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By shifting the AMD controller back to its simple AHCI rather than RAID mode, then creating a 4-drive RAID 0 as a dynamic disk, I see >1200MB/s in the top 4 Atto sizes and an AS SSD score of 990. So I only need to find another 10 in the score to match or exceed your twin PCI-e cards. That's not...

Or bad cable.

It appears to be a replacement for the X25e.

Isn't that the ATX12V connector? Don't you need it for the motherboard?

Do you have one?

Exactly, there's supposed to be two, but in fact there's only one. What's the point in having 34A with only one PCI-e connector?

Nuts, I was trying to use the 32-bit version of SQLIOSIM. The 64-bit version runs just fine. Now I just need to make sense of the results. BTW, the RAID 5 copy simulation from AS SSD is more like 585MB/s. In RAID 0, I was unable to match Ddrueding's dual PCI-e SSD scores in AS SSD and pegged...

I've been playing with 4 Crucial M4 64GB SSDs hosted on a 3GHz Phenom X6 (an experiment before deciding on the final form of the storage). Drivers are dated May 2011. Running individual drives with AHCI, the AMD SATA 6Gb/s controller rocks. Atto sees 400MB/s reads easily, access times look...

Two annoyances about two different Antec power supplies. Antec Neo 450: supposed to have 2 PCI-e connectors rather than the 1 that the 400W model has. Don't trust Antec's published specs. :-x Antec Earthwatts 380 (as supplied with 4-year-old NSK3480 case): has 2 SATA power cables with 2...

Sorry, I was confusing single and dual channel re 754 vs 939. But my point remains: where can he get a socket 754 motherboard to go with the socket 754 CPU and SD-RAM? It's been six years.

Firstly, I think I speak for others here when I say that case is (relatively) clean. I can still make out the individual fins in the CPU cooler. :p Today, I was handed a 3-4 year-old PC that had every possible surface covered in fine dust - and I'm talking the outside. I could have gone for a...

SAN is just so much more fun because you're putting all your eggs in one basket. I've experienced SAN failures in no less than two corporations; essentially, everyone just goes home for the rest of the day. Even when you have multiple SANs, there always seems to be a key one that everyone relies...

FSP (Fortron Source). Six months old, in a home use PC. The diode fell out so I kept it. It's a SR504 Schottky rectifier from Taiwan Semiconductor. I'm more than happy to send you the warranty replacement unit when I get it, if that helps. :diablo:

Is that the most inefficient fan on the planet? This spec sheet pdf from Just Fans in the UK lists a 4-pole 1330rpm 250mm (10") fan that's rated at 20833L/min and uses just 60W at 230V. There's a 2-pole variant that draws 240W @2500rpm but moves 36833L/min.

I've now got the PC here and tried hooking up a new power supply. A very bright white light shone from the motherboard for a few seconds. Not properly awake, I stabbed repeatedly at the front power button before coming to my senses and hitting the rocker switch on the PSU. Too late! The magic...

Here's where I eat humble pie. The user called before to tell me that it's light's out for that computer. Obviously, I suspect the FSP power supply. So in all probability, I need to defer to Mercutio's opinion. :bow:

I believe that you can access the HDD through a panel in the back, so you could have a look to reassure yourself (mine is older and doesn't have that).

I've had a bad day, I need to be boring and say I told you so. Sorry.

Australian superannuation is the biggest Ponzi scheme on the planet, closely followed by Australian housing. You're screwed both ways, but I agree, the Super is especially toxic.

I'm sure they're the quietest drives - that was one of the key reasons I've been using them. But I had noticed that they wouldn't read as wide a range of discs as say, LiteOn (which are traditionally quite noisy, BTW). The extra fast eject action ran into trouble in this latest failure. It...

This might be a good thread to mention an interesting SilverStone demonstration of fan airflow effectiveness. It's all true, you can feel the effects of a honeycomb air guide with your hand, and the smoke machine video at the end really highlights how much energy is wasted with conventional fans.

Ironically, Sony Optiarc is expensive in my part of the world. When I tried to return one the other day (second failure for that PC), the supplier apologized and advised me I would have to deal with Sony direct. I've had dealings with Sony before, so it's going in the bin. Not that I'm...

Correction, it's between LiteOn and Optiarc: Manufacturer MedianError Under 3% Plextor 2.2 % 84 % Panasonic 2.3 % 81 % Pioneer 2.5 % 75 % LiteOn 2.7 % 65 % LG 3.2 % 45 % Optiarc 4.4 % 19 %

And on a slightly related note, here's rip accuracy statistics from thousands of CD and DVD drives. I converted it to error rates and found the medians to eliminate outliers; it gives you some indication of a manufacturer's consistency. I also included what percentage of models managed to...

First, a philosophical article from 2002 that helps a bit with perspective on the limitations of archiving mediums. Optical media companies talk up life expectancy - something of a conflict of interest, unfortunately. Officially, the best CD-R media is good for 100 years, DVD+R for at least 30...

That is correct, semiconductor lifetime estimates are based on a faulty premise. I pointed this out last year. Haven't you ever wondered how manufacturers can quote 137 years as the MTBF for a hard disk drive?

Install specific ancillary HDD coolers Not for many years, and I don't think I used them to cool hard drives! Modify fan/HDD placement to facilitate better air flow I only really worry about HDD placement when there's two or more together. My old cases here still have low-speed cooling fans in...

Bozo, that was my initial preference, but netbooks don't support SATA III (6Gb/s), and the Crucial product loses some of its appeal without it. Chewy, there are so many things wrong with using an MP3 encode to test storage performance on an Atom netbook, that I don't think it's worth trying to...

Dave, how long was the ride, really? If it was a solid 10 minutes or more over several miles, your symptoms are probably understandable - that's not hugely different from a cardio 'stress test'. Hopefully it wasn't completely flat terrain? Otherwise, you should really see a decent doctor...

Of course; it's common knowledge, supported by service statistics. I mean more particularly the iPhone 4, BTW.

I'll second the SSD, and the 40GB should suffice, especially if you stick with XP. However, it's certainly better value to consider a non-Intel solution such as the Samsung 64GB. Faster too, although I doubt that you'd notice or care.

I don't like the fact that Asus claims 1080 HD playback when the display only has 800 lines ... The proprietary all-in-one connector is a big turnoff; you'll need to carry extra adapters with you everywhere. And it may not have a flash for the camera (but I'm not sure I'd care). Apart from...

I think the key-less touchscreen phones might actually be more durable. The lack of keys and buttons also means a lot less places for water to penetrate. I can't recall having a phone that failed completely, or at least, without something else going wrong first. We've lost phones to faulty...

Cheers, Chewy. You're a first class contributor.

You're excluding iPhones, obviously.

Mercutio, how's the bed?

Awesome, the IT gods should appreciate that much more than the traditional chicken.

It's the rate of change that is significant. If all the bad blocks appeared in one hit, but none since, the drive may stumble on for some time. If more are appearing every day, you're playing Russian Roulette.

AFAIK, Diskmon only has one indicator, just like the hardware. Have a look at the crude but free DKHardDrive-Light Or for something perhaps a bit neater, Free HDD LED.

You were the 1 in 10,000 I was thinking of. :) And you're slightly out, I'm pretty sure you measured that at the wall, so you're actually drawing 500W or less from the PSU, which is closer to 40% load. In practise, 80PLUS units are more efficient above 50% than below it, until you get closer to...

The NZXT cases aren't that cheap for me. The Silverstone PS04B is AU$40 if I want a cheap mid-tower, albeit with USB 2.0 and only 6 HDD bays, and a more dated look. :( I could probably sell someone an NZXT Vulcan, though ...

Yeah, at 43 liters it's still too bulky for what I believe most people want (who outside of StorageForum needs 8 3.5" drive bays? :)), but the styling is clean and doesn't look dated, which is more than I can say for most of the Antec range these days. When you can't even keep up with Dell's...

Thanks, my NewEgg-Fu isn't up to snuff. No idea why the second one is so expensive in the U.S. It's actually a cut-down version of the GA-H67MA-UD2H-B3 that had 4 RAM sockets and DisplayPort, for virtually the same price. Now Gigabyte's pushing the GA-H67MA-USB3-B3, which is cut down even...

Thanks. I'm not proposing to use them for RAID, although that was enough of a concern with earlier versions of the Marvell chip that Gigabyte recommended not using them for that purpose. I'm more concerned whether or not they can do SATA III justice. There appear to have been firmware updates...

This post is intended to help anyone who happens to read this. I'm not singling out Tannin for a lecture - it's just a good example of how confused people are about power supplies, so please take this in the spirit in which it was intended. The Rock 500W costs about AU$40 (excluding tax), more...

Thanks Mercutio. My plan is to use ECC RAM in the backup server as well, so it can be scavenged if needed (it can run off ordinary DDR-non-ECC just fine). I also planned a third PC with the same motherboard to be sacrificed in the event of a failure, but the boards are so cheap I prefer your idea.

I've just realized what you're saying. You're running under Windows, you can see the drive partitions with Windows Disk Management or Explorer, yet these tools can't even see the drive? :scratch: It's not in a RAID or something, is it?

All confected. I'm confident that executives have no idea how much power key IT administrators have in their organizations. DBAs are a classic case; you have to trust them implicitly. For Exchange, the very first Google match gave me instructions on how to grant full access to users' mailboxes.

So I'm planning to do something pretty unexpected: use a Phenom X6 as a (file & database) small business server. The idea is to have one primary server and one backup server, which can also take over as the primary if needed. Thanks to M$ licensing, only one at a time will be running Windows...

A phone dropped from about 3ft (900mm) will be traveling at up to 4 meters per second by the time it hits the ground. On a hard surface, I'd guess it would be ceasing downward motion within 20mS (1/50 second, maybe much less, I'm just guessing). That's 200Gs. To experience 3Gs, you'd have to...