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1. RAID 1 requires identical drives. If one is an SSD this becomes expensive. 2. RAID 1 does not protect against faulty host adapters or errors in SATA drivers (which can easily occur with faulty RAM or motherboard). 3. RAID 1 does not protect against data corruption, because by definition, the...

81-year-old fights off 8 muggers Awesome.

Has anyone tried dual monitors with the integrated video on Sandy Bridge CPUs? In practise, the H67 seems to come with both DVI and HDMI - as well as VGA. It's clear as mud whether that allows concurrent DVI and HDMI, or just VGA + a single digital output.

It's good for home and small business - larger enterprises have staff on hand (and spare equipment) for this sort of thing. Perhaps it's not obvious, but the user can continue to work after full or partial drive failure. The backup becomes their live copy. It's particularly a problem if you...

This is an itch I need to scratch; a place to share examples of everyday insanity that seem to be on the rise.

From an article by an Australian financial journalist: So it's not just America's ass on the line here. One of the reader comments: "They *could* also raise taxes - say back to Clinton era levels. It is unlikely given that republicans control the house, but it is a third option." My original...

A microwave oven should do the job rather nicely. Open the door to make a call, close to hang up? And when you take your phone out to use, the oven can heat your coffee: a true multifunction device. :idea:

I really don't know. Perhaps she's overhyped (eg. dancing in the Black Swan) and has said some silly things? Stereodude: where would you like it? I wouldn't call it a review; more a third-hand quick impression. ;)

The partitions on the removable drive were still assigned as G and H. When I installed Bounceback and it repartitioned the drive, the new partitions were assigned the letters J and K (presumably because G and H were already in use). At least, I think that's what happened. No, I haven't...

That's the same for all SSDs. The effects are more obvious with higher throughputs and without the distortion of compressing files of zeroes.

And there sure as hell have been Sandforce firmware issues. I'm talking about things like the same chips coming out of Micron and Intel's joint venture, and Micron saying they're good for 3,000 erase cycles but Intel pulling a higher number out of their ass. And a more conservative approach to...

My eldest daughter saw Thor today. I'll try to summarize: Enjoyed it. Yes, it is funny. For once, Anthony Hopkins didn't overact and the result was good. The guy who played Thor was fine, but the role didn't require as much of a range as some people have suggested. Gagged when realized Natalie...

Had a possessed phone moment tonight. My Android 2.1 phone was switched off, yet we heard a (slightly truncated) text alert tone. I confirmed it was off, but when I powered it back on, I could see two recent texts from my daughter. A bit disconcerting, I like my appliances to do as they're told...

I repeated this exercise with Bounceback 11.0 (the latest version). It was equally successful, although because I didn't release the drive letters, the removable drive partitions advanced to J and K rather than G and H. One of the annoyances with Bounceback is that it now expects the backup...

I have more faith in the Micron Crucial products than I do in the Intel alternatives.

I don't believe any of that for a second. The best part of a month on standby? Give me a break. :) The CPU isn't that much slower and the screen is still 3.2". If you turned off GPS, 3G data, bluetooth and WiFi, and didn't listen to music, I suppose it might be usable for a few days. Wouldn't...

Lots of points, I'll just pick this one for now: Estimates of how many millionaires there are vary, mainly turning on a definition of what defines one. Including a principal residence, I don't think there's any doubt that the number exceeds 20 million in the US. This Bloomberg article appears...

Why thank you. I don't get many compliments, so I'll happily take your backhanded one. :) China's "treasuries", as you call them, are losing value every day. I'm pretty sure they're not happy. But a lot of people would say they deserve it for starting a currency war in the first place...

Is that your birthday?

Write cycle times can be very slow, especially in comparison to read cycle times. But this is relative, you should try putting your hard drive through those tests and see how it fares.

Premature acquisition?

This thread is about software that can create bootable backups; specifically the ability to run directly from a USB drive backup. The point to this is that when an HDD dies, a user can be up and running again almost immediately, allowing more time for skilled personnel to become available to...

Inflation is your friend when you're in this situation - the enemy is deflation. In simple terms, if prices double, your debt halves. Try looking up some economic history and see if you can find any instance that the US government has managed to suck that much money (2.5% of GDP) out of the...

The Blackberry Pearl is excellent for texting, but the screen is always going to be too small in that form factor. Historically, it hasn't been the world's most stable phone (you have to remove the battery to fix some issues with Blackberries, although I've also had to do the same with my...

'Quantitative Easing' is reducing your debt far more than anything half-wit politicians can find to hack off the government's budget. A falling US dollar helps you service the debt (because it's typically in US dollars). Greece is unable to do these things, which is why it's in limbo...

Ouch! I hope it doesn't put too much of a dampener on your trip. Any particular countries?

:rofl: Very cool. Yes, the notification count increased from zero to one, but I didn't get any email (from the visitor message). There are a few visitor messages laying around; I suspect the recipients never even realized. And thanks for the other explanation, even if you're just trying to...

State of emergency has been declared in seven states. US National Weather Service has preliminary reports of nearly 300 tornadoes since the storm began on Friday, more than 150 on Wednesday alone. Death toll already past 200. :(

Given that the US dollar is dropping like a stone (in exchange rate terms), does anyone have any insight (cue CityK)?

Hope you don't mind; this is just a test to see if anyone can actually see my visitor messages (and you're a longstanding member). If you can read it, perhaps you can tell me what brands of vodka are popular locally in Sweden? ;)

I thought Intel said it would just slow things down? This isn't helping my paranoia.

That's fine BBB, but it doesn't cover services. Small shops can't make enough money just selling PCs and random bits of hardware, they have to provide paid services to customers. For a business customer, this may well be onsite. So if you repair and rebuild a server, say, there could easily be...

Obviously not tough enough compared to the (adopted) Aussie: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/03/3153676.htm Seriously, I'm in awe of what those guys survived. I don't know if anyone's seen the movie Gallipoli, but apart from everything else it highlights the horrors of trench...

You'd have to see what Acronis comes up with. They used to lead the pack. I have to admit to a slight bias against Acronis these days. I've had zero success with their 'free align tools' for both Samsung and Hitachi drives. But I'd definitely try the limited function download of the Paragon...

Same 4GB Verbatim Store 'n Go I referred to earlier, only now with 50MB dataset: Sequential Read : 25.082 MB/s Sequential Write : 10.683 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 25.022 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 4.188 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 3.070...

This site gathers results from USB flash drive speed tests. You can contribute by downloading their simple standalone test app. After running the tests, it asks you if you want to upload the results. You can view individual results or click through to see an average, both of which are graphed...

:rofl:

That step is only supposed to be necessary if you can't boot from USB. As it happened, I was unable to boot from a USB drive; I think I tried to get Bounceback to recover to it and it failed to boot properly - but at that stage I hadn't appreciated how aggressively Windows 7 keeps changing the...

OMG! I don't know where that came from. :oops: Howell: my attitude is that if you have 8GB RAM and still need a swapfile, you need more RAM. What possible advantage can there be from allowing Windows to take up 7% of the precious SSD space with an empty file?

That is indeed neat, and very fast. I always liked Alvira, but Avast was a lot less hassle to live with. Thanks for that, Stereodude. NOD32 scanned the boot drive with 50GB used (including runtime packers) in 1.5 hours. This is a 3.1GHz Sandy Bridge 4-core i5 coupled with an SSD. :( Without...

To sum up: I was restoring what is effectively a dual-booting setup, with two drives and 5 partitions between them. Windows 7 plays merry hell with this if it has any chance at all, and none of the tools I used could stop it completely. The easiest solution in general (which I used so much I was...

I suppose they might if I had either a WD or Seagate drive. :???: Not sure what I would gain over the free version of Partition Wizard - both don't respect partition alignments. That's why I was trying to follow in Stereodude's footsteps and use Clonezilla.

I was mindful of this when I did the initial install (thanks to Ddrueding for posting the tip quite some time back). Unfortunately, this was not an install, it was a recovery. You're right though, I think most of my problems were due to Windows continually reassigning drive letters at each...

As I understand it, alignment is more of a problem for SSD write performance rather than read performance, so you probably wouldn't notice anything obvious. Unfortunately, it can also affect SSD longevity and ongoing responsiveness (I think).

I may have to eat my words. I found a CrystalDiskMark test of a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Contour that gave these results: Sequential Read : 29.554 MB/s Sequential Write : 19.042 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 30.281 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 5.910 MB/s Random Read 4KB : 6.527 MB/s Random Write 4KB : 0.075...

Depends what you want it for. If you just use them as a repository for tools etc as I believe Mercutio does, write speed doesn't matter very much. In other words, WORM (Write Once Read Many). If on the other hand you use them to transport data or software between PCs, write speed can make a...

Why do I have the uneasy feeling that Intel may have been lying about the frequency of the bug? The PR story was 5-15% over a number of years, now commonly assumed to be just 5%. But my local supplier told me that they had had heaps of returns with actual failures.

Have to disagree, you can still run it - it's just that some operations will be slow to respond. I have to agree. I just ran a scan with NOD32 on a 4-core Sandy Bridge i5 with an SSD. It took 1.5 hours to scan 40-50GB (default settings include runtime packers), although as ddrueding has noted...

Hi, haven't seen you for a while - unless you're Gary ;)

I rebooted and got the page file message again, so I removed the 'undeletable' placeholder from the brilliant hack I linked, rebooted, and the autorun.inf was back. Checked the swap file settings, and they were as expected: NO swap file (SSD and 8GB RAM). Clicked on the Set button anyway, and...