Search results

Some motherboards (eg H61) come with this host controller to provide SATA 3 & RAID support. I'm vaguely aware of people having more issues than with the Intel native controller. Has anyone here used one? I'm planning to buy more than one, so a little reassurance would be great, or a warning...

I'll hazard a guess you're using the Acronis POS that is labeled for each drive manufacturer. It didn't work for me. If it's a partition with data, you'll need something like the Paragon Alignment Tool (no longer free, but does work). Alternatively, copy the partition to somewhere else and use...

You use WHO codes, I imagine? We used to have arguments over how to interpret the PM COD, eg. did death result from gross abdominal trauma or blood loss?

How do you keep that in sync with Gmail?

Should be fine, Clocker. I hope you don't mind, but as it happens I was just asked to provide a similar configuration, so for anyone else who's interested, here are the two sample configurations I offered: Tiny Tower InWin BK623 case with 300W 80+ SFX PSU $68 Gigabyte GA-H61M-USB3-B3 $79 Intel...

Had an extended heart-to-heart conversation with the distributor for 'OceanSound' power supplies in this part of the world. The 430 and 500W S12II/M12II units have a return rate of less than 0.5%. Various sites were cited as examples of where these units were selected to satisfy a requirement...

Bozo: J/K. :)

Apart from the i3, this looks like stuff that nobody wants - or at least, I wouldn't want. :p The combo saves you $100, but gives you a faster CPU. It might be great, but I doubt it. I'd rather be the guru BIL because I got him the reliable PC that hasn't given him any trouble. Yes, I'm...

I was wondering why you selected a Mini-ITX motherboard to go with an Antec ATX mid-tower, but then I realized that NewEgg has decided we no longer want H67, we want Z68. :roll: You might be able to shave a handful of bucks by finding a MicroATX or ATX board. Although I admit I struggled. My...

8-layer is only used when a design is immature, i.e. designers haven't yet worked out how to build it with 6 layers. This proved too hard with the Intel X58 chipset and production boards had to be 8-layer, which made them stupidly expensive. It's possible that ATI/AMD designers took that into...

Either of these 300W Seasonic 80+ bronze with 120mm fan or with 80mm fan would be a great solution if you get a case without a PSU. This is the HEC case that Merc likes; with 0.8mm steel you should be able to stand on it without worries. ;) The Silverstone SG03/SG04 fit 2 3.5" drives (and a...

Yes, I think it's an ideal solution for what most people want. Your biggest problem is finding a small enough PSU so that it's operating in its efficient range: most droop even at 10% of max rating and go south from there. With 2 HDDs and a 300W PSU, you'll only hit 20% at full load! Mercutio...

I did misread it, it was 50W at idle and 79W under full load. That's with a GTX460 (idling). Assuming roughly 83% PSU efficiency at these low power draws, that's about 41W & 66W downstream from the PSU. Allowing about 30W for everything else including the GTX460, my guess for the CPU is 11W...

I may need to eat some of those words; it may be that only the latest AMD chipset is comparable to the HD 2000. TBH I'm not that interested in IGP performance past a certain point. HD 3000 makes me sit up and take notice, particularly in a laptop, but if I was spending that much on a desktop...

Sandy Bridge integrated graphics is mostly HD 2000, which is broadly comparable to the AMD IGP offerings (although the more recent AMD chipsets are likely to be a bit faster). Certain Intel chips (more mobile than desktop) come with the all-singing all-dancing HD 3000 graphics, which is easily...

The most useful feature I would recommend you try to include is USB 3.0. The big advantage over eSATA is no external power supply required for external 2.5" or SSD drives (yes I know laptops may have eSATA-USB combo ports to solve that, but peripherals to suit are very uncommon). I'd rank an...

Are you getting the difference between LNG and CNG (mostly methane) and LPG (propane + butane)? The only thing they have in common is that we burn them, and the machinery for that is quite different. A propane station is just a large tank of LPG under pressure. A CNG station has to achieve >...

They're not stats, that's why I used the term "rank". They display them as 1 to 5 stars (with half stars), along with a factor of 10 that includes a '%' - which is confusing. It's really 0-10 and the '%' is probably just a formatting issue that I should have removed - a mod could clean it up. ;)

Some more RMA stats, this time from an online store in New Zealand. The methodology and time frame aren't stated. Within each product class, brands are given a reliability rank between 0 and 100%, where 50% is supposed to be the average across the entire store inventory. I thought it was also...

Thanks Pradeep, I looked it up and they're using CNG. So tanks four times larger than diesel before we talk about the reinforcement to deal with 3000psi.

8 bits per color channel is adequate for photographs and more than enough for video. 10 bits allows smoother rendering where one color predominates, eg sky. Most people aren't going to notice. 14 bits is for scanners, where they process the image before you even get to see it. Also helps with...

Doesn't work on XP (unsupported). You get the DOS prompt but it wouldn't mount the game image etc.

The specs say that's a TN panel with a claimed 160° vertical viewing angle. I don't think I could live with the color inversion crap on such a large screen - my head would almost never be in the right place.

I've just wasted 20 minutes of my life proving to myself that Seagate's online RMA procedure works correctly. I dug up a Seagate drive serial number from my sales database, plugged it in, got the warranty confirmation AND the relevant distributor with a suggestion to try their RMA. I then...

That's news to me. Where did someone say it was badly built? And what aspect of the design that contributed to the failures has changed in more recent water-cooled designs?

I also give you Dilbert:

Sorry, didn't mean to offend. I'm currently without speakers while I try to repair my desk, so it's too much hassle to listen to that talk; I'll try to catch it later. However, I disagree with the thesis implied by the description. Although you could construct psychological experiments to...

Under mulithreaded load, yes, because the drives can no longer service reads concurrently (assuming RAID 5). But for sequential transfers, probably no obvious difference. The big advantage is that rebuilds should be many times faster than with spinning disks. Intel talks about SSD RAID here.

Happy End of the World, everyone. As I write this, it's already over in Oz, but most of you guys are just looking out on the dawn of a new age. I guess the fact that I'm still here means I don't have to worry about Winter anymore. I'm pretty confident that CougTek will be joining me. I'm off...

Isn't that CougTek's?

I'll take a stab that it takes up too much space and weight in a car? Newer buses in my city run off natural gas; the tanks are huge. LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) is standard for taxi cabs here.

How much are you planning to make from his indisposition? This isn't the bad debt is it?

In response to your blind faith in Ted Talks, I give you: Solid state drives fail. A lot. ;)

Excellent points, Bozo.

Resistive electric hot water?

Compared to HDDs, SSDs have powerful controllers. They are more than capable of detecting and logging exceptions. Example

Dell and HP probably do, but only for the duration of their nominal warranty. So if it's a choice between a PSU that costs $30 and lasts 3 years, versus a PSU that costs $20 but lasts 13 months, which do you think will get the nod? I'm exaggerating for levity, but that's the basic principle.

I actually avoided those super-low-end HEC models; you know, where they can't even afford a fan grill so airflow's about a third of what it should be. And I try not to support predatory anti-competitive behavior, so I don't think Rosewill would be on my list. But sooner or later, it will be...

Despite Anand's tireless promotion of Sandforce and OCZ, I have zero confidence in their reliability. I won't be considering them at all for at least six months. Consider, Intel and Crucial/Micron write their own firmware (based on the Marvell platform). Based on user feedback, they may update...

Although I have someone on Ignore (it's mutual), I just peeked to see if he had decided to stop being an arse. I used a lowish cost FSP (not 80Plus) recently to fix a 4-year-old computer, recognizing that it only had to last a year or two, and with reasonable confidence that it won't destroy...

I should add, that in this little exercise I want to remove the PSU as any possible cause of instability, RAM corruption or SSD death - even after 5 years. So I'm really looking for 'server quality' at a reasonable price. In other circumstances, I'd still be happy to use the Earthwatts D 380W...

This is my analysis of the actual OEM manufacturers, based on multiple PSU reviews: Seasonic has very good designs but inconsistent manufacturing quality. They used to provide Antec's Earthwatts series, and now they make Antec's Neo (Eco) series, which apparently is the same basic design in a...

I'm continuing a topic from another thread here because it's more relevant.

Unless you get a car with an extraordinarily large trunk, I much prefer hatchbacks or wagons for their utility value. Not as quiet, but much more practical. You can fit a surprising amount of stuff in even a tiny hatchback. The Elantra Touring is about 25cm longer than the Elantra hatch, which...

I don't know about the Southern Hemisphere, but there's definitely a reality distortion field around Ballarat. Given the age of the data, the statistics didn't seem that unreasonable to me. I haven't used Western Digital for years because someone on Storage Forum had a few unkind things to say...

People have probably already seen this, and it's out of date (2009 stats), but interesting anyway: Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia

I just spoke to Crucial, and the 64GB M4 is on allocation (two per customer) and the 64GB C300 is out of stock. :( I made the inquiry because I see orders for 128GB M4s are being delayed by 7-10 days. So if anyone sees them elsewhere, it may be your only hope. Apparently, Crucial offers a 45...

Can anyone work out how TRIM would pass through a RAID controller?

So Foxit Reader has been broken for months now (can't fill in forms), and version 5 that's supposed to fix everything is still in invitation-only beta with no indication whatsoever of when - if ever - it might be released. Foxit recommend reverting to 4.0.something, which I have, but it breaks...

I believe you mean "ill-fated"? Although bad-faithed could be appropriate if Ddrueding was just telling his wife he was going to lose weight, while really intending to have boozy afternoons sampling every Jack Daniels product known to man. And if you're such a great ventriloquist, who's your...