problems were the fans. I needed
lots of fans.
in my stereo cabinent, windows had the darndest time
doing TV out, Wireless support in windows sucked so
\_ Never had a problem with Windows doing VIVO. Guess
you just suck. I also never had a problem with
wireless in Windows. In fact, AFAIK the Apple
wireless is crap, the Airport sucks, the builtin
WiFi card on the laptops suck, so...
\_ I have had exactly the opposite experience.
WiFi in Win2K never worked for me (I'm using
linksys 802.11G PCI card) and would often
cut out intermittently w/ XP. (I did not
have this problem w/ the same PCI card in
My G4 or my Linux box, I tested them in the
same approx spot as the windows PC.
The problem w/ video output was that the PC
just couldn't display properly on my Wega.
I futz around with all sorts of stuff and
the display was always screwy. My mac's
don't have this problem. I tried the PC
after getting an HD Wega and I still have
the same problem. I just plug the macs in
and they work. I could probably get the
PC to work in XP after futzing around w/
drivers &c., but then again I could probably
also install linux, rebuilt the kernel w/
50 patches and d/l the latest cvs branch
of 8 different programs and get that to
work as well, but these days I don't have
time for that.
I have never had a problem w/ airport. I
have an original abs, a new AEBS and a AE.
All work flawlessly w/ my iBooks, my PB,
my G4 and my mom's thinkpad.
everytime I needed to put movies/music on my HTPC I
had to run a ethernet cable from my switch in my rack
upstairs down to my living room.
Yes I could drop in a 250 GB ATA/100 drive but the
extra storage was useless b/c the HTPC couldn't
integrate w/ my Digital Lifestyle. Even the hacked
xbox which ultimately replaced the HTPC didn't quite
fit w/ everything until I got a AirportExpress and
I could finally talk to the damn think wirelessly.
The problem w/ the xbox is that even though it is
a P3 733 w/o a cpu fan, the case fan is loud and I
can't seem to find a good quiet fan that will keep
the xbox from overheating.
The mini-mac is quiet, wireless and integrates
perfectly. To me this is worth the apple premium
b/c I no longer have time to futz around w/ diy.
\_ I know you can do digital audio over firewire but a usb to
spdif converter or usb to component audio converter is much
cheaper. |
| 2005/1/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35657 Activity:nil |
1/10 Is it generally a good/bad idea to defragment a disk running
under VMware? The disks are represented in files, disk.vmdk
so I presume thath if I defrag it should make them faster.
How about defragging outside? The second question is, is it just
my imagination or it seems like copying *.vmdk file is a lot
slower than copying regular files?
\_ Read the help. Defrag within the guest, then defrag from the
Workstation UI (under the disk properties), and then defrag the
host. Copying .vmdk files shouldn't be any different from copying
other files; they *are* just ordinary files (they just happen to
be larger than most others). |
| 2005/1/8-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35611 Activity:low |
1/8 Does an iomega 250MB zip disk work in an iomega 1GB scsi JAZ drive?
\_ Why would it? The disks are physically different, aren't they?
\_ They appear to be a bit different. Just wanted to confirm. |
| 2005/1/8-10 [Computer/SW/OS/OsX, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35601 Activity:nil |
1/7 Anyone know why my 700MB (80min) CD-ROMs show up as having
only 676megs free when I put them into my apple (OS X), even
when they are brand new? I want to burn a disk image, which is
only 680megs, but it won't let me. Thanks.
\_ Perhaps because 676*2^20 = 708837376?
\_ Ah, fascinating. So this is MeBi vs MB? -not op |
| 2005/1/7 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35586 Activity:nil |
1/7 I just downloaded a disk image that is 676megs, which is 16megs
larger than the capacity of my cd-roms. Is there anything I can do
to mount/copy it onto the cd-rom? |
| 2004/12/30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35492 Activity:nil |
12/29 What's the difference between a CD with a bunch of JPEGs vs. a
Kodak Picture CD? I'm asking because the Mintek 5" portable DVD
player plays the Kodak Pic CD which is really cool, but I'm wondering
if I can stick any CD with JPEGs in it to view. Thanks. |
| 2004/12/30-31 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35490 Activity:kinda low |
12/29 What is Progressive Scan DVD player? Looking for a nice region-free
DVD player with multilingual OSD menu features. Recommendations?
\_ word of advice? by 40 dollar dvd players from Costco,
anything above 100 bucks breaks down too fast and too
expensive to replace..
\_ What is OSD menu features?
\_ On screen display.
\_ Progressive scan means it can output non-interlaced video,
thereby providing better resolution. It doesn't matter if you
don't have an HDTV.
\_ The resolution shouldn't change but the way the image is
displayed will. Regular TV sets display an interlaced image,
which is one reason why computer monitors have always had a
better picture compared to regular tv sets (computer monitors
display non-interlaced video). If you don't have a TV set that
can display non-interlaced video, then the progressive output
will look like garbage. Many TV sets cannot display
non-interlaced video, newer "HD ready" or "Digital" sets
usually can.
\_ The resolution of the video data on the DVD doesn't change,
but the resolution perceived by the viewer will, which is
what I meant. (480 scanlines at one time versus 240 scanlines
separated across 2/~60ths of a second.)
\_ Yes, technically the same resolution but presented in a
less crappy fashion.
\_ I've had good luck with the cyberhome 300S - very cheap ($30 on sale
at radio shack), region free, small profile. Make sure you get one
built after March/April 2004, previous versions had heat issues.
\_ I have a few minor gripes with the CH300S. The remote is hard to
use in the dark (small, uniform buttons). There's a long-ish
pause during a layer change. The JPEG viewer will not show any
more than 255 images in a single directory. On the plus side,
you can enter a secret remote-code to make it region-free.
\_ Unless you are going sub $50 or so, get an upconverting DVD
player.
\_ Philips DVP642. I saw it at Target for $70. You have to unlock
region-free yourself via the remote.
\_ I bought this and then returned it the next day. The remote
feels like a toy, and on my DivX files it was unable to FF or RW
(not to mention in one case the sound wasn't synched). Also, the
max FF/RW speed was 8x.
\_ can you suggest better? that thing looked good to me. -!op
\_ I'm afraid not. I currently have an old Aiwa XD-DV170
which has great OSD menu features, but can't play some
newer disks (the extra disks in The Two Towers:EE don't
play for instance).
\_ I've had a Toshiba 5-disc DVD player from costco, really nice
unit, which turned out to be a region free one. Had I known that,
I would've gotten 2. I don't think they carry it anymore. I also
got a Daewoo DVP480 player from Costco, which I got it because it
is a region free player. But the Toshiba is much better in terms
of build quality and operating noise. Get a cheap DVd player from
costco, it may be region free. Don't get the Sony one, I am sure it
is NOT region free. |
| 2004/12/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35474 Activity:nil |
s12/29 I have random mov, mpeg, avi movies I want to burn to a DVD. Can I
use dvd shrink (never used it) to do this? What is the recommended
way to make it work?
\_ actually I have a similar question. We know the followings:
VCD:~700M for ~60 min, 352x240
DVD:4.7G for ~60 min, 720x480
We know that a DVD contains approx 6-7X the size of a VCD.
Can you actually copy MPG files from 6-7 VCDs and then
burn it on a DVD, which shoulsd last 6-7 hours?
\_ Yes. If you do nothing else, you'll have 6-7 MPG files on
your DVD, which will vary in accessibility depending on your
DVD player.
\_ Usually not. A set-top DVD player would:
1. Need to support MPEG1 video. (Which isn't uncommon, since
most can play VCDs.)
2. Figure out how to find and navigate the various files you've
scattered around on your DVD.
--jameslin
\_ No, DVD Shrink, not surprisingly, is used for shrinking existing
DVDs. It only does transcoding; it's not a general MPEG2 encoder,
nor is it a general DVD authoring tool (which you'd need to make
menus, chapter points, etc.). I've heard good things about Nero
Recode recently. Look around the http://doom9.org forums. --jameslin |
| 2004/12/25-27 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35434 Activity:moderate |
12/25 Is email down?
\_ I am getting an insufficient disk space error when trying to
send mail. -!op
\_ Fixed. - jvarga
\_ Well, wait for the load to get back to normal to actually
start getting mail again. - jvarga
\_ sweet!
df -k /var/spool/mqueue
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0s1f 1016303 974635 -39636 104% /var |
| 2004/12/17-19 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35348 Activity:low |
12/17 Is there a way in WinXP to make it re-scan the USB bus to notice a
hard drive that was already attatched at boot time? Restarting or
replugging the hard drive works, but it's not automatable and is
therefore inelegant.
\_ Open your device manager and click the icon on the toolbar to
rescan devices. WinXP rescans all hardware and finds your
stuff. - jvarga
\_ AFAIK no, there is no way. The only "way" is to disable and then
re-enable the USB interface through device manager, which is the
software equivalent of restarting or replugging in the drive.
If you do this a lot then you might want to do it this way since
the USB port does wear out.
\_ Not to dispute your claim (more out of shock really), but XP
doesn't scan the bus at (or soon after) bootup? That sounds
extremely strange- does anybody know any justification for this
decision?
\_ Normal startup, yes. After a hard crash, no. |
| 2004/12/14-15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35298 Activity:low |
12/14 What's an easy way to create a DVD image out of a whole bunch of
.vob/.bup/.ifo files I ripped straight from another DVD? Been STFW
for hours with no luck. I'm looking for something I can mount
on a virtual DVD drive under windows (like with d-tools) and watch
with something like WinDVD, in lieu of schlepping the actual discs
around.
\_ Use daemon tools on windows to mount your DVD image.
\_ Burn them to an image. Nero has a virtual disc recorder that
should be to create a mountable ISO. |
| 2004/12/14-15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35294 Activity:nil |
12/14 Anyone know what tool I can use to convert real player files
into DVD? I have about 5GB of rm files from an asian television
series. I want to convert it to DVD, fitting as much as possible
on each disk. (each episode can just be a title by itself and
it'll be good enough for me.) Thanks. |
| 2004/12/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35140 Activity:high |
12/1 I think getting 72GB 10K RPM SATA drives at $160 a piece was a bad
idea. You could have gotten much larger 7200RPM drives for that price.
Most people would take larger quotas over slightly better performance.
Besides, a RAID controller with a reasonable amount of write cache
memory should have provided a decent write speed even with relatively
slow drives. Read speed should also be fairly decent with so many
drives and any RAID level. My $0.02
\_ Gee, let's just kvetch about the call after it's been made. Now,
this comment might just possibly have been constructive if you'd
been able to deliver it beforehand, but what purpose does it
serve now? Seems like you're just biting the hand that feeds you
because you didn't get fed exactly what you wanted. As for me,
hey current CSUA admins: thank you for doing anything at all
for me. I realize I'm entitled to nothing, and what you're doing
for me is much better than that. What you have done may, or may
not have been optimum, but the call was yours to make and I don't
think what you did was unreasonable. Please ignore
bozos like o.p., who decided to deliver criticism above the thanks
we all owe you for your efforts on everyone's behalf. --PeterM
\_ Gee, let's just jump all over someone for giving a valid
opinion, why don't you. I agree with OP, paying $160 US is
too much for 72 GB disks. Maybe it is too late to do something
about it, but that still doesn't mean the opinion isn't valid.
I don't know what the time schedule was for getting parts, but
you could've gotten at least twice the capacity for SATAs
in the past two months. Granted, any improvement is better than
no improvement, but the OP wasn't demanding anything, just
offering advice. -williamc
\_ You are making the assumption that we were going for capacity.
What we would have liked were SCSI disks. Those are too damn
expensive. However, the Raptor (which is 74GB) is a 10K RPM
SCSI internals w/ SATA connector disk. This gives us very
good performance, without the huge cost. Yes, we could have
purchased a 200GB disk, probably even for less than the 74GB
ones we invested in, but on a system that has 200+ simultaneous
logins, spindle speed and seek times becomes more important
than raw storage space. In any case, the CSUA is *not* a
data storage facility...if you want lots of storage, buy
yourself a drive and put it in your own damn case.
--njh (one of the SAs putting in much more time running
the CSUA's systems than the motd complainers)
\_ PeterM is right, the horse has left the barn.
The CSUA SA's have been pretty good over the years, and
the uptime at soda beats a lot of commerical systems.
AND SODA IS FREE! Instead
of bagging on the SA's, make a paypal contribution. If everybody
who complained on the motd sent in some money, we'd have a
CSUA jet named soda instead of a PC. They've made reasonable
decisions in the past, and I'm sure they had one for their choice
of disks. -ax
of bagging on the SA's, make a paypal contribution.
If everybody who complained on the motd sent in some
money, we'd have a CSUA jet named soda instead of a PC.
They've made reasonable decisions in the past, and I'm
sure they had one for their choice of disks. -ax
\_ Yes, please contribute to the CSUA! There's a
paypal link on the main page now. I did. --allum
\_ no dropcash progress bar?
\_ I want my lottery-scheduling system! CPU cycles for everyone!
-lazy sl0da h0z3r
\_ I am putting a box together with a bunch of 200GB SATA
drives--any opinions on 5+ disk RAID-5 controllers that are
happy with FreeBSD? Also, should I be looking at CPU power
management? The thing should be as quiet/cool as possible. -John
\_ Think about this for a moment. You're planning to stick five
or more > 72K RPM drives in the box, and you're worried about
the the heat/power that the CPU is going to generate/consume?
The drives are going to suck WAY more power and generate WAY
more heat than the CPU. -dans
\_ Fair enough, I'm looking at an Antec P160. Will low-rpm
drives make any difference? -John
\_ Actually, this is wrong. Hard drives these days only pull
about 10W each. Processors pull on the order of 100s
of Watts. --njh
\_ I think you're an idiot. Want to make specific objections? At
least sign your name.
\_ bigger, faster, more reliable. for a given amount of money,
pick any 1.5
\_ yermom can't afford me |
| 2004/11/30-12/1 [Computer/HW/Memory, Academia/Berkeley/CSUA, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35127 Activity:nil |
11/30 So can we get a hardware summary (purchased and planned) for the new
soda machine(s)? It sounds like there's a dual Xeon getting an OS
somewhere-- what kind of ram, what kind of storage does it have?
How much was it? How much disk does/will it have? Maybe a file in
/csua/tmp would be helpful. Thanks.
\_ Maybe a CSUA wish list would be helpful.
\_ I would like to see this too, but purely out of curiosity.
I think that the CSUA admins are probably doing something
pretty reasonable. --PeterM
\_ Seconded... I'm kinda excited about what we're getting |
| 2004/11/30-12/1 [Consumer/TV, Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/Camera] UID:35125 Activity:nil |
11/30 Anyone one have the show "The Adventures of Pete and Pete" on dvd?
\_ i thought i was the only person who watched that show. are you
12 too?
\- you can watch the french version: http://csua.org/u/a5h
\_ "12 too"? Are you making fun of P&P fans? Its a great show.
\_ Well, I was 12 when it first came on. It's a great show
though, well worth buying on DVD. -op
\_ I too used to love this show... I sent away for a casette tape
of the theme song and some other music once from a cereal box
or something. the band was called Polaris. lemme know if you
want some mp3's. - rory |
| 2004/11/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35112 Activity:moderate 66%like:35109 |
11/29 So what is TDA? Why does it keep bringing soda down?
\_ http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/Td
The TDA is filled with nice, old, slow 8GB disks. The TDA isn't
bringing soda down, soda is bringing soda down. The issue with the
TDA is that the hardware itself is not very reliable. If it turns
off, there is no guarantee that it will spin back up again,
resulting in a catastrophic loss of the motd (well actually, I think
the motd is on an internal disk, but without your home directories
you may have a small issue actually logging in). In short, TDA
sucks and we're getting off of it. - jvarga
\_ ^TDA^Yermom
\_ Has screwdriver experienced issues with TDA?
\_ Screwdriver is running fibre channel disk, not TDA.
\_ Hail the Glorious new revolution!
\_ It's a trinary digital assistant, 50% more powerful than a regular
PDA.
\_ Someone replied before and said it was a terabyte disk array. Is
that true? If so, why do we still have measly 30 MB quotas?
\_ As I replied to that thread, no, it stands for tertiary disk
array. -- njh
\_ Because 8GB disks * 4 disks = 32GB of fun for all ~2500
hozers. Type `df` and look at /home/* to see why you don't
have huge quotas. There *are* quota upgrades coming with
new soda, so donate well! - jvarga
\_ I don't think I've ever seen an official upgrade proposal or
a request for donation. Do you have a pointer to either?
\_ I could have sworn there was an official posting on
this... I'll look around or post again. Soda is gettin
some dual P4 Xeon luvin (I have yet to figure out how to
get them to burn a hole in the machine room wall, but I am
definitely trying). Ooodles of disk space and RAM come
with it too. Depending on how our finances look (ASUCk
money, donations, etc), we are seriously considering
offloading mail handling to another machine (and putting
virus scanning into the mix to kill off some of that
pesky virus-laden mail). We are also looking to give some
of the other servers face lifts (upgrades to somewhat
modern technology like motherboards without ISA slots like
a high-end PIII or something cheap).
Everyone will be getting some quota love... maybe up to
100-150MB (don't quote me on this, it isn't set in stone
yet because we don't know how much disk we can buy or
even what is considered reasonable).
I'd love to give official specs on what we are planning,
but those are changing because of finances. - jvarga
\_ I think everyone else on the motd has asked already,
but why dual Xeons? It's a fine choice, apart from
the fact that it runs warmer, slower, and is more
expensive.
\_ We've all asked and have never been given an answer.
I think they pulled the choice out of their spleen
and have no satisfactory reason.
\_ Uh, because it DOESN'T WORK and CRASHES SODA
\_ Maybe that's because it was never designed to work with vinum.
\_ Are you talking straight out of your ass, or is it taking
a detour through your spleen?
\_ wc /etc/passwd
2906 6617 203836 /etc/passwd
\_ we should each get at some where around 300MB.
\_ Sure, if you can make 4 8GB disks add up to 1TB.
\_ So what's causing the instability? RAID driver? Hardware?
\_ ilyas
\_ I may destabilize soda for generations to come. -- ilyas
\_ Nah, you'll go back on your medication eventually
\_ What's with all the hatin' on ilyas? Isn't tom still
around and a good target for kicking?
\_ Soda has just been crashing itself lately...no real idea why.
The resent *planned* shutdowns were to put bigger disk online.
\_ I believe that at a politburo meeting the politburo was
told exactly why it was crashing, from people who went thru
the crash dumps. Basically, the OS is too old/broken.
\_ Well, yes, the OS is old and crufty, but that doesn't
explain why soda has been crashing. And yes, I have
been going through the crash dumps --njh
\_ We should just replace the whole thing with a cheapo terrabyte
IDE raid on a P4 3 gig or AMD equivalent. I built one for about
$2500. We could each donate like $100 or more and get it done.
-williamc
\_ Set up the paypal account, and I'll cough up a twenty.
\_ There has been a paypal link on the csua web page for at
least a month now.
\_ But what if williamc collects all the money and then escapes
into South America?
\_ I'd like to know what the Politburo plans to do before I
cough up the dough.
\_ See above
\_ TDA...Totally Dumb Acronym. |
| 2004/11/29 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35109 Activity:high 66%like:35112 |
11/29 So what is TDA? Why does it keep bring soda down?
\_ http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/Td
The TDA is filled with nice, old, slow 8GB disks. The TDA isn't
bringing soda down, soda is bringing soda down. The issue with the
TDA is that the hardware itself is not very reliable. If it turns
off, there is no guarantee that it will spin back up again,
resulting in a catastrophic loss of the motd (well actually, I think
the motd is on an internal disk, but without your home directories
you may have a small issue actually logging in). In short, TDA
sucks and we're getting off of it. - jvarga
\_ ^TDA^Yermom
\_ It's a trinary digital assistant, 50% more powerful than a regular
PDA.
\_ Someone replied before and said it was a terabyte disk array. Is
that true? If so, why do we still have measly 30 MB quotas?
\_ Because 8GB disks * 4 disks = 32GB of fun for all ~2500
hozers. Type `df` and look at /home/* to see why you don't
have huge quotas. There *are* quota upgrades coming with
new soda, so donate well! - jvarga
\_ Uh, because it DOESN'T WORK and CRASHES SODA
\_ wc /etc/passwd
2906 6617 203836 /etc/passwd
\_ we should each get at some where around 300MB.
\_ So what's causing the instability? RAID driver? Hardware?
\_ ilyas
\_ I may destabilize soda for generations to come. -- ilyas
\_ We should just replace the whole thing with a cheapo terrabyte
IDE raid on a P4 3 gig or AMD equivalent. I built one for about
$2500. We could each donate like $100 or more and get it done.
-williamc |
| 2004/11/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35000 Activity:nil |
11/21 I have a CD that I can play just fine from my CD player. But when
I put it into my CD drive in my computer, the computer thinks it's
a blank CD. How can this be? And more importantly, how can I rip
MP3s from this CD if my computer won't recognize it?
\_ Quick! Sell this CD to the RIAA for a million dollars!
\_ It's copy protected--probably something like AEC. Alcohol 120%
makes pretty short shrift of this sort of crap. -John |
| 2004/11/12 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/SW/OS/Windows] UID:34853 Activity:moderate |
11/12 Dual boot question: I had a hard drive set up with dual boot.
XP and Linux. I had problems with the Windows partition.
I got a new hard drive. I connected the new hard drive and set it
as the slave drive. I went into setup and set it to boot from the
slave drive (the new one). I then reinstalled XP on the new drive.
Oops. My boot loader on the original drive got overwritten. The
Linux partition is still there, but I can't boot to Linux. I need
to resetup my dual boot. I would like to have 2 options when I
turn on my computer. One option would boot to my Linux partition
on my original hard disk (now set as the master). The other option
would be to boot to XP on the new hard disk (now set as the slave).
I think I want to go into setup and have it boot from the master,
and then use my Red Hat CD to resetup the boot loader. But I'm
not really sure what I'm doing and I don't want to screw things up.
I don't want to reinstall Linux. I simply want to fix the boot
loader. Please help!
\_ You are already on the right track. You can boot either from
the first install CD or you can use the .iso image for the emergency
cd. It will guide you through mounting your existing RedHat
partition. You can then use either grub or lilo to reinstall the
bootblock on the master CD... but you will need to make changes
to either your lilo.conf or grub.conf to tell it to book
XP from the other drive now instead. Once you finish that, you can
go back into the bios and tell it to boot from the primary hd again.
\_ You should have installed XP first, then Linux. Windows loves
to scribble over the boot partition of every disk it can find.
Having said that, if you want to avoid having to reinstall
Linux, you will need to boot from a linux boot floppy. At
least, that was the only thing I could figure out to do
when I was in your boat. Maybe one of these 3l33+3 linux
hackers has a better way.
\_ Well, I don't need to install Linux. I only need to setup
the boot loader. Are you sure this is the same situation
you were in? Windows is installed on one drive. Linux on
another. And I just want to modify the boot loader, not
install anything.
\_ When you installed Windows XP it overwrote the MBR on your
Linux drive, so no you don't really have Linux installed
right now. You have a partial linux installation, that you
need to repair. I don't know how to do that.
\_ This is far too much spew for a simple question. Why do we need
to see useless details about your disks and blah blah? Anyway
just boot using the floppy and run the lilo tool or whatever.
\_ The problem I've always had with dual-booting is that if one
disk goes bad, it can be a real pain to get the other up in
isolation. If you're using the Grub bootloader, I know you can
install windows to drive 0, take it out, then put your linux
drive in as 0 and install Linux. Then put the windows drive
back in as drive 1. You can then boot to Linux and set up grub
such that when you boot to your windows drive, your windows
drive is tricked into believeing it is drive 0. This setup is
a bit of work initially, but I've found it to be very robust.
If you're interested, I can tell you how to set up grub.
-jrleek (!Linux guru) |
| 2004/11/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34823 Activity:nil 71%like:34789 |
11/8 I am looking for an free external RAID box.
Am willing to build it myself, though I have not done that.
ESDI seems the way to go. Any pointers?
\_ apple xserve
\_ He said inexpensive.
\_ How many drives do you need? Do you need hardware RAID (yes for
anything semi-intensive). If this is just for personal use I'd say
get a cheapo x86 Linux box and don't bother with SATA, as it's not
much faster than a good IDE drive right now, and it's much easier to
find a motherboard that supports 4-8 IDE srives than 4 SATA drives.
If this is for business use, disregard this advice.
\_ You aren't giving us nearly enough info. How much storage space do
you need, for what purpose, what is your budget and what is your
skill level?
\_ Oh, and also, how will it be connected to the other computer(s)?
Will it be simple FireWire or USB2, or do you want a little SAN
and in that case do you need NFS, CIFS, or what? -!pp |
| 2004/11/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34789 Activity:low 71%like:34823 |
11/8 I am looking for an inexpensive external RAID box.
Am willing to build it myself, though I have not done that.
SATA seems the way to go. Any pointers?
\_ apple xserve
\_ He said inexpensive.
\_ How many drives do you need? Do you need hardware RAID (yes for
anything semi-intensive). If this is just for personal use I'd say
get a cheapo x86 Linux box and don't bother with SATA, as it's not
much faster than a good IDE drive right now, and it's much easier to
find a motherboard that supports 4-8 IDE srives than 4 SATA drives.
If this is for business use, disregard this advice.
\_ You aren't giving us nearly enough info. How much storage space do
you need, for what purpose, what is your budget and what is your
skill level? |
| 2004/11/9-11 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34788 Activity:nil |
11/9 I tried using FBSD 4.9 to format a 120GB drive as FAT32. The format
succeeded, but I can't mount the drive-- the error message mentions
the next free block exceeding the max. Win2k refuses to create FAT
partitions > 32GB because Win98 machines have 16 bit utilities that
might barf in that situation.
The point of the exercise is to have a single large partition that
can be accessed from multiple systems (via USB enclosure), and I'd
rather not split up the disk into separate partitions b/c I want to
use iTunes to manage my music collection, and I'm not sure it can
handle 2 or more root folders like this.
So, any advice as to what to try next?
\_ Sub-mounts.
\_ Will that work on Win2k too? Eventually I'd like to get a
Mac, where that's probably possible, but for now it's just
a Win2k laptop running iTunes. If I split up the 120GB disk
into 4 30GB FAT32 partitions, can I mount those on top of
each other w/o assigning a Windows drive letter?
\_ I don't think you can do it natively. However, the
commercial PGP version lets you mount a PGP disk in a
directory, so it might be possible. Why don't you want
separate drive letters if you have multiple partitions? -John
\_ Partition Magic boot disk? |
| 2004/11/7-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34740 Activity:nil |
11/7 Does anyone know if the I/O Magic 4.0GB GigaBank drive use the IBM /
Hitachi MicroDrives inside? Is it possible to take these apart and
put it into a PCMCIA adapter? |
| 2004/11/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34545 Activity:nil |
11/2 Anyone have netflix or walmart DVD rental? What's the max you can
get for each month? Specifically, what's the turn-around time if
you get 3 DVDs each time and you drop it off in the mail the next
morning? I am in the bay area. Thanks. |
| 2004/10/29 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34434 Activity:nil |
10/29 Any speculation on Sony's PSP as a media player? I could see Sony
reissuing a bunch of their movies on UMD, but I can't imagine there
will be a way to convert your DVDs or other video sources to a format
the PSP can use because of Sony's fixation on piracy.
\_ There's no reason it can't make a fine DVD player, especially
chipped. To be honest, I'd rather consider a Mini-ITX box
booting from a CF card, than a game console that I happen to be
able to play some movies/CDs on. -John
\_ PSP = Play Station Portable, a handheld which uses a cartridged
disk called UMD, not a DVD (different sizes). |
| 2004/10/26-27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34345 Activity:kinda low |
10/26 Any experiences with Zalman TNN500A cases? Are they worth the
huge gobs of cash they cost? -John
\_ Holy crap, that's over $1000 for a case...
\_ Have you tried the Antec Sonata case ($100) with Zalman CPU fan
and Zalman silent video card cooler? It runs pretty quiet.
\_ No, but thanks much for the tip. I have given up on finding
an external firewire-attached SATA RAID 5 array; the idea for
the Zalman was to have a server with about 6 big disks in it.
It's nice & solid too, but that Antec case looks nice. -John
\_ Arena |
| 2004/10/24-25 [Recreation/Dating, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34315 Activity:very high |
10/24 Can somebody tell me what this is:
http://www.airetight.com/images/Via%20Resti%20Vid%20Web%20st.mov
\_ In a word...boring. I haven't felt this ripped off from a motd
link since the last time John posted one of those ass links.
\- it seems to me this was an inquiry and not an attempt to
entertain.
\_ I don't remember posting an ass link, but if I did, you can
be assured that it would be a discriminating, fascinating and
interesting ass link. -John
\_ Judge for yourself, dude.
http://csua.com/?entry=32231
\_ Oh yeah, _that_, well, that was, er, an artistic
statement (or me getting impatient with the HEIL GERMAN
JOHN guy, I forget.) Anyway, it's the context that
counts. I thought the contrast of the dirndl/girlfriend
thing with an ass link was nicely representative of the
duality of man. -John
\_ Good recovery.
\_ It's a skill I've honed relentlessly ever since
that raid on Macho Grande. -John
\-Hello, if you mean thepiece of music, it is the "Via resti servita,
Madama, brillante" duet from the middle of ActI of Le Nozze di
Figaro. The woman in red sings Susanna [to marry Figaro] and the
other one plays Marcellina [who is an old bat in the opera] ... the
scene is sort of a funny bitch vs bitch encounter. If you are asking
about the the performance, I dont know who/where it is but it looks
like some kind of lesbo-Sex in the City hybrid performace art
version. ok tnx.
\_ psb, is that you. Only psb uses \-
\_ But he puts a space after it.
\-well, not always. --psb
\_ psb also signs off with the "ok tnx"
\_ he's also the only one who says "Hello, ..."
\_ If I buy the full DVD, do they get nekkid and start making out?
\- that is what happens in the original 2 act version of NdF
but was changed in the modern 4act version. --psb
\_ You need to buy the director's cut platinum commemorative
DVD. It's got a killer WAM lookalike commenting on the
hot lesbo action. -John |
| 2004/10/19-21 [Consumer/Camera, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34238 Activity:kinda low |
10/19 Have you ever purchased a photo cd when developing your pictures?
What format, resolution, and size are the images?
\_ A related question. What's the difference between Photo CD and
Picture CD? Thx.
\_ PhotoCD is the professional one, very expensive, maybe around $35
per roll. They give you various resolutions for each picture, I've
heard the max is around 3000x1500 or something.
PictureCD is what you see when you go to Costco, Walmart, etc. It
is relatively cheap, developing plus CD is around $8-10. The
resolution is something like 1536x1024. The good thing is it looks
identical to your print, which is hard to get if you scan the
negative directly, the bad thing is the resolution sucks, even
compare to cheap digital cameras. If you shoot film, it's a nice
and fast way to get a 'catalog' of pictures to your computer. If
cost is not too big of an issue, I'd recommend you try it.
I do not recommend PhotoCD. If you want to go that route, maybe you
should've picked up the Digital Rebel for $500 from OneCall when
they have one of those deals.
\_ I wished Kodak had provided a higher resolution PictureCD service,
because to them the cost os nothing, the developing of film is in
the digital domain anyway now a days. If I can get 3000x1500
PictureCDs from my 35mm film for $10, then I might not have
jumped on the digital SLR bandwagen so fast. They only have
themselves to blame for the inevitible.
\_ You are forgetting the cost to create the CD...it takes
machine time. At least in the early days, this wasn't
cheap.
\_ How much could a machine with a 1x CD-writer cost in the
'olden-days'? $10K? Depreciate that over the use it would
get in 2-3 years. If they burn only 4 discs per day in
250 business days, that still comes to about $3/disc for
usage of the machine, and for later machines, well we all
know what hapened to CD-R prices and speeds. |
| 2004/10/8-9 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33992 Activity:nil |
10/8 If I am creating a swap/temp partition on a disk, is it better if the
partition is in the beginning? end? does it matter? Assuming beginning
is the center of the disk, it would imply it being faster, right?
\_ I don't know where the 'beginning' is, but in benchmarks, the
beginning is always faster.
I seem to remember some weird problem once where the boot loader
could not load kernels after like the 1024th sector or something.
\_ I want to create a 10GB temp partition and mount it under C:
for use as a temp directory...
\_ there is somethint seriously fallacious about attempting to optimize
performance while swapping. Eliminating swapping altogether should
be the priority.
\_ agreed. You're (op) really barking up the wrong tree, even for
a temp directory.
\_ I want to redirect everything temporary to this partition,
such as %temp, ie cache, etc. This is so that the main OS
partition does not get fragmented over time and becomes slower
and slower. It is generally easier to reformat the temp partition
and file writing on the temp partition is a lot faster than
on a fragmented main partition. We are talking about different
things. -op
\_ this is why one usually puts the 'temp' partition on a memory
based file system. Again in this case performance is
optimized by keeping this OFF THE DISK, making disk
performance needs mostly irrelevant.
\- partitioning makes sense. worring about underlying
physical layout is silly. nuff said. if you want to
waste your time, feel free. |
| 2004/10/4-6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33916 Activity:low |
10/4 Good place to buy decent DVD+R cheap?
\_ Fry's, 30-40c a disk.
\_ Those are usually cheap brands. I want slightly better
brands such as Verbatim, TDK, etc...
\_ Again, Fry's, 60-1.20, depending on rebate offer.
\_ http://meritline.com, try BeAll disc's. great quality, great price.
\_ http://www.rima.com awesome!! |
| 2004/9/30-10/1 [Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/TV] UID:33854 Activity:nil |
9/30 Besides DVDFab, are there any nice freeware program like
DVDShrink that will backup a DVD onto 2 DVD-R? |
| 2004/9/23 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33715 Activity:very high |
9/23 I need to make an image of a disk a disk on a different machine
in Linux. That is, Make an image of A's disk, on B, and then
later be able to just copy the image back on to A.
ADDENDUM: It would be nice to be able to compress the image on the
way out. Tar and gzip or bzip2 I suppose.
\_ Is this a question or an observation? I need a big-breasted
blonde to cook and clean for me.
\_ I'd rather have a big-breasted blonde to have sex with me.
\_ have u tried something like 'dd if=/dev/diska | ssh machineb
"dd of=/dev/diskb"'
\_ I think you're looking for something like Norton Ghost. Check
out g4u (Ghost for Unix), probably hosted on sourceforge. |
| 2004/9/21 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33671 Activity:very high |
9/21 Here's another question: Is it possible to lock a CD or DVD drive
so that the disk cannot be removed by a member of the thieving
public, but it can still be opened by someone authorized?
\_ I think you want to put the drive on a server somewhere and mount
it as a directory. Or just get a big harddrive...
\_ Disk: No. PC case: sometimes. You'll notice that a lot of
cases have locks on the back, or loops for padlocks. These will
not dissuade anyone seriously motivated, though. For laptops,
Kensington locks. -John
\_ Kensington locks,hehehe. |
| 2004/9/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives, Recreation/Media] UID:33669 Activity:high |
9/21 Must kill Lucas. Waited at 1201AM at Tower to buy it. Knowing the
bastardizations. It is worst than I thought. There are new BG lines,
changes in the style of FX, bloopers still left in!
\_ of course, ALL these changes have been documented for weeks. Just
had to go to any website (theforce.net), and you'd know.
\_ Are you kidding? You waited at tower till 12:01 to pay too
much for some DVDs you knew would suck? Wha?
\_ LASERDICS RIPS! LASERDISC RIPS ARE THE STANDARD STAR WARS DVD!!
\_ Ha, ha, laserDICS. Anyway I got one of these and was all
excited. Then I watched a couple scenes on my PC to check it
out and realized how childish it is and how I seem to have
outgrown it. Maybe the prequels and all the analysis and hype
killed the magic for me. When Vader speaks I have an image of
fat James Earl Jones in my mind.
\_ Er, maybe its just that after the 20 MILLIONTH TIME, it
isn't all that exciting anymore. People need to stop giving
Lucas money.
\_ This totally reminds me of the Conan O'Brian where Triumph visits
the line for the episode I premiere.
Here's the video in question:
http://csua.org/u/95d
\_ this is 95% true for me -op
\_ Has there been a change in the end of ROTJ, where the apparitions
appear? Natalie Portman isn't in there, is she?
\_ Anakin's ghost is now Hayden.
\_ Get a life - William Shatner
\_ Learn how to act - Fans
\_ Stop appearing in ads for the Ramada.
\_ Priceline. |
| 2004/9/21 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33668 Activity:high |
9/21 Has anyone tried DVDs from http://www.asiandvd.com or similar sites? I was wondering since VCD is the prevailing format in Asia, do these Asian DVDs actually hav DVD-quality video or do they only have VCD-quality video converted to DVD format? Thanks. \_ It varies, a lot. Some of them are shitty pirated VHS/VCD transfers, some of them are full DVD quality with extras. It varies by \_ It varies, a lot. Some of them are shitty pirated VHS/VCD transfers,\ some of them are full DVD quality with extras. It varies by publisher and even by movie within a particular company. Read review sites if you are looking for a particular one. --oj \_ where to get Churasan DVD's with english subtitles? |
| 2004/9/18-20 [Computer/HW/Drives, Recreation/Media] UID:33614 Activity:high 54%like:33810 |
9/17 Anyone have plans to buy the Star Wars DVDs?
\_ What's the point? Hasn't everyone already seen the trilogy
ad naseum for the past 25 years already? Is it really worth
your time and money to see an addition 10 seconds of modified
footage? Isn't it time to shelve the action figures and get a
life?
\_ Hell no. Meesa fucking hate star wars.
\_ only if the Force permits me.
\_ obThese aren't the DVD's you're looking for...
\_ Already got this:
http://csua.org/u/8xa (Unadulterated SW on DVD)
\_ Can you post md5 or sha1 hashes for all the files? Some of
the sections of the VOBs I downloaded from BitTorrent seem
to giving me problems.
\_ Tell me how to do this, and I will.
\_ If you're using Windows, then you can get md5sum from
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net. Then you run md5sum -b *.*
It'll take awhile though... |
| 2004/9/17-19 [Consumer/TV, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33609 Activity:nil |
9/17 Special Edition Bourne Supremacy DVD:
http://www.dvdplaza.fi/forums/showpost.php?p=380237 |
| 2004/9/17-18 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33587 Activity:low |
9/17 How difficult is it to host a virtualized FreeBSD server? Not
commercially, just want to let a friend go nuts with it. Something
like what's described at http://www.johncompanies.com/jc_bsd.html
but I don't care so much about uptime and reliability. Is this guy
just using a jail, or is it more vmWare-like solution?
\_ Jail. Very straight-forward. I love the part about their special
technology. You just need a unique IP/server. -John |
| 2004/9/16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33558 Activity:high |
9/15 One of my DVD's is scratched up and I can't copy the VOB file to
my PC. What are some recovery programs I can use? Thanks.
\_ Some brands of DVD drive (eg. Plextor, Pioneer) are better than
others at recovering errors.
\_ Did you try reading using your DVD burner yet?
Also, I had a similar problem. I think I fooled around with yermom.
I mean, the read options in DVD Decrypter.
\_ DVD-backup related question: I've got a VOB file but I don't
know what the DVD's original name was (i.e., DVD_THE_MOVIE).
Is there a generic name I can assign the DVD when I burn it?
Arbitrary names don't work.
\_ I usually see DVD_VIDEO as the generic volume label. |
| 2004/9/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33316 Activity:nil |
9/2 For the hostage crisis, here's one plan: Have a confidental meeting
with the family members of the hostages, explaining to them that we
(well, the Russian govt) know that the hostage-takes are going to blow
up everyone no matter what we do, hence we're going to raid the school
beause that's more likely to save more. Then keep the family members
away from the media and start the raid as quickly as possible after
the meeting. After it's over, family of the hostages alive would be
grateful, and those of the dead ones will hopefully understand that
the raid isn't a mistake.
\_ you are brilliant. call the kremlin with this remarkable plan.
\_ Nanobot assassins are the answer.
\_ And YOU soldier will get to be the first one in! GO, GO, GO!
\_ I wonder if Russia is going to take Isreal's stance on guns in
schools? |
| 2004/9/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33309 Activity:nil |
9/2 If i buy a MotherBoard with 2 SATA ports, does that mean I can only
have 2 SATA devices attached or is there some chaining possible?
\_ Only 2 SATA drives, although your MB probably has 2 ATA connectors
too for optical drives and the like. |
| 2004/9/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33272 Activity:high |
9/1 Securely destroy your CD/DVDs:
http://www.primera.com/ds360_disc_shredder.html
\_ Don't CDs often have stuff you aren't supposed to breathe in
them?
\_ nuke it in the microwave.
\_ Do people really need this? If I just break a CD in half, can
someone else still repair it for reading? I thought one scratch is
enough to render a CD unreadable, let alone a crack repaired with
glue.
\_ CDs have a lot of error-correcting bits. If the crack does not
damage too much data on any given track it might be recoverable.
If you want to experiment, take a CD you don't care about and
make one long scratch radially. There's a good chance of still
reading the data.
\_ It depends what you mean by "unreadable". A CD broken in two
will not be readable by sticking it into your CD drive, but if
it contains interesting data, someone could optically scan
the surface and reconstruct it. -tom
\_ If you can very cleanly epoxy the 2 halves together, it might
read in a normal drive.
\_ This conversation reminds me of a story my mom told me.
While she was working at the high school library, some
kid came up to her and complained that the CD drive on a
particular computer wasn't working. She went over, and
found an AOL disk in the drive that had been run over by
a car and broken into five or six pieces. The kid had
taped it all back together with scotch tape, and just
couldn't understand why his CD wouldn't work. Maybe
someone should've explained error correcting bits to
him... |
| 2004/8/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33113 Activity:high |
8/24 I've been thinking about getting a 2 GB Microdrive for my
digital camera (Digital Rebel) so that I can start shooting
pictures in RAW format. Has anyone used a microdrive for
this purpose? If so, how well has it worked for you? tia.
\_ microdrives are slow, and very unreliable compared with flash
media. you'll do better with multiple, smaller flash cards. -tom
\_ "seconded"
\_ You can buy flash-based drives up to 4 gigs.
\_ microdrives used to be cheaper and bigger than flash drives,
which made it popular, but those two are no longer issues.
and microdrives are very prone to failure at high altitude/low
pressure.
\- While I agree flash media is probably more reliable in
theory, I dont think microdrives are especially unreliable.
I have used them above 13,000ft without problem. So if you
have them, I wouldnt worry about using them. If you are
buying something new, without looking at price "sweet spots"
I'd probably buy 512meg flash cards to avoid putting all
your eggs in one basket. These are light, quick to swap
so I dont see the point of consolidating. I suppose if
you are alays shooting at +50megs per image that is another
matter, but I think that is a mistake for reasons I wont
go into. I'll be curious if you are still shooting RAW
in 6mos. --psb
\_ I still shoot only in RAW mode, and have been using it
for several months. Try doing a side by side comparison
of tone or curve adjustments in 16bit and 8bit images.
I can fit over 60 images on my 512MB card, using RAW mode
on my Canon D60. -meyers
\_ I've got a 256mb card right now, and it just isn't
big enough to shoot more than a few pictures in RAW.
I thought that by getting a 2 GB Microdrive I could
at least shoot some pictures in RAW ever now and then.
I still intend to shoot the majority of my pictures
as fine jpg.
\-yes that is fine. i am betting in 6mos you will not
be shooting the maj in raw. let me know if i
am right. --psb
\_ I think he is saying that now. |
| 2004/8/20-21 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33037 Activity:kinda low |
8/20 Does anyone use an iRiver hard-drive based MP3 player? Suck or rock?
\_ if you don't get any responses, go to http://newegg.com, http://epinions.com,
http://amazon.com, http://cnet.com, in that order. there are a lot of iRiver
models.
\_ Just read through iriver's forum(off the international website.)
They may have a lot of features, but it's quite unpolished.
\_ Yes. I like my iHP-120. --jameslin |
| 2004/8/19 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/HW/Memory] UID:33005 Activity:moderate 77%like:33018 |
8/18 Anyone have any experience getting a bootable .iso onto a USB
memory key (yes, it is bootable and has enough space). -John
\_ I just did this recently. I haven't found a way to get a .iso
directly on, but here's what I did:
1) Format the USB storage
2) use mkbt to get the boot sector from the .iso and then put it on
the USB storage. (Get mkbt at: http://www.nu2.nu/mkbt
3) copy files from .iso to memory key
I used daemon-tools to mount the .iso to rip the boot sector.
Oh, and if you want to use Ghost's boot disk creator, you can use a
virtual floppy drive so you don't have to use a physical floppy:
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html
\_ There's not even a readme for this. What exactly does it do?
\_ Readme for which? vfd is a virtual floppy. Install it and
you've got a virtual floppy drive. mkbt extracts boot sectors
and writes them.
\_ Oh, and this is where I got most of my help on this:
http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick.php
\_ Many thanks, swami. *bows* -John |
| 2004/8/15-16 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32905 Activity:nil |
8/14 Inside Al-Qaeda's HD:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200409/cullison |
| 2004/8/14-15 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32903 Activity:very high |
8/14 I'm looking for (a description of) the rules for 5-6 player expansion
for settlers of catan. brief desc. to URLs to the real mccoy,
appreciated.
\_ http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2807 might be a good place to start
\_ bigger board (can check the dimensions for you if you like), and
build phase after each person's turn. Not much else, IIRC...
build phase after each person's turn. Not much else, IIRC... (!op)
\- see this is one of those cases if you posted non-anonymously
and either i liked you, you you were a generally useful
and either i didnt hate you, or you were a generally useful
member of the sloda community, i'd have just offered to
FAX them to you. your loss. --psb
\_ YOU ARE SO FUNNY!!! |
| 2004/8/13-15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32880 Activity:low |
8/13 I have a question. CDs that are burned using say 52x, when the
data is read back, does the drive have to spin it up to 52x?
ie, are there any differences between CDs that are burned using
8x vs 52x? Are the data interleaved differently? What about
DVD?
\_ DVD players play at the same rate it needs to play any dvd
\_ It's all written the same way. The only concern is if you have low
quality discs they might not write correctly at 52x, but you'd
notice that right away.
\_ Think about your question. The "x" in "52x" is the PLAY SPEED. |
| 2004/8/10-11 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32812 Activity:moderate |
8/10 What command line tool exist for windows to create an iso image
from a directory structure? or from a set of files specified
on the cmd line or a input file? thanks.
\_ mkisofs. oh wait, you said "command line tool ... windows"
\_ Uhm, cdr-tools (where mkisofs comes from) has been
ported to Windows for quite some time now. Just google
it (some german guys wrote this). Oh wait, you're a moron...
\_ I am a moron who doesn't use Windows.
\_ despite your deleting this there is still mkisofs for windows:
http://www.dimensional.com/~sitaram/CD-R-for-CLUEd-in-Windows-users.html
http://tinyurl.com/4vm69
\_ Try daemontools but I haven't tried it in a looong time.
\_ Daemon Tools mounts ISo images, not creates them, yes?
\_ Daemon Tools mounts ISO images, not creates them, yes?
\_ I really don't remember. Like I said its been a long time.
Maybe their site will point you to writing tools if they
don't have them. |
| 2004/8/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32797 Activity:moderate Edit_by:auto |
8/9 How do you rip DVDs using Windowz XP? Why delete this????
\_ dvd decrypter (rip) -> dvdshrink (shrink to 4.7GB) -> Nero (burn)
\_ What's the program to copy a DVD movie as is to 2 DVDs?
I forgot the name. It allows you to split and can provide
different graphics for insert 2nd disc...
\_ dvdshrink lets you do that too. anyways, the feature is
prevalent in much software.
\_ OMGWTFFOB!!!~~@@1111!!
\_ http://www.filemirrors.com/search.src?file=dvdshrink32setup.zip
Reduces 7.4gig CD, then makes an image |
| 2004/8/6-8 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32751 Activity:moderate |
8/6 Are there any windows program that would split files/directories
by certain size? Let's say I have a few directories containing
5gb of data. Any programs that would group them into 700mb
chunks (pick files until they get to 700mb, then begin next
chunk) so that I can burn them onto CD? DVD is not an option,
I want to know if there are ways to break them into chunks...
something that may works with nero perhaps. thanks.
\_ burntothebrim? http://bttb.sourceforge.net
\_ this application failed to start because wnaspi32.dll was not
found.....? wth? this is windows xp...
\_ Do you have ASPI drivers for your CD drives?
\_ This is my work computer, maybe that's why. will try
again at home. thanks.
\_ http://bttb.sourceforge.net/Help/bttb_faq.html
\_ Try http://downloads.com in the CD management section. Programs like this
were written a long time ago for floppies. I've seen the same thing
for CDs.
\_ Here's a DOS app I wrote several years ago: ~yuen/temp/bsplit.zip.
You can unzip and run the .com or the .exe, or you can compile the
.c yourself if you worry about viruses. --- yuen
\_ install cygwin, then use tar and split
\_ this is too much trouble. I need my cd to be able to use as is
with the minimum amount of software needed. No one that I'll
be giving the CD to understands what a tar file is. ;)
In case you are wondering, I need to burn those jpg files on to
CDs and give to relatives.
\_ WinZip can open tar files, they don't need to understand
anything.
\_ zip supports multivolume archives. you can just create a big
archive where each piece is about 700 MB. winzip should be able to
extract them. |
| 2004/8/5-6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32724 Activity:high |
8/5 I have a VCD which is in PAL format. How can I convert it
to NTSC, either in DVD or VHS, so I can play it in players
here in the US? Do commercial video converter places know
how to deal with VCD?
\_ I have a link to a good site with all sorts of converters
and media tools at home. Mail me and I'll dig it out. -John
\_ on linux, mencoder/mplayer is very nice and supports all kinds
of resampling/transcoding options. i've never tried to change
video framerate or interlacing, but i think it allows any
playback filter to be used during translation.
\_ i am looking for similiar beast: convert real video to
mpeg-1 format. Is there anything non-commercial exists for
linux/unix platform?
\_ Are there such things as PAL VCD and NTSC VCD? I thought PAL and
NTSC are TV formats, and all VCDs are of the same format that can
be played on a PC. I thought there are only such things as PAL VCD
player which outputs PAL signals to the TV when playing a VCD, and
NTSC VCD which outpus NTSC singals when playing the same VCD. No?
\_ No, totally wrong. NTSC VCDs are 29.97 fps (or 23.976 fps) and
352x240, whereas PAL VCDs are 25 fps and 352x288. Anyhow,
to the OP, if you're using Windows, you can use AviSynth +
VirtualDub to do the conversion. I probably can you walk you
through this if you want. Email me if interested. --jameslin
\_ No, you're wrong. There is no such thing as a PAL/NTSC
VCD or DVD. The data is in digital format. The terms have
no real meaning but merely denote the resolution and the
fps. FPS and resolution have no real bearing on NTSC or PAL
format. A so-called PAL DVD can technically be played on
an NTSC device and vice versa. The device outputs NTSC or
PAL. NTSC and PAL are analog formats, not digital.
Relevant link:
http://www.michaeldvd.com.au/Articles/PALvsNTSC/PALvsNTSC.asp
-williamc
\_ You're arguing technicalities in semantics. Does it
matter? You still can't play a "PAL" disc in an NTSC
player, because most NTSC players won't do any conversion
for you. The grandparent post said that "all VCDs
are of the same format", but that's not true; there are
different frame sizes and frame rates, and they are real
issues. --jameslin
\_ I see! So is NTSC TV 29.97 fps or 23.976 fps? Or does an
NTSC TV switch fps according to the broadcast signal?
\_ NTSC is 29.97 frames per second (well, 59.94 fields per
second). A DVD or VCD that is 23.976 frames/second
(i.e., from a film source) gets telecined to 29.97 fps
by the DVD/VCD player by duplicating two fields of
every 10 (29.97 * 8/10 = 23.976). --jameslin
\_ Say NO to PAL! Support Freedom Videos! |
| 2004/8/4 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32687 Activity:nil |
8/4 Ha, I guess vinyl lasts longer than CDs after all:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3940669.stm
\_ CD's were an obvious fucking rippoff from day one. here's
the real challenge: name *any* data storage medium of any kind
that sucks more than CD for longevity.
\_ floppy disks
\_ floppy disks don't leak as much, so they're arguably better
for keeping your data securely stored.
\_ if you don't mind losing the argument.
\_ cd's aren't ruined by magnets.
\_ I'll bet that stone tablets last even longer.
\_ Can we have a digital medium that is widely and easily accessible
and has long life? Yesterday MO thread shows that you can protect
your data against a glancing nuclear attack but unable to read it
because of a lack of a driver, or transfer all your archive from
CD -> DVD -> blue ray every few years as technology advances? |
| 2004/8/3-4 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32667 Activity:high |
8/3 Does anyone have tried using MO drives (like Fujitsu) for backup/
archive? Is it worthwhile?
\_ Do they hold a lot more data than DVDs? Otherwise, what's
the point?
\_ No, infact MO holds much less than DVDs. They might
have 4gb ones now, but nothing close to the 8gb and
its not like you can afford the 4gb disks in any
large quantity (as compared to DVDs, which are about
$1 for 4x rated media).
\_ What's an MO drive?
\_ Magneto-optical; the first removable-disk technology (predates
Zip). I don't think they're large enough to be worth using for
backup. 2.3 GB? Way too expensive for that kind of capacity.
-tom
\_ I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
\_ Yes MO is expensive, but they "supposedly" have good
archival characteristics. I am wondering if it is a
good way to archive important data like thesis, paper,
photograph etc, or things that you want to be able to retrieve
a few years from now and are not that huge. -- op
\_ Do you know a drive that can read one of the original
44MB cartridges? That was less than 10 years ago. -tom
\_ I am not aware of 44MB, but supposedly the 3.5 ones
should be able to read back upto 128MB, because it is
an ISO standard.
\_ Well, do what you want, but in my opinion, if you're
looking for data archival, you don't want to be
using a technology that few others are using.
Especially if it's expensive. -tom
\_ If you don't mind that MO drives are slow, MO disks are low
capacity (in comparision with a DVD) and expensive and that
most of the drives are still scsi based, MO is great. Sure,
your data will survive the next ice age, a emp and a glancing
blow by a nuclear weapon. If your pr0n collection is that
important, consider MO. If, on the other hand your data isn't
that important, stick to the cheap soln., DVDs. BTW, MO is big
in Japan (just thought you should know).
\_ How is DVD's archival quality? BTW, Fujitsu makes MO with
firewire or usb 2.
\_ Yes they do, but most of the good drives are still
scsi. The fw or usb2 drives are usually the crappy
ide version of the drive with a low cost fw/usb2 to
ide bridge chip. You've got to ask yourself why you
would pay top dollar for MO only to get stuck with
cut rate bridge chip.
For the vast majority of stuff DVD works well enough.
Get the make in Japan stuff (~ $1 per 4x rated disk)
Get the made in Japan stuff (~ $1 per 4x rated disk)
and make sure that you keep each disk in a separate
case and out of the sunlight and you should be good
till blueray comes out (2-3 yrs), at which time you
will want to ditch your crusty DVDs for blueray disks.
\_ I have a MO library right now. I used them back in 1995 as
well. There is no redeeming quality. Back then it was cool to
be able to store 2 GB on a rewriteable medium, but there is no
advantage now. I can't wait to throw my library away. What kind
of idiot would go back to early 90s technology now?
\- if you are talking about this technology:
http://www.pinnaclemicro.com/optical_index.htm
it is a serious pain in the ass to use. some genius
decided to use this on a DAQ setup and it lead to countless
problems. media integrity is useless if there is no device
to read it ... especially when the drivers have to be
licensed as well. if you want reliability, go with redunancy.
that also protects against fire/theft/earthquake/mudslide
scenarios. --psb
\_ One other point no one has mentioned is this: how many people
\_ The point has been made above multiple times.
do you know with a MO drive? WTH are you going to do with your
disks if your drive goes bad? At least with DVDs you can go
to fry's buy a new dvd-rom (or burner given the recent price
drops) and get all your data back. |
| 2004/8/3 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32660 Activity:nil |
8/3 I bured a backup for a music CD about 3-4 years ago on an imation
CD-R. Now the backup has lost 2 tracks and the rest is filled with
noise, while the original is still fine. How come CD-R has such short
lifespan? I always kept it in shaded and cool place. Now, what media
should I used to keep backup of my data? |
| 2004/8/2-3 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32637 Activity:very high |
8/2 I'd like to get a USB HDD enclosure and use it to backup data. What's
the best format for (1) reliability and (2) compatibility? I'd like
to use it store my music on and sync with my ipod, so it would have to
work with iTunes, but I wouldn't want to use NTFS because that's not
writable from FreeBSD. MSDOS might be a decent least-common-denom,
but that seems to waste a lot of space and have reliability problems
(fragmentation etc). Can windows mount/write a harddrive in the UFS
(CD) format? Am I overlooking a good format? tia.
\_ Thanks for the suggestions- I was somewhat against ext2 for
reliability concerns (unfounded?), and I guess I meant UDF
(I thought it was Universal File System...)
Do you happen to know if UDF (or iso9660) is modifiable at all?
Most of this stuff is going to be read heavy / write light,
so write performance isn't important. More important is each
OS being able to recognize a harddrive formatted to look like
a CD/DVD.
\_ IIRC, the problem with ISO9660 and UDF is that you need
to stick a fs image onto the drive. You can't add and
delete files later (well, mt. rainier can, but that
isn't widely supported outside of windows).
BTW, ext2 sux, but it is pretty much your only choice
if you want 255 char filenames and unix permissions.
If you are okay with 8.3 filenames, then msdos fs
might work for you, but I think that you will find that
the effective storage space on your drive will be much
smaller than with other file systems because of the way
that blocks are allocated.
Are you okay with using VPC/VMWare on your systems?
If so, you may be able to stick NTFS onto your drive
and then just use Windows running in the vm to access
your drive, share its contents. Then using smb mount
you can mount the drive under Linux/*BSD/MacOS X.
If you are willing to spend some cash you might want
to consider trying to go the hfs+ route. The following
urls might be of some help:
1) hfs+ kernel module for 2.4/2.6 linux kernel:
http://www.ardistech.com/hfsplus
2) Freebsd hfs+ kernel module (5.0 and newer):
http://people.freebsd.org/~yar/hfs
3) MacDisk for Windows:
http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3
4) MacDrive for Windows:
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive5
I haven't used any of these before (I've used the
old hfs linux driver in 2.0/2.1 kernel under x86
and ppc linux, but not the current one), so I don't
know how well this will work.
\_ Try ext2. There are windows, freebsd and macos x drivers for
ext2. CD's don't use UFS (Unix File System, aka FFS), they use
ISO 9660 (w/ extensions). Perhaps you are thinking about UDF (DVD
format)? AFAIK, UDF isn't designed for rw access, so it would be
a bad idea for a hard drive.
\_ ext2 rw support for Windows is very bad. I would be very careful
about rw on ext2 under Windows if you want to keep your data
intact for any period of time. Unfortunately I can't offer a
good alternative that is cross platform because Windows support
for 3rd party drivers is just the shits. You can (again) thank
Mr. Gates for that one.
\_ ext2 rw support linux is very bad too but people use it.
\_ Ha-ha, very witty. Now why don't you STFU and let the
adults talk. By "very bad" I mean that you can expect
data corruption everytime you access the disk. No,
not sometimes, no, not once every ten times, but
EVERYTIME you write to ext2 from Windows.
Thank you for playing.
\_ You can expect data corruption from ext2 everytime you
use it as well. If you stopped playing with kiddie
boxes and put it in production, you'd find out real
fast what ext2 can do to data and you'd either learn
how to real fast how good your backups are or be
looking for a new job. Thank *you* for playing. I
enjoy 'winning' whatever that means on the motd. |
| 2004/7/30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32600 Activity:nil |
7/30 I can't stop browsing http://techbargains.com and spend too much money, what should i do?? \_ I love http://techbargains.com! bitch! \_ I'M RICK JAMES! \_ It wasn't funny the fiftieth time, either. \_ why not? \_ advertise what? people advertise all the time. They advertise how they hate Bush, Cheney, the Liberals, the Hippies, etc. \_ You are all strung out on dorkasterone. \_ You call that advertise? Geez you need to get out more. In the mean time, I am off to browse for more gadgets and spend more $$$. \_ For every piece of crap you're thinking of buying, divide it's price by your hourly take-home pay. This will tell you how many hours you will spend working to buy the thing. Maybe that'll make you think twice. (Hint: Hourly take-home ~= (Annual_Salary)*(1.0-Total_Tax_Rate)/2000 \_ What does this have to do with templates? \_ It was about someone who can't control their spending, but that thread got nuked and there was a mis-merge. \_ Cool, the ipod is only a few days salary!! \_ Keep in mind that a whole lot of your work time has to go to housing, car, retirement, and maybe kids. Perhaps 35 hours a week are going to things you really shouldn't skimp on... If only 10% of your income is disposable, then you really should use 10% of your take-home pay as the divisor number. \_ it's just $5.7/h, OUCH!! time to get those roommates back to fuel my gadget buying... |
| 2004/7/27-28 [Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32501 Activity:high |
7/27 What are some good sites that give you good bargains to products? I'm
looking for a digital cam and I'd like something that is similar to
http://bestbookbuys.com, but for cameras. Thanks.
\_ You squished other people's changes. Use motdedit.
\_ No.
\_ http://www.techbargains.com - the only one you need, run by some berkeley
dudes I think...
\_ http://bensbargains.net (really good)
\_ http://pricescan.com
\_ pricescan sucks.
\_ They all suck, use http://www.techbargains.com they have lots of camera
deals. Even if they don't have it RIGHT NOW, expect some deals to show
up within a week or two. |
| 2004/7/26 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32482 Activity:very high |
7/26 r0x0r, d00d. I just put together my Athlon 64 3200+ (Newcastle) with
an Asus K8V SE Deluxe with an AMS gMono $50 case and Enlight $32
EN-8361934A1 power supply, Lite-On DVD 166S reader and 812S writer
(flashed to 832S VS08), and it runs quiet (didn't need the
Zalman cooler) -- all gotten at http://newegg.com -- and it only uses 67
watts at idle because it downclocks to 1 GHz from the maximum 2.2 GHz
it can run when there's nothing running !!!1!111 radeon 9600 xt!
d00m ]|[ here I cumm!!!!51@%^4$
\_ rad!
\_ On a more serious note, I just upgraded to a 10kRPM SATA HDD and
it's pretty nice.
\_ 37GB / 74GB raptor?
\_ Yes, 74, very fast.
\_ any noise issue? I originally planned to get one of those
but then on balance it seemed silly. my 7200 rpm drive is
silent and I never wait on it. Hope you have >= 1GB RAM.
The money would have been better spent on a faster vidcard.
\_ I can hear it, but it's much quieter than the old drive
I already have 768MB RAM and a GeForceFx 5600 -PP,!OP
I'd say it's quieter than my 7200RPM W.D. and it a lot
quieter than my CPU and case fans.
\_ A 5600 non-ultra is kinda crappy. 1GB RAM really
makes things snappy for me, since I never have to
page to disk no matter how much stuff I run. I think
avoiding disk is more important than faster disk.
For videocards, this ranking is pretty accurate:
http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=8221450
Good deals seem to be: 256bit ATI 9800SE $150
9600 XT ~$150
9800 Pro ~$200 (oem)
If you don't really care about games then whatever.
I guess that HDD will load levels bitchin' fast.
\_ The video card it about a year old, when it was
fairly hot shit.
\_ 74 GIG only? My IDE has 250Gig...
\_ Try finding a 10K RPM IDE drive.
\_ I have ~500GB on other drives, but none of them have a
4.5ms average seek time.
\_ so basically you might be able to run D3 @ medium quality :)
\_ Do I look like I'm made of money?
\_ yes, I am irritated that my CPU dropped $52 in < 1 wk. :( -op |
| 2004/7/22-23 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32425 Activity:very high |
7/22 Is there any convenient way to upgrade (replace) my primary hard drive
in WindowsXP without having to go to the trouble of reinstalling my OS
and all my apps?
\_ Clone your disk.
\_ Does that work when the two drives are different sizes? The new
one is (obviously) larger.
\_ Yes. Afterwards you can even use something to
grow that partition. There are several utils that do this.
\_ Ghost works, at least. I used it to clone my notebook HD
(C: and D:) to a faster, bigger notebook HD -- no problems.
\_ Will that work for cloning ATA to a SATA drive?
\_ I haven't tried it, but I believe you just need Ghost
to "see" your SATA drive -- Ghost runs in DOS.
Also, if your drive is > ~ 128 GibiB, you will need
Ghost 2003 or later.
\_ I thought the XP activation crap checks your hardware
configuration, and refuses to run when it's different.
\_ The drive is only 1 of several things that it checks
for change. On a desktop system you are allowed to
have something like 5 different things change before
having to simply reregister your key with Microsoft.
I've done this sort of thing several times, and even
when I did finally have to reregister with them, it
happened instantly.
\_ Yes, but if you have the right program ...
In any case, legitimate users will only need to
re-activate their OS through an Internet or phone
connection (I think Internet works). I do have a
legitimate license, but I don't need the hassle.
re-activate their OS through the Internet (?) or by
phone call. I do have a legitimate license, but I
don't need the hassle. |
| 2004/7/20-21 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32382 Activity:insanely high |
7/20 I want to spend money on something cool. Any suggestions? Probably not
willing to spend more than about $2k.
\_ take a pilot class, it is really an eye opener
\_ Go on a trip. Take a helicopter tour over Kawaii. Go visit the
Lourve. (sp?) Or St. Peter's Basilica. You'll remember it
forever: it's worth more than some $2k hunk of junk. --PeterM
\_ Bah. You mill around with the other tourist cattle looking at
pictures of dead white people. Or get sunburned wandering in some
rainy island. Just upgrade your PC and preorder Doom 3!
\_ give me to me, i'll spend it for you and send you a cool
cool greeting card.
\_ You need someone to give you to yourself?
\_ GFE
\_ My girlfriend will give you about 45 minutes for $2k.
You won't regret it!
\_ Does she do anal???
\_ Sure, yermom is a total ho-bag.
\_ How is it dating a whore?
\_ Sky? Is that you?
\_ How much does your girlfriend charge YOU?
\_ Half-a-pound of weed
\_ Sweet!
\_ Used motorcycle and enough gear to keep from getting killed.
\_ Some ideas:
- Canon 10D w/ 28-135 USM II IS lens
- 23" lcd w/ X800XT or nv6800UDDL
- 40 gb iPod + dock + case
- Sony WEGA: 34" HD: http://tinyurl.com/5gdty
36" w/o HD: http://tinyurl.com/5nnjq
\_ Buy and share a RealDoll(tm) with someone.
\_ Buy a RealDoll(tm) with someone else, and share her.
\_ dear op, please consider alternatives to material goods.
Sure you can buy a cool toy or something, but what about
intagible things that'll actually last you a lifetime? Have
you considered using that money on education (chef/pastry
class, 1/3 of a pilot's license, horseback riding,
Princeton Review/MBA, etc)? You can buy cool toys and
they'll be fun for a while, but please consider the
intangible things that lasts you a lifetime.
\_ sometimes those are the same thing, like getting a boat
that you then actually use all the time.
\_ It is weird to agree with someone entirely and still think
they are being a complete pansy. Or, for the majority with
south park clue... -phuqm
\_ Dude, that is so gay. -Stan
\_ Education makes you gay.
\_
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and
blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only
love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or
know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only
one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what
wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust,
never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never
dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a
lot of things there are to learn."
-- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King" |
| 2004/7/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32338 Activity:nil |
7/18 I have a 250GB Western Digital IDE disk (in a firewire enclosure)
badblocks size 244198584 * 1024 = 250059350016 bytes
fdisk size 30401 * 16065 * 512 = 250056737280 bytes
Any ideas why the difference? 2612736 bytes
\_ Nevermind, 'fdisk -s /dev/sda' shows 244198584 -op |
| 2004/7/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32302 Activity:low |
7/15 Pioneer announces the A08:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=118390#118390
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1622910,00.asp
\_ The 12x Plextor is actually faster than this "16x" Pioneer, due
to different write strategies. |
| 2004/7/15-16 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32301 Activity:moderate |
7/15 I have a FireWire IDE enclosure. If I have static on my body and touch
the enclosure while it is running (zap), it resets the drive
(click), and causes linux kernel panic. I assume that data would be
lost in such a sitation. Is this normal behavior for an
ennclosure?
\_ Is your power supply connected to a true ground? Or one of those
screw-on plugs for older outlets without a ground?
\_ The computer is plugged into a three prong power strip, which
is plugged into a 3 prong recepticle in the wall. I assumed
that the wall plug was grounded (I will test it). The power
supply for the firewire enclosure only has 2 prongs. I think
that the enclosure is grounded via the FW cable. Also, the
aluminium housing of the enclosure is in direct contact with
the metal on top of the disk drive. Does static arc between
a charged human and a grounded metal? This is the enclosure:
http://coolmaxusa.com/cd-309.html
\_ Static will arc between any 2 objects that have a different
charge level. Since 'grounded' is defined as having no charge
you can spark on grounded metal if you build up any charge.
Ideally, your enclosure should be grounded. If it is not
grounded and you spark on it, the current will flow into any
parts connected to the case, including delicate electronics.
\_ It's worth pointing out that the human body can have
multiple kilovolts on it pretty easily, particularly
in dry weather. |
| 2004/7/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32230 Activity:high |
7/12 iPod causes CD Copy protection companies to rethink strategy:
http://tinyurl.com/5ujph
\_ I assume there's a hack to rip those 'copy protected' CDs right?
or am I wrong?
\_ Yes, but it's not always very user-friendly, and in any case the
copy-protected CDs have bogus error correcting codes which means
the disc is more likely to be damaged by a scratch. Whoops!
Looks like you have to buy another one...
\_ Ok, I don't completely under how CDS-200 works, but
it seems the following would work:
1. disable auto play in XP
2. using some software, select the active session on
the CD (to be different from what it would normaly be)
3. rip as one normally would.
This would work right? Or is it more complicated than
that? I mean if a normal CD player can play
it, then the raw track has to be on the CD somewhere,
the computer just need to find it.
\_ No. When you try to rip it your CD-drive will either:
A) Say "Ack! Corrupted disc!" and abort.
B) Say, "Hmm, the error-correcting code says the music
should sound like <gibberish>..."
You need to rip in some non-standard mode I forgot the name
of. There are special programs to do this. You can of
course put the disc in a normal CD-player and feed the line
into your sound card and record, but that has its own set
of problems. FWIW, this copy-protection system also
renders the discs unplayable on many car stereos.
\_ You have to use rca output, not spdif output to copy
the cd if you are going to audio way.
\_ RCA output is never considered a 'copy'. I am
talking about copying as in computer file copy. |
| 2004/7/6-7 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31183 Activity:very high |
7/6 What CD/DVD burning software do you use?
\_ sheesh, this is the 10th time this has been posted this year.
STFArchive
\_ scrolled through last 2 days of archive. Is there a text search
interface I can use via CVS?
\_ I hate searching, someone please just repost the whole
thing
\_ Translation: "I'm lazy and I want someone else to do my
research for me."
\_ the archive doesn't keep ppl from posting the same stuff about
Michael Moore over and over again
\_ Nero 6 on Win2k/XP, Toast 6 on MacOS X
\_ How well does Toast 6 do the whole DVD rip-and-burn?
\_ I guess its okay, but I prefer to use a PC for ripping.
DVDDecrypter + DVDShrink + Nero 6 produce much better
results (playable on hacked XBox!) than Toast 6.
\_ http://csua.com/?entry=10042
http://csua.com/?q=dvd+burning
\_ Related question, what software do I need to burn a copy
of a DVD, but change the region code?
\_ I use DVDDecrypter to rip the DVD, strip the copy
protection and the region code and then I burn the
result. Most of the time it works fine. On some
R2 PAL dvd's I need to reauthor the dvd as R1 in
order to get the colors to show up properly.
\_ What software do you use to burn a DVD movie into
2 DVDs loselessly? Free software?
\_ I've never done this because it is a pita
to get working properly. Some players crap
out if they get to the end of d1 and can't
find the next chapter. In order to fix that
you need to futz with the ifo files and stuff
which is just too painful. DVDShrink is good
enough for the likes of me.
\_ If converting from PAL to NTSC, you probably will need
to completely re-encode the DVD. Most NTSC DVD players
can't handle PAL discs (and you may also need a TV that
supports PAL). Going in the other direction doesn't
have this problem, because most PAL DVD players and TVs
are multi-standard.
\_ cdrecord |
| 2004/7/2-5 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31146 Activity:high |
7/2 What software do you use to backup your own PC?
\_ snapshot backups via rsync over ssh
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots
\- have you compared this with rdiff backups from
stanfraud?
\_ Raid 1+0. No backups.
\_ you never accidentally delete a file?
\_ all important files in rcs. this is deja-vu. I answered
this at length two days ago.
\_ rsync with incremental options running from cron to backup my
Linux files to a second disk. On the windows box, I use
right now the windows backup tool manually to backup everything
to a second disk but you could schedule it automatically.
\_ You can also put your windows data on a linux box and
make it accessible to windows via a samba share.
\_ Make CD backups every 6 months or so.
\_ XP box: Maxtor OneTouch drive, and store everything important
on Samba shares. FreeBSD boxes: rsync back and forth between
boxes. -John
\_ I have multiple matched drives. Every three months or so, I copy
everything from one drive to another and then start using the new
copy. The next time, I swap the drives. Once a month I burn stuff
to a cd/dvd. Important stuff I keep in cvs. I backup my repository
every other week. I'm mostly using MacOS X, FreeBSD and OpenBSD,
I don't bother backing up my WinXP box, nothing important on it
except DVDDecrypter :-)
\_ I've read that if you let drives spin down for too long there
is a good chance they won't spin up again, thus cold disk is
not a good backup medium. I've done a little of what you're
doing but not enough to say if what I read is true or not. YMMV.
\_ From what I've seen this is only the case if you let
your drives sit for years not months. Even then, most
drives will work (I just powered on a scsi drive that I
last used in 1997 and got some data from it last week).
Also, I tried to make sure that my drives are never
more than 24 months old. Around 18 months or so I upgrade
to a larger pair and sell the older pair to offset the
cost. |
| 2004/7/2-4 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31122 Activity:low |
7/2 I am looking for a reliable RM/RMVB to VCD/DVD-based MPEG
converter. Any recommendations? I have tried several found
through Google, and all of them can only decode some of the
real video files I have...
\_ I'd like to know what you've tried. TINRA? EO Video? |
| 2004/6/30 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31088 Activity:high |
6/30 What's a good free ISO burner for XP? ok thx
\_ burn4free. http://download.burn4free.com Does just about
everything else you want from a burner as well, it's great.
\_ http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
is free and doesn't include NavHelper. Same author wrote
CreateCD for command-line burning. |
| 2004/6/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30995 Activity:kinda low |
6/24 Hotmail to increase storage. Should I buy storage stocks?
http://tinyurl.com/2suo3
\_ No. You should sell storage stocks. The amount of storage a place
like hotmail or yahoo or google needs is only a few tens of
millions at most and the cost of storage per terabyte continues to
plunge rapidly. The storage industry has razor thin margins which
is why the dozens of companies you could buy a drive from in the 80s
is now Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, and (if you're stupid)
Fujitsu.
\_ IBM's gone?
\- ibm sold much of it's disk drive stuff to hitachi --psb
\_ Sold to Hitachi. They handled they 60 and 70 gig failing HD
\_ Sold to Hitachi. They handled the 60 and 70 gig failing HD
problem very poorly. I wouldn't trust them or Hitachi who
bought it because it's mostly the same people.
\_ Hitachi seems to have cleaned up the division.
The new 120-180 gb drives are reliable and
come with good warranties (3 yrs for some).
\_ There is also Samsung. I have one, it's quiet and seems fast,
no idea about reliability but I haven't heard horror stories.
\_ same here. i bought it mainly for its quietness, but thus
far no issues after 6-8 months, which is more than i could
say for some drives i've owned *cough*quantum*cough*
\_ Don't buy a maxtor. The 120 and 160s have lots of problems. |
| 2004/6/23 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30970 Activity:nil |
6/23 Does the post office generally sell CD mailers (something sturdy to
ship a CD in) or do I need to stop at Office Depot on the way to
the post office?
\_ Depends on the PO. Better to stop at OD or Staples and get
one since the PO generally overcharges for stuff like that. |
| 2004/6/18-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30909 Activity:moderate |
6/18 What's your favorite fanless firewire 3.5" HDD enclosure? I want
something high quality. I just ordered a CoolMaxUSA CD-309-FW and
the quality sucks. As far as I can see, there is nothing mechanical
holding the HDD onto the ATA connector
\_ http://csua.org/u/702
3.5" hard drive, this one is USB 2.0 and FireWire. I got one last
week and it works fine with my Hitachi 160 GB. Read the user
reviews. 90% tool-less, convenient to swap HDs if you want,
light-weight, no fan, and space efficient is nice. The one with
the neon lights blocks the air vents. For me the main issue is
that it uses a power brick. It does use two screws on the bottom
to secure the HD, which I think is fine.
\_ I am very happy with mine, and I coughed up the extra $3 for the
neon lights. Its great for mood lighting my room.
Its true about the air vents tho it hasn't gotten THAT hot.
I have a 250gb drive in mine, and I like it way better than
my other enclosure with a fan because that one gets pretty loud.
I don't think you can get around having a power brick.
\_ no power brick: See the pic for the coolmax.
\_ When you're hard, it's only 3.5"?
\_ Yeah, but it's 7200RPM!
\_ vibrate at 7200RPM! and has neon light.
\_ plus subwoofer and oversized spoiler.
\_ Do all the connections maintain quality if you wiggle them?
\_ 7200 RPM HDDs can get pretty hot, and high temperatures typically
reduce the lifespan of the drive. A fan helps a lot... |
| 2004/6/16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30847 Activity:moderate |
6/16 Has anyone used one of the new 10,000RPM SATA hard drives? How do
they compare to a mainstream 10,000RPM SCSI?
\_ a friend of mine has a raptor. says it is dead quiet and super
fast. my 10k scsi was so loud i stopped using it but was also
very fast. |
| 2004/6/16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30833 Activity:insanely high |
6/16 I have about 500 Gigs of stuff that I need to backup on a monthly
basis. I anticipate that our content will grow to 1000Gig in the
next year or two. Should I just get 2-4 big HDs or should I get
tape backup device? Opinions? -newbie admin
\_ Do you need to back up the entire 500g each month or just an
initial cut and a small amount of data changing each month? 500g
per month is an insane amount of tapes. 500g every 6 months plus
5-10 gigs a month is fine for tapes.
\_ Get hard drives and a fast network.
\_ TAPE BACKUP IS DEAD! External 250 Gig drive costs $250. Two
would be $500, which is still much cheaper (and faster) than
any tape backup system out there. Get more as you need them.
\_ Just curious, I know the lifespan of a hard drive is 2-6 years.
How is it with tape? Is it about the same schedule for both
media when copying the old backups to new hardware?
\_ No, MTBF for a single ATA HD is about 68 years. Much higher
for a quality Seagate SCSI or FC drive.
\_ My personal experience suggests that number is wildly
optimistic.
\_ You aren't supposed to play soccer with them.
\_ 640K is all anybody should ever need.
\_ Sigh, just like Gore/internet and ketchup/vegetables.
\_ The new marketing buzzword is D2D2T, which stands for "Disk to
disk to tape." You setup a big raid unit to backup to as fast
as you can, then backup that onto a tape at a more leisurely rate
and then send the tapes offsite. The middle disk will provide
fast and easy restore to recent stuff while the offsite tape
will provide long term archive.
\_ But will D2D2T leverage B2B and B2C strategies to increase
OEM market share at high levels?
\_ Yes. It is called the Netapp Rxxx series of NAS appliances. |
| 2004/6/15-16 [Computer/Networking, Computer/HW/IO, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30822 Activity:high |
6/15 Related question. Is there any harddrive enclosure that is powered
by USB (so I don't need to drag an extra power cable)?
\_ I have one for a laptop drive, but I suspect the power demands for a
standard 3.5" drive are too high.
\_ For a 2.5" notebook HDD, sure, almost all of them should do it.
For a 3.5" HDD, no, USB doesn't provide enough power. Firewire
can do it, but Wiebetech is the only manufacturer I know of who
makes such enclosures, and they're very pricey.
\_ That's not necessarily true. Certain USB ports on certain
computers don't supply enough power to the USB port to run
even a 2.5" hdd. This is the reasn why they include a
keyboard adapter (draws power from the mouse/keyboard ps2
port). YMMV. Also, powered Firewire is only standard on
Macs, on PCs it's hit/miss.
\_ who makes 2.5" enclosure?
\_ there are literally a dozen different ones that you can
pickup at Fry's. I would guess there's at least 50
different manufacturers.
\_ http://newegg.com, search "2.5 enclosure usb", or find the category |
| 2004/6/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30807 Activity:high |
6/14 I'm looking to purchase a firewire enclosuer online. NewEgg is
\_ enclosure, or something French?
out of stock for the one I want (Coolmax CD-309-FW). Any
other recommendations for online hardware stores?
\_ enclosure, or something French?
\_ Wasn't FW invented by the French? Maybe he wants the real thing?
\_ http://pricewatch.com
\_ 3.5" hard drive, this one is USB 2.0 and FireWire. I got one last
week and it works fine with my Hitachi 160 GB. Read the user
reviews. 90% tooless, convenient to swap HDs if you want,
reviews. 90% tool-less, convenient to swap HDs if you want,
light-weight, no fan, and space efficient is nice. The one with
the neon lights blocks the air vents. For me the main issue is
that it uses a power brick. http://csua.org/u/702
\_ I am very happy with mine, and I coughed up the extra $3 for the
neon lights. Its great for mood lighting my room.
Its true about the air vents tho it hasn't gotten THAT hot.
I have a 250gb drive in mine, and I like it way better than
my other enclosure with a fan because that one gets pretty loud.
I don't think you can get around having a power brick.
\_ no power brick: See the pic for the coolmax. |
| 2004/6/13-14 [Uncategorized/Profanity, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30778 Activity:insanely high |
6/13 RIAA doesn't want you copying songs from the radio:
http://tinyurl.com/373ht (reuters.com)
\_ nothing new. RIAA/MPAA are already public enemy number one
\_ public enemy? hardly. if you're using a p2p net to steal
music you'll hate them. i've never downloaded a p2p client.
the riaa/mpaa activities mean absolutely nothing to me. i laugh
when the motd/slashdot crowd whines about their freedom to
steal and their 'rights' being taken away. you noted that
they didn't sue anyone before p2p networks or napster existed,
right?
\_ what if you just hate them because all the music for the last
ten years sucks?
\_ That's not their fault. All possible good music has already
been created.
\_ That's not their fault. All possible good music has
already been created.
\_ I hate them because they are too greedy.
\_ I second that. Regional coding, SCMS, all these fucked up shit
that doesn't prevent shit but prevents me from watching legid
DVDs from other countries. Fuck the RIAA, even though they
have nothing to do with DVD, but fuck them none the less!
\_ all optical data storage technology sucks ass anyway.
I firmly believe that people have only been suckered by
the lie of optical data storage media by brainwashing.
i have tapes from the 1980's that have been dropped,
kicked, left out on the ground, left in a hot car
and carried around the world in a grubby shoulder bag
that still play fine, and cds that are less than four
years old that are totally busted. fuck cds and fuck
dvds. |
| 2004/6/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30743 Activity:high |
6/11 What's the easiest way to inspect the last few bytes of a HDD?
I want to see the data with something like hexdump.
\_ dd?
\_ The HDD is 10GB and I've got a 256MB RAMDISK to write to.
I want to read just the last part of the disk. fdisk -l
says the disk has 10248118272 bytes. Am I doing something
wrong? dd if=/dev/hda of=./endfile skip=10248118000
\_ The argument 'skip' counts in blocks. You're skipping several
terrabytes.
\_ I'll try: dd if=/dev/hda of=./endfile skip=200158550
\_ I'll try: dd if=/dev/hda of=./endfile skip=20015850
Aah, that was a lot faster! THanks. |
| 2004/6/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30741 Activity:very high |
6/11 What's your favorite live linux cd tool for console and network use?
Does it have netcat, dd, and cmp? Slackware used to have a live cd
Anybody know which one it is these days? (Has it been renamed SLAX)
\_ KNOPPIX is your best solution. you can even install debian
onto your hard drive with it. - danh |
| 2004/6/10 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30723 Activity:nil 53%like:29972 |
6/10 What's a good place to buy the digital rebel body only? Can I get
it for around $700?
\_ Special mentioned on http://gotapex.com says OneCall is selling the kit
with 18-35mm lens for $826 eith free 3-day FedEx shipping. |
| 2004/6/8-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30686 Activity:moderate |
6/8 Anybody ever known of data getting extraced from a drive that has
been zeroed out?
\_ Does it count if I got 000000... back?
\_ It can be done. When your disk drive does a write, it writes a
rather wide path. By placing the platters into special machines,
you can extract data from the fringes of the write path. This is
why the DoD has released specs on write patterns useable to highly
minimize such extraction.
\_ I think the sequence of writes is something like:
11111111, 00000000, 11110000, 00001111, 11001100,00110011,
10101010, 01010101, which is kind of like micro-degaussing.
\_ We had a pretty interesting joint presentation by Kroll
and Guidance. I forget which one of the two it is, but one
has fairly extensive labs for just this kind of recovery that
they'll let you tour (at least in Germany) as a "potential
customer". Anyway, I thought DoD just physically shredded
all physical storage media after use as a matter of policy?
Most of my bank clients so far have paid someone to do that
for them. -John
\_ Yup, it's possible. As the above poster said, you need to
overwrite your data several times with various bit-patterns.
Otherwise someone determined enough can use an electronic
microscope or whatnot to determine what had been written there
several generations of writes before.
\_ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/09/0151219 |
| 2004/6/4-6 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30616 Activity:moderate |
6/4 M$ Japan cancels development of True Fantasy Live Online:
http://csua.org/u/7li (Wired)
Rumor has it that the game featured a virtual version of Windows
that never crashed and was invulnerable to malware, but testers
refused the scenario as simply too unrealistic.
\_ speaking of which: my XP laptop crashes everytime it tries
to access the CDrom after it has been running for a while.
(so, i can restart and use the cd/dvd but if i've had it on
for a while already and try, it is sure to crash). It seems
to happen whenever it spins up, even though i have disabled
autoplay. Any suggestions besides getting real os?
\_ you could try booting knoppix to see if it works there.
check out the ide controller settings. does it just lock up?
\_ yeah, locks up, can't move mouse curser, suck.
\_ heat problem?
\_ why the correlation witht the DVD player?
\_ CD drives get really hot when they spin up. Try using
the CD for a while, and then feel that part of the case.
\_ I was only guessing it is heat but it is kind of weird
that rebooting will 'fix' it. If I'm right then it's
something weird like the heat causes some bits of on-board
cache or other non-ROM to get corrupted and rebooting
flushes/reloads that memory. If it isn't heat, then it
is some driver bug with a memory leak that is corrupting
it's own memory space and maybe whatever else it can get
to nearby in the kernel. I don't remember what execution
layer things like cd drivers run at in windows. I
consider forgetting things like that a sign of good
mental health. |
| 2004/6/4 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30608 Activity:nil |
6/4 Computers might lead to autism:
http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1086361542.html
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/04/1086203610297.html |
| 2004/6/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30522 Activity:high |
6/1 Clear Channel really is the Great Satan. Hard to summarize, but
basically they're shutting down a perfectly good company making
a perfectly great product (live CDs of the concert you just saw,
purchased at a kiosk right after the show) by abusing the US
Patent Office. Go go invisible hand!
http://csua.org/u/7je (rollingstone.com link)
\_ obWDYHA?
\_ Save Howie!!!
\_ "As soon as I came out against Bush, that's when my rights to
free speech were taken away. It had nothing to do with
indecency," Howard Stern said on March 19, 2004.
\_ Um, that's nice'n'all, but what does that have to do with
the DiscLive patent issue?
\_ Nothing, but it is more evidence that Clear Channel is
the Great Satan.
\_ What idiotic thing does the patent cover?
\_ The patent is here: http://csua.org/u/7jg (patent office link)
From what I can tell from perusing it, the patent appears to
be on any process that does the following:
1) Record audio digitally
2) Manually divide stream into "tracks" as it is streamed in
3) When finished, send the tracks to multiple CD burners. |
| 2004/5/31-6/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30514 Activity:nil |
5/31 In XP, how can I preserve the date of a file when I drag and drop a
file from my hard drive to a DVD-RW using Explorer? I checked the
parameters for xcopy, but didn't see any options. Is there a way
to do it natively? If not, are there any good 3rd party utilities?
\_ Nero?
\_ Xcopy? CLI dos xcopy? It can preserve dates.
\_ Which parameter? None of them seem to be for preserving the
date. I know /a didn't work. |
| 2004/5/31-6/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30511 Activity:high |
5/31 Under XP, is being prompted to run fdisk during boot >50% of the
\_ I assume you meant chkdisk?
Sorry, was in real-OS mode. -John _/
time a sign of a failing HD? I tried this several times, with
not much luck. The drive's not making any noises out of the
ordinary, and my bios has just recently started giving me disk
read errors (no boot at all). -John
\_ Yes. Your HD is fucked. dd to another drive, do not collect
$200 and do not pass go. Drives are cheap. Data is expensive.
\_ Was. It's dead. Nothing of import on it. -John
\_ And you bothered us with the report of your dead HD because..?
Did you want to hear about the excessive wear on my new ties
or how my tv remote control buttons are wearing out?
\_ No, I want you to eat the peanuts out of my shit while I
try to drill into your thick skull that there may be a
possibility that I discovered the drive was dead by some
other means after posting the question, and thought I
would leave it for the benefit of others in case somebody
posted some informative help. Bite me. -John |
| 2004/5/31-6/1 [Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30510 Activity:high |
5/31 On average what is the power consumption of modern computer
components? I'll start with my estimates, you correct/add as needed:
Pentium 4: 80W
200G IDE HD: 10W
Video Card: 10W ? Mine has a fan on it
MB: 15W? Mine has a fan on it
How about transformer? Misc?
\_ Latest video cards from ATI and Nvidia draw 80-100W
MB: 15W? Mine has a fan on it
How about transformer? Misc?
\_ There are techie websites out there with all this info.
\_ urlP
\_ uhm, #t
\_ You've lowballed a bunch of those numbers. |
| 2004/5/25-26 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30424 Activity:very high |
5/25 I just installed a dedicated Linux software RAID server with five ATA
133 drives. It seems to run decently. I expect to get heavier usage
as people start using it (It's a CVS repository for our office).
Will I get much more out of a hardware RAID and/or switching to
SATA? I also plan to migrate people into the box with NFS/automount
for home directories. Also, what's a good backup system for a
a terrabyte RAID? DVD-RWs? 8 gig tapes?
\_ SATA: not really.
Hardware raid: possibly because its nice to have all those XORs done
for you in hw but 3ware is the major ide raid hw card maker and
3ware sucks.
Hardware raid: possibly because it's nice to have all those XORs
done for you in hw but 3ware is the major ide raid hw card maker
and 3ware sucks.
Backup system? These days multi-TB systems aren't backed up unless
the owner has big bucks. Tapes are almost as expensive as
getting a second unit and mirroring across systems. DVDRW?
the owner has big bucks. Tapes are almost as expensive as getting
a second unit and mirroring across systems. DVDRW?
Do you really want each backup to take 3 dozen or more dvds?
What slave is doing that job?
\_ that's ridiculous; anyone who has important data backs it up.
Mirroring doesn't help you if a file is corrupted or accidentally
deleted. Yes, tapes are expensive, but so what? -tom
\_ Ah yes, we once again hear from the loud but ignorant and
illiterate as well. There are lots of small companies that
have >1tb of data that can not afford to back it up. They
do not get funding from tax payer dollars. They do not make
grant proposals for the perfect system which is then paid
for by someone else. When you have some real world
experience with budgets and risk come back to the motd and
we'll talk about your childish notion of "tapes are
expensive, so what?" idiocy. If the guy had infinite money
from the tax payers he'd be doing 1+0 on all his data, have
an offsite location to copy snapshots at internet2 speeds,
and do full backups at both sites everyday. But he doesn't
'work' for the university and isn't sucking off the tax
payer's teat, like some ignoramouses around here.
\_ gee, the university has such infinite money that half
of the network infrastructure is still shared 10 megabit!
In the Math department they still have 50 Sparc 2s in
service. Let me know where I can go to run these
"perfect systems". -tom
\_ I see, so how does a poor person afford all of these
tbs worth of tapes and where did a poor uni worker
like yourself get the idea that money is no object
when it comes to data intregrity? Which way is it?
\_ Presumably if you have data, it's worth something.
For anyone with important data, the cost of
losing the data is less than the cost of tapes.
MTBF on human errors is much smaller than on
disks--the majority of requests we get for
file restores are due to user error, not disk
failure. Unless your data are read-only, you
need tape backup. And it's really not that
expensive. -tom
\_ You're missing out on cost/risk. Not all data
is worth 100% reliability on backups. If some
student loses their homework answers is it
really worth adding 80% of your costs to your
file system purchase to recover their hw from
last week for them? Only to the student who
isn't paying for it. Also, tapes *are*
expensive if you're doing enough backups to make
them worth doing. Tapes wear and break. Drives
do also but quality drives get a 3 year
warrantee and even crap drives get a 1 year so
you're ok with DOAs and early deaths. And the
thing you keep ignoring is doing tape backups on
multi terabyte systems takes a fucking long
time, restores are even more painful, and you
need some *very* expensive robots and software
to keep track of all that. This isn't your
grand daddy's world of dump/restore anymore.
In short, you just don't know what you're
talking about which is understandable since you
don't have to do real budgeting or cost/benefit
analysis or risk assessment. Finally, all data
is not necessarily worth backing up. Some data
is your entire life and must be, other data
should be but it's worth the risk or doing some
kludge, and other data can be recreated or it's
ok to lose it.
\_ Dude, if you can't figure out why tape backups are a
good thing, get out of the business. Or your CTO will
just kick your ass out for being an idiot.
\_ I know all about tape backups. Can you figure out why
you'd spend precious money on tapes when they cost
almost as much as drives and it could take days or
even weeks to do a tape restore? Have you ever dealt
with multiple tb of data before? If you had you
wouldn't see tapes as some backup panacea. They have
high cost and other issues on large data sets since
hard drive sizes and speeds have grown by leaps and
bounds while tapes have done very little relatively
speaking in the last 20 years.
\_ I remember, just a couple of years ago, when it was
the VC backed firms that blew all their cash on
over engineered systems. How the worm turns.
\_ Over engineered? Naw, it all went to salaries for
stupid useless people on sales and marketing so they
could keep up their coke habits.
\_ Indeed. Just clone the box and backup to that.
http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu
\_ Why would I use this instead of rsync? What are the
advantages?
\_ It's basically an incremental rsync. All the
advantages of rsync with the ability to keep a
week's worth of changes in just a bit more space.
I think it even uses rsync internally.
\- hey does anybody know if rsync or some other
tool can make sort of an "incremental blob" ...
say i rsync from A to B at t0. i would
like to compute the "incremental" at t1 and
store that to some "blob" C, which could
be "applied" to B [say via tar or some rsync
merge option] to turn B into a an image of
A at t1. basically like a patch diff. so this
way you could say rsync A->B on sunday and then
just store the "diff blobs" for mon, tue etc.--psb
\_ It depends on your cpu power and usage. linux software raid does
use up sufficient amount of cpu. But unless you're running some
cpu intensive services as well on some older hardware, you'll be
fine with software raid. Just a few years back, the fastest IDE
RAID performance you can get was out of a software RAID. As the
above has mentioned, 3ware sucks ass, especially in linux. I've
wasted a lot of time on drives dropping out and data corruption
on a 3ware, but have yet to have any problem with any of the
software RAIDs I've done. To make sure you get maximum disk
bandwidth, make sure each IDE channel has only one drive attached
to it.
\_ You should be able to get 20-30 GB tapes running off a robot. For
1TB, you may need multiple tape drives to streamline backups. How
big are your filesystems? How vital is the data in each FS? What is
your data turnover (how much is altered daily)? What is your network
like? The answers will help you analyze your backup needs.
\_ What's a 128 tape multi drive tape robot go for these days? |
| 2004/5/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30353 Activity:nil |
5/21 What is the proper way to spin down a an IDE disk in a FireWire
enclosure in Linux? hdparm (the ATA/IDE tool) or scsi-spin?
The Firewire device shows up as SCSI in /dev/sda/ |
| 2004/5/19 [Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/TV] UID:30285 Activity:high |
5/19 Screenshots of George Lucas's latest SW changes:
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/rumormill.html
\_ What a crappy Photoshop job.
\_ Someone please kill Lucas before he gets any stupider.
\_ It reminds me of the line from "Six Degrees of Separation". Any
child can make art as great as Matisse. You just have to know when
to take the paper away from them. -- ulysses
\_ wtf is frodo baggins doing in the screenshot?
\_ Pretending to be Annakin Skywalker?
\_ Here's a theory, Myabe Lucas actually is so sick and tired of
Star Wars that he's decided to Ruin it so people will stop
bugging him about it.
\_ My theory: Lucas is just an idiot surrounded by yes-men. |
| 2004/5/18-19 [Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30272 Activity:high |
5/18 I have an ATA raid (5), but linux insists on trying to detect each
of the 4 drives individually upon startup, which takes a while since
it isn't really successful. How do i stop it from doing that? Is
that what the -nodma startup option is for? thanks.
\_ obGetRealOS.... ok... which distribution?
\_ happens on both RedHat and Suse. Am running SuSE 9.1
\_ Is this during kernel bootup or during rc.d/* execution?
\_ Are you doing hardware or software raid? If hardware, which
hardware?
\_ By the way, has anyone successfully used vinum with +1TB
filesystems on FreeBSD 5.2.1? I have trouble newfsing
big filesystems.
\_ i had trouble with freebsd 5 correctly recognizing the disk
geometry of all the disks, so i switched to freebsd 4 and
it works. i am unable to get it to successfully boot
off of a vinum / partition. - danh
\_ I was jumping for joy when I finally got pf installed *and*
setup as the first program just after the NICs are initialized
but before the gateway is set. Now you want >1TB partitions
too? :-) I'll share the pf 'secrets' if you need that.
\_ Um. is this really all that hard?
\_ Yes. Have you done it? Were you already FreeBSD Guru
#1 before doing so? This isn't enough:
(cd /usr/ports/security/pf && make install)
You need to build a new kernel with the right options,
change rc.conf, and rewrite the pf.sh.sample they
provide. About 2/3rds of the changes are documented.
\_ Please do share. I'm a linux guy who's currently playing
around with setting up a freebsd machine. |
| 2004/5/16-17 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30248 Activity:very high |
5/16 poll time: comments also appreciated:
Conectiva:
SUSE:
\_ It is really annoying that SUSE doesn't make ISO images available.
\_ Maybe someone has .torrents of them?
\_ yeah, i'm downloading a torrent now, but it is very slow
going, and there are 5 (!!!) CDs. How does a linux distro
need 5 CDs??
\_ Latest versions of a lot of programs. How many thousands
of open-source programs exist and are legacy or at least
semi-commonly used? I agree that if they only included
'the basics' they could fit it on 1 CD easily.
Turbolinux:
Whitebox:
\_ check out <DEAD>centos.org<DEAD> as a whitebox alternative
\_ poll about what? what's the question? what's good? what sucks?
\_jeesus christ are you daft man?
yeah, favorite, best, most likely to be around in 10 years if
that's what you want to vote for but basically i am looking for
people's favorite.
\_ favorite what?
\_ favorite linux distro. Are you trolling me? |
| 2004/5/13-14 [Computer/Networking, Computer/SW/OS, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30205 Activity:high |
5/13 I just got back from a 10 minute talk by Pat Miller, the flash mob
computing guy, about casual supercomputers. He spoke in general
about the flashmob and how it went. (Another 6 hours and they
probably could've gotten into the top 500.) But more
importantly, how you can have a supercomputer at home. He booted
up off the CD available at http://www.flashmobcomputing.org on 4
chepo machines and got 2 GFlops. With 32 2 Ghz Machines you can
easily get 48 GFlops. Right now the CD doesn't run anything but
LINPACK benchmarks, but people are starting to port their
applications to it. -jrleek
\_ very cool -darin
\_ me too!!
\_ To the person who asked how this is any different from SETA@Home:
The SETI@Home framework is well-suited to applications that do not
require good interprocess bandwidth or latency. A large range of
supercomputing problems DO require both bandwidth and low latency.
This is the first time someone has tried to build a community
supercomputer that can be used for a wide range of problems. The
top500 list is ranked using LINPACK, which does linear algebra. If
you tried runing LINPACK on the SETI network, it would be terrible.
\_ Is this similar to the XGrid thing hyped by Apple?
\_ Except you do it with random non-homogenous computers.
\_ You mean flashmob can connect CPUs other than pentium? |
| 2004/5/12-13 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30192 Activity:high |
5/12 My work is planning on ordering a raid box and we're considering
going with fibre channel instead of scsi. none of us have worked
with fibre channel. can anyone recommed for/against any brand of
fibre channel? the raid manufacturer is quoting us with a qlogic
board. we'll be running it on linux, but experience with any os
is appreciated.
\_ You will be able to get *lots* of bandwidth over the fibre
channel solution, assuming you are going with 7+ drives. The
CSUA has a fibre channel raid array that hosts the office
accounts and the debian mirror, plus some. It is running
software raid 5. We only have a 1Gbit backplane, which I
can easily saturate when doing linear disk access. Qlogic is
the defacto fibre channel controller card. Make sure you have
at least a QLA2200 card. I wasted 6 months of lockups when
doing testing with a QLA2000 card. No driver issues
since the change-over. If you have any questions, let me know.
-- njh
\- helo how much $ did you spend for how much storage?
i have some SATA numbers built fairly cheeply but an
curious about the perf gain if we spend a little more $
ok tnx. --psb
\_ About $2000 for 1/2TB of 10K RPM 36GB drives in 2 chassis
with redundant power supplies. This was for surplus,
unused netapp hardware w/1 year warranty, and 2 spare disks.
And no, I can't get such a good deal anymore.
\_ Or you could get an external hardware raid box like the Arena from
Maxtronic. The low end boxes are IDE drives attached via FC or
SCSI (your choice). Rock solid. Cheap enough with decent perf.
\_ you didn't mention what os you're planning on using it with. I
can tell you now to avoid JNI cards like the plague. We're still
having issues (linux)
\_ apple xserve RAID |
| 2004/5/12 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30180 Activity:nil |
5/12 I have 2GB of ram and a server that has 20 20MB processes. I have over
a gig free but many of those processes are put on disk. Is there a way
to tell Solaris to be less aggressive about putting certain processes
on disk?
Memory: 2.0G real, 1.5G free, 266M swap in use, 2.3G swap free
28820 root 1 50 0 12.5M 1416K sleep 11:07 0 1.60% dansguardian
28821 root 1 59 0 12.5M 1464K sleep 3:54 0 0.54% dansguardian
28822 root 1 59 0 13.5M 2216K sleep 3:43 0 0.52% dansguardian
The processes used to be 50MB but I reconfigured the server to use
smaller list files. BTW, this is a content filtering proxy that does
a pass through to squid. |
| 2004/5/12 [Recreation/Travel/LasVegas, Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30179 Activity:very high |
5/12 Suppose I have as much RAM as a computer and can memorize/count
card. But what good is it if the casino uses 10+ decks and they can
shuffle any time they want? Isn't card counting good only when you
have very few decks?
\_ Card counting gives you an advantage. The size of that advantage is
determined by how many decks are in play and how many cards have
been dealt since the last shuffle. The house has a built-in
advantage. If your counting advantage is less that the house
advantage (because of #decks or shuffling) then don't play.
\_ Casinos don't exist for you to apply your mad math skillz and get
rich and famous like some MIT cheats from a few years ago. They
exist as a form of entertainment. Some people actually do win
money sometimes but (here's the Stat 2 part) because the house has
a built in advantage you *will* lose money over the course of your
life if you don't cheat. The MIT crew were cheating. Card
counting alone will not help you tip the odds in your favor.
\_ How were they cheating? From what I heard of it, they had one
player sit at a table playing small hands and when that player
saw the count become favorable, they signaled for a whale player
to come over. When the count went south the whale left. They
were sneaky about it, but that's not illegal, just common sense.
\_ I didn't say it was illegal. The State determines what is
legal or not. The casino determines what is cheating. I
never used the word "illegal" to describe them.
\_ I agree with the previous poster. You need to show how the MIT
crew were cheating. Everything I've seen and read suggests that
they were not cheating.
\_ If the casino says it is cheating, it is. They make the
rules. Breaking rules = cheating. It's very simple.
\_ So if the casino says wearing a red shirt is cheating,
that's cheating too?
\_ It's called a dress code, and if they so chose, they
could throw your ass out for violating it, yes.
\_ The question wasn't "should they throw you out", it
was "is breaking any casino rule cheating" and the
answer is "no"
\_ Well, actually, since most casinos are private
establishments, they can throw you out any time
for any thing. They write the rules of the game,
they arbitrate those same rules. So, I think
the actual answer you're looking for is, "yes".
I think the question you're answering is "is it
illegal".
\_ You said "breaking rules = cheating". Breaking
rules. Not some rules, but just breaking rules.
So is wearing a red shirt cheating, if the casino
has a rule against the wearing of red shirts?
\_ You're being obtuse. See the post below -- I
think he's got a sane explanation.
\_ I'm not being obtuse. The "breaking rules
= cheating" guy has a stupid definition he
was trying to defend, and I just showed
how ultimately silly it was.
\_ Maybe we should make 3 distinctions.
Breaking the house rules: Whatever rules they want. They
can eject you and ban you from the premesis.
Breaking the game rules: Looking at other people's cards,
changing your bet mid-game. Against house rules and
generally illegal.
Breaking the law: They eject/ban you and you go to jail.
Card counting without the use of a computer is only aginst
the house rules.
\_ Does signaling a whale player count as #2, breaking the
game rules?
\_ Counting cards by itself is a 1. Not against
the rules, but some casinos won't want you as a
customer. Signaling a friend by itself is a 0.
It's quite common and acceptable to tell a friend
to gamble at your "hot" table, for reasons of
hotness unrelated to card counting purposes. So
a combination of a 1 and a 0, signaling based on
card counting, should not be a 2. |
| 2004/5/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30175 Activity:low |
5/11 how do i check to see that the ISO I have was faithfully burnt to
CD. Can I run and MD5 check on a CD? (how?). I have an md5
checker for windows which works for the iso but not on the cd, I
could always put the cd on a linux box if there is a way to do it
there.
\_ Uh, run the verification after you burn, which practically every
CD-ROM burning software has as an option? I mean, c'mon, do you
you really have to ask a question like this on the motd?
\_ nero, for one, doesn't seem to allow you to verify ISO burns.
\_ My version of Nero seems to allow verification just fine.
What version are you using? -williamc
\_ Hold the orginal and the copy up to the light, side by side.
\_ This solution has never failed me.
\_ huh huh, smart guy isn't so smart anymore huh? -troll
\_ hi troll, troll better! that was weak!
\_ In Linux, with an ide-cdrom: "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=newcdimage.iso"
or with scsi (or ide-scsi): "readcd dev=N,N,N f=newcdimage.iso"
cksum newcdimage.iso ; cksum sourcefile.iso
or use md5sum if it was complied with "big file support". |
| 2004/5/8-10 [Computer/Companies/Apple, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30102 Activity:nil |
5/8 To the person who was asking about multi-bay Firewire enclosures
yesterday: http://csua.org/u/77z --jameslin |
| 2004/5/6 [Computer/SW/OS/OsX, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30063 Activity:nil |
5/6 Does anyone know of multi-drive IDE to Firewire or USB2 enclosures?
Preferably something that can hold 2-4 drives.
\_ http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118
I have no idea how good this product is.
\_ It countains about $800 of drives, and sells for $1200. I was
hoping for just an enclosure and under $200
\_ http://www.triumphtech.com makes multi-bay Firewire enclosures.
Call or email them for prices and distributors. I think you can
find some on newegg or maybe compgeeks too.
\_ Thanks! |
| 2004/4/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:13313 Activity:nil |
4/21 Do all firewire enclosures for 3.5" disks have fans? Couldn't an
aluminium enclosure in contact with the drive go sans fan?
\_ Kind of like this? http://csua.org/u/702
\_ Yeah, exactly like that. Do you have one of these?
Do you have the loose-connection problem discussed
in the newegg user forums? What chipset is in this device?
Does it work with Linux?
\_ I don't have one. Prolific chipset. |
| 2004/4/17-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:13248 Activity:nil |
4/16 Any recommendations for a IDE to Firewire enclosure?
\_ I've been happy with my ADS enclosure (they make the Pyro 1394
cards).
http://www.google.com/froogle?scoring=p&q=1394+ide+enclosure+ads&btnG=Search+Froogle |
| 2004/4/14 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:13187 Activity:nil |
4/13 Does anyone know a good brand for USB flash drives? The reviews on
Amazon seem to suggest that most of them are crap that get corrupted
after a few months. --dgies
\_ Lexar JumpDrive Pro is well-reviewed. Sandisk Cruzer Mini as
well (and smaller), except the silver coating scratches easily.
See Amazon. Sandisk even makes a 512 MB key that transfers at
13-15 megabytes/second, but that's like $200+. |
| 2004/3/31-4/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12943 Activity:moderate |
3/31 Grado SR60 or Sennheiser HD-497?
\_ I have absolutely no complaints with my Sennheiser HD-590's. I love
'em.
\_ Those are $250. The others are $60.
\_ Yeah, if you buy 'em from a place like Magnolia Hi-Fi. I got
mine online for $150.
\_ As nice as they may be, it's still twice what I'm looking
to spend.
\_ I have the HD-495's, and they're really nice. Never heard
the Grado's, but I know lots of people who can vouch for
the Sennheisers.
\_ I thought the GR80 were quite uncomfortable to wear for long
periods of time (> 1 hr.).
\_ The sound on the 570's is OK, they're reasonably priced, and very
comfortable (for me, a guy w/ sensitive cartilige) for long periods
of time. |
| 2004/3/23-24 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12819 Activity:nil |
3/23 What is a reasonable NFS transfer rate (cp file . for example),
100 BaseT?
\_ How busy is your network? What is on your network? What's between
the two machines on your network?
\_ Let's assume an unloaded net. The two machines are on the same
switch.
\_ For unknown networks when I just need a reasonable number I figure
10-20% overhead for tcp, NFS, and random bad luck.
\_ So you think around 10MB/sec? I'm getting 3.6MB/s.
\_ yes as a *very* rough estimate. it assumes your net is
reasonably clean, your source and target hosts are powerful
enough to deal and not overloaded *and* that both src/tgt
hosts can retrieve and store the data on/from disk at that
speed. What's the write speed on your target hd?
\_ Thanks for your comments. Write speed is apparently good
beacause I was able to cp via NFS 10M/sec to it from
a RAID array. Apparently it was read speed on the disks
I had previously mounted via NFS.
\_ I got around 4 MB/s on a test just now over 100baseT full duplex
to a relatively robust solaris server w/ 100s of clients and
gigabit connectivity to the backbone from my linux desktop PC.
I get 12 MB/s for things like scp in the same LAN.
\_ If your disks can push it, I have seen 10MB/sec on such a
network. |
| 2004/3/21-23 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/Networking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12790 Activity:moderate |
3/21 I have two computers, a p3-133 and a p3-500. They are taking up
precious space and gathering dust. Is there any worthwhile cause to
donate them to? If I can't turn them on should I bother taking out
the harddrives and whacking the fuck out of them with a hammer first?
\_ Computers for schools will take the p3-500. No one but an old
lady who wants to use the internet will take the 133.
\_ Would you sell the p3-500? I'm interested in buying.
\_ email me -aspolito
\_ http://accrc.org
\_ There's no such thing as a p3-133. You mean a P-133 or P2-233?
Either way, a 133 could be easily turned into a firewall/router.
\_ I dunno what it is. I bought it in 97 or 98 or so and I
probably haven't turned it on this millenium. I seem to
remember 133. I'm not really curious enough to look, I just
want it out of my closet.
\_ It's a Pentium from about 1994 if it's 133 mhz. A 233 from
then *could* be a Pentium but more likely a P-II.
\_ Don't whack the hard drives. Even small hard drives are useful
for a computer for the poor or 3rd world. If you're worried about
data, boot from a Linux floppy and do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
\_ Elitist prick! They need food and condoms and free aids drugs
not your old hard drive! Think of the children!
\_ There's no such thing as a p3-133. It could be easily turned into a
firewall/router. |
| 2004/3/19-20 [Computer, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12764 Activity:kinda low |
3/19 I bought a memory card from Frys. I put it in my camera
and successfully took some pictures. The next time I turned
on the camera to look at the pictures, it said "CF card
error". I downloaded a trial version of some software that
can recover pictures. (It shows only thumbnails unless you pay
$30). It was not able to recover my pictures, but it did find
about 150 pictures that were not mine! Presumably, someone else
had problems with the card and had returned it. And then I bought
the same problematic card. It's been more than 30 days since I
first bought the card. I would like for Frys to pay whatever it
takes for me to recover the pictures, but I'm not even dreaming that
this will happen. I'm just hoping I can get a full refund. But I
bet I will have trouble with this since it's been more than 30 days.
Even though it's been more than 30 days, do I have any legal right
for my money back if it's reasonably obvious that I was sold defective
merchandise?
\_ did you try talking to them at Frys and showing them the other
pictures? [formatd]
pictures?
\_ Why don't you just buy another one of the same model and return
the defective one using the new receipt.
\_ Not yet. Not sure how I will be able to do that, since I'd
have to have my memory card hooked up to a computer with the
right software on it. Besides, how do they know that those
150 pics were not taken by me?
\_ [the broken merge 'feature' in motdedit is worse than just
getting things lost. at least like that people didn't have
150 pics were not taken by me?
a software driven excuse to be rude *and* fuck up the motd]
\_ Purchase identical (shrinkwrapped) item. Take it home. Swith
broken item for item in shrinkwrap. Return recent package to store,
since you purchased that one within the last 30 days.
\_ Good idea, but the memory card is PNY and I've read on the net
about people having similar problems with that particular brand,
so I don't want to replace it with another PNY. In fact, I
already bought another card (Sandisk) not from Frys.
\_ Use the above method to get a working PNY card. Then do as
you please (gift, eBay, etc.).
\_ Why do you hate capitalism?
\_ Because of companys like Fry's.
\_ I don't hate capitalism. Fry's is free to have a more
restrictive return policy if they like. I used this technique
to return some bad CD-R media a while back that I got as a
present (but dind't use until >30 days later).
\_ I'm guessing you're screwed. Fry's *may* give you store credit
for the memory card, but I wouldn't hold my breath. PNY has a
warranty, and Fry's will probably tell you to go that route.
Easiest thing is to but another PNY card, swap it for the bad
since you purchased that one within the last 30 days.
one, return, and repeat till you found one that works. Yes,
it sucks. Tough luck with the Sandisk card, though. |
| 2004/3/17 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12723 Activity:nil |
3/17 I want to change my stereo and add a DVD player. Anyone know of a good
shop and a good brand?
\_ Depends on your budget. Rotel and Parasound make well regarded
entry hi-end stuff. Also check out brands like Nad, Adcom, B&K,
etc. Nothing wrong with better quality consumer grade DVD players
from Panasonic. There are a whole set of different brands if you
want hi hi-end. I've mostly hacked the installation myself.
It's really not that hard to hack on X10 stuff for home automation,
so no reason to pay a custom installer if you can afford the time.
\_ I've heard good things about Outlaw components if you don't mind
buying stuff that 99% of the world has never heard of.
They don't spend any money on advertising.
\_ A friend has the now discontinued Outlaw receiver. There
were some video features that never quite worked correctly,
but 90% of the receiver worked well and sounded great.
\_ I know you didn't ask, but if you are also looking for speakers,
Ascend makes some great ones that are quite inexpensive.
\_ Also check out the eponymous PSB.
\_ I didn't know partha made speakers!
\_ In fact he was hawking his speakers on motd, back when
there was neither ebay nor craigslist. |
| 2004/3/16-17 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12698 Activity:nil |
3/16 Any recommendations on stereo installation places?
I want to get a new stereo and a DVD player installed.
\_ For your car?
\_ for my asshole. -op |
| 2004/3/11-12 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12622 Activity:moderate |
3/11 Is CD1 all I need for general install of Debian 3.0r2?
Or do I need to get all 7 CD? Thx.
\_ I usually just get the netinstall cd image and install everything
over the net, but I believe CD 1 has all of the core stuff.
\_ CD1 works great either way, but if you have ethernet internet
access, use http as your apt source rather than the cd. |
| 2004/3/10-11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12608 Activity:high |
3/10 Regarding donations, does CSUA take monetary donations? Why can't
We setup a non-profit fund raising event & setup a bank/treasury and
give more quota/cputime to those who donate more while keeping
the same services for other members. I'm sure that'll really buy us
a really nice machine, with gigabytes of RAID, fast quad processors
(to run crackroot at night), etc etc. What do you all say?
\_ You can't sell services; people can donate money, but you can't
give them more disk space because they donated money. (Though
you could raise the quota for everyone). But anyway, the CSUA
could easily come up with the $400 or so it would take to
completely eliminate the disk space problem. (Or they could even
use a joined filesystem that would mean there would be no problem,
even with the current amount of disk space). It's just a question
of will. -tom
\_ I am fairly certain some people have more diskspace than others
due to 'contributing to the CSUA', and I am fairly certain some
of those contributions resulted in either making or saving money
for the CSUA. The line does seem a little faint. -- ilyas
\_ Why should the quota be the same for everyone? I thought
you hated socialism.
\_ Certainly it should not. But drawing the line at 'buying
diskspace' seems stupid, as it is already essentially
bought. "In Soviet Russia, socialism hates you." -- ilyas
\_ Er, I don't know if "$400" is enough to get the disk we want.
The current tech/vp cabal (mainly njh and erikk) are looking at
much larger disk arrays (in terms of number of disks or whatnot -
$400 will only get you ~2-3 good sized disks) with good RAIDing and
backup and whatnot - ie, fibre channel, scsi, etc etc - at least
this is what we did to fix the office accounts disk space problem
(which seemed more dire at the time, if I remember right). These
kinds of things usually take a fair amount of planning, time, and
cash to get right and be fairly future proofed, from what I have
seen. Any time, money, or hardware alumni kick in will be
appreciated (unless it's a 5 disk, 80GB SCSI RAID array...). There
is no pay for play, that just won't happen. --jhs
\_ I'm not sure what disk you want, but the disk you *need* isn't
anything near that. Even right now there is about 100 GB of
spinning disk on soda and only about 50GB of usage (half of
which is backup instead of primary usage); reallocation
would solve the immediate problem, and you could easily triple
the disk space available for very little money. -tom
\_ If that is the case, I think it would be reasonable to
ask alumni to donate for a couple hundred GB drive to
expand to, I would donate some $ to that to increase
quotas. I'm not convinced w.r.t. the fibre raid, though.
\_ I'd be perfectly willing to contribute $50-$100 if it
were easy and straightforward. I suspect other alumni
would be as well. -emarkp
\_ me too: ...
\_ The new CSUA'ers sure are picky.
\_ jhs, what the fuck are you talking about? This is something that
anyone who has done before can set up in an afternoon. And why
isn't there pay to play? We've done it in the past, it's all
just a matter of semantics.
- Has set up good raiding and backup several times, and can
now do it in an afternoon
\_ Feel free to send mail to the masses of members who have the
time, skill, desire, and spacial locality to soda to set up
the system you think is best. I'll enjoy the larger
quota and defer to your greatness. --jhs
\_ I'll be at the next politburo meeting and I'll offer to
do it on the condition that you stop naysaying and
shooting down ideas that you basically know nothing about.
- Has set up good raiding and backup several times, and
can now do it in an afternoon
\_ out of curiosity, what is "good backup"? Raid is easy but
backup is the screwy part. --not a sysadmin
\_ You can do very clever things with any number of pieces of
software. A second large array and using incremental dumps
or rsyncs (my preference) is easy, cheap, and effective (and
less of a pain than rotating tapes) --scotsman
\_ How 'bout a little paypal donate button on the web page?
\- what is the point of adding disk to soda? i'm not saying there
isnt one, but i dont see the case being made. --psb
\_ I don't know what everyone else's problem is, but the
current soda disks (the TDAs) scare the hell out of me. The
disks in the array are probably ten years old, and as far as
I know there's no redundancy in the disk array (other than
the backup disks, which aren't really redundant). These
drives are nearing the end of their useful lives, so we may
as well come up with a new storage solution as we look at
phasing out the old disk. I'm much more concerned with
reliability than space, but I hardly use my soda space
anyway. -gm (!root)
\_ And wisely so. Why anyone would really need more space
on soda is beyond me. Soda could at any moment go poof and
arch over and take out the backups. Don't keep anything
on here that you're worried about.
\_ Dick Hyman is a famous jazz musician. pianist? |
| 2004/2/29-3/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12449 Activity:nil |
2/29 I am looking for a DVD burner to buy. I want to make sure
my existing Toshiba DVD player (2+ yrs old) can read the discs
burned by the drive. Consulting the web site and manual didn't
help--it simply stated the player plays DVD discs. So should
I just buy a DVD-R format buner or shell out more money to buy
a unit compatible with both DVD-R and DVD+R? Are DVD-R more
widely supported by most DVD players?
\_ http://www.dvdrhelp.com Consult the player compatibility guide.
\_ Get a Pioneer A06. The A06 is a 4x DVD+-R/RW and is extremely
reliable and quite affordable (~ $120). I have two A06's and
have never had any problems with them or with the A05 in my
PowerMac.
If you want to minimize problems with standalone players, I
would recommend that you stick to brand-name (Apple, Pioneer
or Fuji) 2x or 4x DVD-R media. You can get brand-name media
for between $1.50 and $2 per DVD-R, so trying to save $.50
per DVD-R and burning coasters using the cheap stuff isn't
worth it. I would avoid DVD+R's since they don't play properly
in many standalone players and older DVD-ROM drives. |
| 2004/2/28-29 [Politics/Domestic/California, Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/SW] UID:12442 Activity:nil |
2/27 I've googled this but w/o any luck. I'm trying to find the mpeg/wmv
file of the AOL 9.0 commercial with Jerry Stiller and that rap/hip
hop guy where they made a fish out of AOL CDs. Thanks.
\- "that rap/hip hp guy" = mr. s. dogg, of long beach, ca. --master psb
\_ that's "hop" to you.
\- "that rap/hiphop guy" = mr. s. dogg, of long beach, ca. --master psb |
| 2004/2/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12345 Activity:low |
2/21 DVD backup ruled illegal.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5162749.html?tag=nefd_lede
\_ Still legal in the rest of the world 8) -John
\_ this week. |
| 2004/2/3-4 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12083 Activity:nil |
2/2 Can you guys see a problem with this? An online company sells CDs, and
they offer to give you a download of the CDs you bought in say 65kbit
mp3, 128kbit mp3, 256kbit mp3 and FLAC. That way you are saved the
trouble of ripping the CD and getting the right ID3 tags, you also get
to listen to the music immediately. As a further extension, you could
have them hold onto your physical CD for a while and only ship you discs
every few months to save on shipping. The 2 caveats I see are they have
to only let the person who ordered download, and they can't sell CDs
they don't physically have. Would this avoid the RIAA/MP3.com fiasco?
\_ Looks like you've been reading Robert X. Cringely's column. -williamc
\_ If you're referring to that "collective ownership" idea, that's
not what I had in mind. I'm looking for a way to have a normal
pay-to-download music scheme with multiple encodings/qualities and
no DRM.
\_ Any scheme that doesn't have DRM will instantly turn into
song-swapping.
\_ Bzzt. Not everyone sucks. Check http://magnatune.com.
\_ Thanks. neat site. -!op
\_ How does http://magnatune.com stop song-swapping?
\_ It doesn't. It accepts it into its business
model. If the riaa companies had done this back
when cassettes were their big issue, they wouldn't
be so far behind.
\_ All downloads would happen from a central server, and only
at the time of purchase, so there should be little risk of
password sharing or the like.
\_ that still doesn't stop me from sharing it on say, kazaa,
or whatever favorite p2p scheme i might have.
\_ There's nothing stopping you from doing it with CDs
you already own. It's also legal for a company to
rip and encode CDs you own. This combines the two.
\_ the law is a tricky thing. is it legal for them
to store copies of mp3s they rip and send them to
you? it would seem there could be a catch if they
didn't rip it from the cd you own. but it wouldn't
be a practical business if they had to hire someone
to open your cd and rip all the tracks off your cd.
then, there's the cost of warehousing a huge backlog
of unsent cd's.
\_ The company would have to retain, store, and be able to prove that
each person's physical CD collection existed in a warehouse some
place. Forever. That alone is going to cost way too much to make
it worth the effort. I recall reading about someone with a similar
idea a few years ago but I guess nothing came of it. Is your
startup prepared to be RIAA audited once a month? Probably not.
\_ If it kept immaculate records, then after the 3rd audit or so it
could either sue or get a harassment reatraining order, or else
refuse the audit, get sued, win because everything is well
documented, then file a SLAPP suit or invoke the Sherman
antitrust act. I do agree it will be harassed and must keep
excellent documentation.
\_ Assuming the RIAA just didn't get a law passed against this,
you still have *huge* storage and IT costs. Music just isn't
that expensive. You have a one time sale but repeat costs on
each one time sale. It is guaranteed to lose money in the
long term. If your plan is to get a million users, own 10%
of your $6b space, IPO and walk away then oh wait, we don't
do that anymore, this isn't 1998. Forget about it. Come up
with a service people would be willing to pay for that you
could actually make a profit running.
\_ Here's a business model that might work: write good,
music, play it in a public concert hall and charge people
money to listen.
\_ that business model works for Dave Matthews, but not
for the vast majority of good bands. -tom
\_ Little guys can't make money that way. How does a big
guy get to be a big guy without a music publishing and
distribution system? No one is going to put me in a
20,000 person stadium because I rock at the kazoo with
out at least 20,000 rabid *local* kazoo fans around.
\_ Your army awaits you, Captain Kazoo. |
| 2004/1/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12013 Activity:nil |
1/29 As far as I know, no DVD-Audio players have a digital-out, and this is
some anti-copying measure. Couldn't you just put it in a computer and
rip it, possibly using DeCSS?
\_ I was under the assumption DVD-audio / SACD can't be read by
computer drives.
\_ ditto.
\_ If it doesn't have the same pit size and wavelength, why is it
called DVD? If it does, it should be readable with the right
program.
\_ Odd. This (http://csua.org/u/5ri seems to have a digital out.
Or did you mean that the digital out in this or similar device
only passes AC-3/DTS, but does not pass DVD-A information?
OBTW, google trivially found that the Meridian 598 does provide
a digital DVD-A out. Unfortunately, the Meridian might be pricier
than what you are looking for.
\_ My question was entirely theoretical, but thanks. -op |
| 2004/1/27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11954 Activity:nil |
1/26 i have a PC. what kind of DVD write drive do people like?
\_ the 8x write kind
\_ If you are getting it for copying DVD's, wait for the
dual-layer burners expected around this summer. With those
you can copy DVD's onto one dual-layered DVD without having
to split them. For data, the 8x ones are pretty good enough.
\_ I like Pioneer. I haven't had any issues with my dvr-105 and
my dvr-106. --ranga |
| 2004/1/26-27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11955 Activity:nil |
1/26 Would you sign up for a contest you think you have a better
than average chance of winning in exchange for your info
(could be used by marketers)
\_ depends on the prize.
\_ lots of money. of course, better than average still means
low odds.
\_ Probably not, if there's not a realistic chance of
winning. -tom
\_ fyi, a good friend of mine has won two notebooks over his ~ 5
years of entering random contests. just two weeks ago he won
a $250 set of Japanese anime DVDs. I guess he's figured out
what to do with all the junk e-mail.
\_ that is pretty good. But what if they ask for your
birthday or even your IM name?
\_ if I were to guess he uses the correct year of birth, but
uses a random month/day. He probably gives them an IM name
created just for this type of thing.
\_ and probably the same for email address and uses a POB.
\_ my dad and his gf have gone crazy on the online contests.
They've won weekends in LA,Vegas, Santana Row. Cruises on the
SFBay, front-row tickets to concerts in SJ/Concord/SF/MTview
$200 gift certificates, a partially-paid 3-wk trip to Europe
and all sorts of other smaller prizes like wine, cameras,
portable CD, DVD players, TVs, sharks tix and Bocelli tix.
They use all valid info, but several free email accounts |
| 2004/1/21 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11856 Activity:nil |
1/20 A follow-up to my post on Western Digital 2 months ago. After
complaining to BBB and writing to the headquarter in Western Digital,
I finally got my $120 rebate last week. Hard work does pay! |
| 2004/1/20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11855 Activity:high |
1/20 Can anyone recommend a good program to write regular data
files (not movies) to dvd? Something like easy cd/dvd creator
except good. TIA. - brendal
\_ Nero?
\_ Seconded |
| 2004/1/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11794 Activity:nil |
1/15 I need a small NAS-RAID (on the order of 500 gigs or so) for a bunch of
developers. I was thinking of constructing one from parts using
SATA and Linux. Anyone got a better idea? Purpose is mainly for
NFS mounting, so it has to have decent (although not blazingly fast)
performance. I don't care that much about hot-swappability. Needs to
be RAID 1 or above (redundancy at 2x is enough). I was thinking of
spending maybe 4K on it.
\_ If you want to provide NFS access don't use linux. Linux
has terrible NFS performance/reliability. FreeBSD is much
better at NFS (if you want to stick with a free/open os).
\_ Apple Xserve RAID 1TB (500GB usable RAID 1) @ $6K, free kool-aid.
\_ I said, you're very phunny. Do you make yourself happy with your
little joke?
\_ This is easily doable for the budget you have in mind. SATA
seems nice, but I haven't seen any real world results for
performance and failures. Considering that you can buy 250G
disks for $300 or less, you can easily do 500 gigs. Do RAID 5
you'll get more space.
\_ I haven't gotten a SATA board/drive yet, AFAYK how many
SATA drives can I reasonably dump into a box? If I can
dump 8 of them in there I'll get more drives. Also, are there
any more oustanding issues with Linux NFS hooking up to Solaris?
(clients here at the office are all solaris boxen).
\_ There are no major issues with linux/solaris using nfs. You
may have to tweak some mount options to get super performance
but frankly your developers are unlikely to know the diff.
There are cases available that have room for as many as 20
drives. 16 is more common. 8 fits in a 2u box. You have
many options. -MSG
\_ Our Solaris 8/9 clients have lots of problems with
with Linux servers. Only v2 seems to work well on
Linux servers.
\_ Depends on what you call "problems". Will it work at
full speeds with default settings? Usually not. Will
you have to read a man page and change one or two nfs
client mount options? Yes. Oh! Horrors! -MSG
\_ I'm not talking about full speed. I'm talking
about problems such as multiple simultaenous
reads hanging nfsd or cases where a client
writes a file but the file ends up truncated on
the server. Even if the clients mount using v2
such problems occur on a weekly basis for ordinary
files (esp. for files larger than 1gb).
\_ There's no reason at all to use SATA. Just go get a case, stick
in motherboard, any cpu, and 256 megs and an 8 port ware card.
attach 8 cheap ass 80 gig IDE drives in a raid5 stripe and forget
about it. Total price is way under 4k. If you want it mirrored,
then get 8x160 drives and mirror 4x160 stripes instead of raid5.
Mr. Motd Storage Guru signing off.
\_ That SATA/SATAN joke wasn't even close to funny. There's tons of
terms you can make risque by changing a letter.
\- if you are a solaris shop, why dont you just take sun you
presumably already have and just spend all of your budget on
a small HWraid. assuming you feel your time is valuable,
this may be the most convenient thing to do. --psb
\_ This is a pretty good idea, too, but be careful what you get
for an external array. Some are really crappy and I've lost
entire raid sets when it decided to go JBOD on me after a
hwraid unit crash. I've had good luck with Arena raid
arrays attached to different systems. --MSG |
| 2004/1/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11743 Activity:nil |
1/9 What have you done with your old 5.25" floppies?
Or even your 3.5" ones?
\_ coasters
\_ Threw them away, keeping the ones that looked important.
It's a shame you can't recycle floppies, CDs, or jewel cases in
the normal way.
\_Alameda county will take media: http://www.accrc.org/what.html
\_ I installed a fdd in my linux box and I'm just about to
dd image each floppy and keep all those images on disk
or possible make a single CDROM of them all. then I'll
destroy the floppies. They are not worth their weight.
What's the best way to destroy them (w/o using the fdd)
\_ Crack open the plastic shells, then cut the magnetic media into
a long thin spiral. Then thread the metal hubs onto string and
make a mobile and hang it from the ceiling. Oh sorry, I thought
you said funnest.
\_ They make a fun sleeve for a CD, if you can take the magnetic disk
out and keep the plastic part surrounding it. |
| 2004/1/1-2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11638 Activity:nil |
12/31 Anyone know what I'm supposed to do with broken hard disks? Am I
supposed to recycle them somewhere or is the general trash the only
place for them?
\_ If you live in Fremont, there's a place you can drop off electronics
stuff for recycling. I don't have the address right now.
\_ http://accrc.org berkeley
\_ RMA
\- Evans 10.
\_ Give them to a homeless person on Telegraph. |
| 2003/12/31-2004/1/1 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11621 Activity:nil |
12/30 Three weeks ago I accidentally overclocked my AthlonXP 2000MHz to
2500MHz for 24 hours running setiathome. A test with memtest86
showed no errors, but since then, I've had three different disk
drives get corrupt data with "IO" errors. I fear this is related.
badblocks -w showed no errors. drives work fine after reformatting
ext3. The overclocking was done with very fast case fans and a
copper CPU cooler rated for overclocking. The CPU fan was turned
up all the way. Do you think overclocking damage would cause this
error? Could overclocking fry an IDE controller?
\_ If you overclock the front side bus, you are stressing everything
on that bus, including IDE interfaces.
\_ It's quite likely you fucked your system, yes. Did you have
temp measurements before and during for this 'test' or did you
just figure it'd be fun to fry an expensive new chip?
\_ He said he'd done it accidentally.
\_ I had this EXACT same problem when I fried a memory stick.
Put a new RAM chip in and see if it goes away. Also, make
SURE that there is good air flow over the memory (I.e.. no
drive cables occluding the case air flow).
\_ I fried a mem as well. There were no smoke whatsoever, but
it's a goner forever. Overclocking ain't what it used to be
\_ I ran memtest86 for many hours w/o a single flaw. -op
\_ Really- just try to put in a new mem stick. In general,
don't trust software- Its a 10 minute experiment.
\_ then what? how to corrupt a hard drive in 10 min? |
| 2003/12/31-2004/1/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11620 Activity:nil |
12/30 When copying a file from one IDE hard disk to another in one PC,
what's to prevent a bit from getting flipped? are there hardware
checksums?
\_ yes, but.... Once you start copying gigs or TBs around the
error rates are high enough that bad bits really happen. The
odds of this happening on your mp3 or porn collection are really
slim and the odds that the altered bit actually changes a file
in such a way that you notice is even slimmer but yes it can
and does happen in the real world on PC quality hardware.
\_ isn't there error-checking? IDE drives are supposed to resend
data when there's too much cross-talk, aren't they?
\_ Get what you pay for, caveat emptor, and all those
other platitudes...
\_ urlP
\_ I don't know the answer, but you can do a file compare afterwards if
there's a way to tell the OS to flush all file cache. |
| 2003/12/30-31 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11613 Activity:nil |
12/30 Can anyone recommend a digital image software that does good
editing, organizing (putting them into albums) as well as
archiving (e.g., burning CD-Rs, creating slideshows/VCDs) on Windows?
Adobe Photo Album 2.0 is nice except it has really poor support
for cd burners. It doesn't even see my drive (a Samsung)
although XP sees it no problem. I also tried the free Kodak
Easyshare, same problem. Is there any imaging software that offers
decent cd burner support?
\_ use an online service if you're having so much trouble at home.
they're all designed for technical illiterates.
\_ Talking about being presumptuous. I happen to be highly
technically literate. Like you never have problems with
any kind of hardware. And I didn't ask for a printing
software, I asked for a good digital photo archive software.
Perhaps you need to learn to be English literate first.
\_ If you're such a genius, why can't you get your COTS to
work? How hard could that be? And yes, I have hardware
problems. Unlike you, I also have solutions. That is the
difference between me and the technical illiterate such as
yourself. If you had checked online you'd see the services
provide both printing and storage. But you were too smart
to check that, huh?
\_ Why don't you just organize all the data in folders and
burn the compilation manually to the CD-R? What do the
above programs give you that you can't get from just
indexing stuff in explorer? With XP you can even thumbnail
them.
\_ I have been doing exactly that. Just that as my
photo collection starts growing into the 1000s,
it's getting more difficult without the help of
some 3rd party software...
\_ there is iView Prof, but it's $200 software ...
\_ Microsoft Paint but this is only for experts... |
| 2003/12/30 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11612 Activity:low |
12/29 WinXP users: I installed HP recordnow and HP CD-writer drivers. And
now whenever Xp boots up it complains about these drivers being
incompatible with Xp. Anybody else seeing this? Thanks. Does Xp use
its own internal CD writer drivers? Thanks.
\_ Probably installed the wrong drivers. HP is notoriously bad for
supplying the wrong drivers with their hardware. You don't
really need drivers for a CD-Recorder unless it's a weird one.
\_ It really depends what type of interface the CD burner uses.
The internal ATAPI burners don't required drivers, but the
USB or parallel port interface burners do need proprietary
driver.
\_ That's no longer true. USB CD Burner is just an IDE ATAPI
drive stuck to a USB to IDE converter (the company
that I work for routinely disassembles these things
for research) , so unless the
USB to IDE interface is proprietary or weird the generic
mass storage USB driver in WinXP should work at least
for detection. As for parallel port, I've never seen
a CD Recorder that uses a parallel port. I've heard
of them but unless you are burning at very very low speeds
a parallel port CD Toaster wouldn't make much sense as a
buy. I also don't think HP produced a parallel port model
(at least not recently). |
| 2003/12/19-20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11520 Activity:kinda low |
12/18 SACD vs. DVD-A. If I can only have one in a player which do I want?
\_ SACD is technically better in every respect. DVD-A seems to get more
support in hardware right now. But hybrid SACDs also play on older
CD players, and there are a lot of them available. Go SACD I guess.
[above post restored from deletion. plz be careful of overwriting]
\_ What does DVDA stand for?
\_ DVD Audio?
\_ If you have to ask... -phillip
\_ would you actually use either one?
\_ Sure.
\_ At least at Fry's, SACD selection seems *much* larger. Actually,
it really depends on the artists you listen to. Make your decision
based on that.
\_ SACD all the way! DVD-A *sucks*!
\_ DVD-A all the way! SACD *sucks*!
\_ When I stopped paying attention to high-end stereo, Sterophile was
indicating that SACD was more likely to win the battle. I'm not
as familiar with the current situation, though. -nivra
it really depends on the artists you listen to. Make your decision
based on that.
\_ SACD all the way! DVD-A *sucks*!
\_ DVD-A all the way! SACD *sucks*!
\_ time to go and buy 4 more monoblock amps to get the same
sound quality!
\_ hey, there is a substantial increase in sound-quality w/
hi-end equip. Especially now, with SACD, DVD-A. Not to
say I have 4 monoblocks. But if I had the $$, I would.
-nivra |
| 2003/12/16-17 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29721 Activity:very high |
12/16 Pusan Market on telegraph no longer sells K-pop CDs. Any other place
around Berkeley that sells K-pop CDs?
\_ No, but do you know where I can get chacharoni noodles?
\_ Doesn't Pusan Market have them? Also, try the real thing at
the noodle house next to Koryo Sushi on Telegraph.
\_ I don't know. I'm just a lazy white boy looking for instant
chacharoni.
\_ What the hell are you TV magic queers talking about?
\_ What the hell is a "TV magic queer?"
\_ http://www.snpp.com/episodes/CABF14
\_ I missed that line in the episode. Thanks. Now I have
a new phrase of the day.
\_ Best. Motd. Post. Ever.
\_ Much obliged. But I still want to know what the hell they're
talking about.
\_ K-pop is Korean music. There's a Korean grocery store on
telegraph that used to sell them, but they don't sell 'em
anymore. |
| 11/23 |