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Thanks muchly. I just installed 1.3 and promise to use the email client for a week at least to see if I like it. Can't get away from using IE for VPN, much as I wish. :( I've had great results using the Moz browser; it's been a lot more stable than IE 5.5 was for me. I manage to crash IE 5.5 at...

It's called "The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco," by Marilyn Chase. It just recently came out. I've only gotten through the first chapter so far. Oh well. It's nice being a fictional mouse; no fleas. :) Merc, I haven't decided if I'll download Moz 1.3 yet. Isn't it...

Heh, I'm in the middle of reading a book on the bubonic plague that hit San Francisco right around 1900. Brought over by... Rats. ;) Back OT: I figured I'd give the Moz email client another try on my laptop. If nothing else, it's good to learn a new package; I've played with Pegasus, Pine, VM...

The one at work is a lot faster than my home rig; it has a very nice Wildcat 6110 card, something that I cannot afford in my home system. In exchange for having a great CAD setup, I think I can deal with having to use IE exclusively. ;)

I tried the email client that came with Moz 1.0 and promptly went back to OE. Maybe one day I'll give the email client another try, but so far, I only use the browser. At home, I use OE for email and IE for work (VPN) and certain sites that refuse to work with Moz. Otherwise, I love the tabbed...

Doug, thanks for all you've done with this site. Consider the "candy" a token of our appreciation, to borrow the phrase. ;) And thanks to Merc for putting this all together. 'Tis really a great place and a great bunch of folks.

Don't forget to use de-ionized water for any blessing purposes. Don't want to cause a short-circuit or leave any hard water stains. :) I still remember the first time an older engineer told me to run a test drive underwater. I thought he was pulling my leg. Luckily, he told me the trick was to...

I suspect it'd be everyone but Seagate, as they (last I checked) held something like 70% of the high-end market. If each of the remaining competitors starts nibbling away at Seagate's market share, prices should drop and more enterprise systems will start using 15K drives.

:lol: That was great! A disk drive hatchery! :D That could explain the teeth marks on my rear. Forgot my security badge in the car when I tried to get to work. :) (Sorry, I've had a stressful day at work so I'm being silly now) I mentioned 1 year design cycles because that's standard for...

That's what I heard, too. I've never seen a new platform come out after only a few months of work; it usually takes closer to a year at best for a new platform.

I haven't found a local shop that carries SATA controller cards, though. I don't want to get a new motherboard, since my P3V4 is working well for me. Plus, in all honesty, I don't need the speed; I'm getting it for the geek factor. :D

I plan to; it's just a question of when they become available. My sources say they are due any day now in distribution.

SeaBra? You mean that rubbery sock that went over the drive? I've heard some of my snarkier colleagues call it a drive condom. It supposedly helped greatly reduce failure rates due to mishandling. And why were you prying off the chips? Did they get stuck? :D

:oops: Guess I voted incorrectly, then. I was thinking the 250 GB option was in a RAID5 array instead of a single contiguous RAID0 partition. Too bad I can't "unvote" my selection. Serves me right for casting a vote when I'm too tired to think straight.

Heh. I'm a patient person; what can I say? ;) When I'm away from my DSL, I can tolerate 56K dialup pretty easily, since I mainly just surf and do other things that don't take much bandwidth. Same with going from a 10K SCSI workstation at work, to my little laptop at home. I'd still like to...

I think the price is certainly quite attractive. I currently have neither SCSI controller card nor a SATA controller card, so for me, the Raptor+card would be the cheaper option if I wanted more speed from my storage subsystem. Then again, my laptop drive's speed (4200 rpm) doesn't bother me...

Just finished reading it. For all of us that have wanted faster IDE options, I hope WD sells lots of these drives so they (and other HDD firms) know there is enough demand for 10K IDE drives to justify continued work on them. I'd hate for this to be a one-hit wonder.

The rolling blackouts weren't a way to regularly reduce energy consumption. The thinking is if usage is likely to exceed what the grid can safely handle, it's either have rolling blackouts to keep it within a margin of safety, or have a catastrophic grid failure (it's happened before and it ends...

Sounds similar to the breakdown for folks in the US. Most people support an attack only if a UN resolution is passed. Of course, being on the Left Coast as I am the breakdown is probably skewed more against the war than for it. ;)

Nope. With the rolling blackouts of months past, work pretty much required we shut down our systems at night (along with working with dimmer lights during the day). *grumbles* My cube is too far from any windows to get natural light, so it *really* got a bit dim some days. My home electricity...

Hmm. So the USPS box did about the same as the steel sandwich? At least, according to the graphs it looks that way.

For my work workstation, I shut if off when I go home. I'm not counting doing a power-down reboot right around lunchtime if I've been pounding the CAD hard; the system gets too sluggish otherwise. For my home workstation, I shut it off when I'm done for the evening/day. I don't use it very...

It's probably because a surprising number of people want the fastest possible booting drive. Does Linux offer hibernation support? (I have never used Linux, so pardon the potentially silly question.) At work I usually just power on my workstation and take the time to get a fresh mug of water...

Hmm. The numbers look a lot better. That's a good sign, at least. Good funny there, Mercutio. :lol: Of course, if my computer was constantly rebooting itself, I think I'd be worried about something much more serious than boot times! :D

Yep. Elementary school. Had to wait till I got to college before I saw them, as my folks didn't have records in the house. Dad had a nice one. If it's that stuff with purple printing, with that "ditto paper" smell that teachers handed out for homework, then yes. Seen one, live near one...

Whoa, that's a teensy baby something-or-other. Plain avatar here. Hope Disney doesn't come after me. :D I'm not very artistic.

Oh. I've heard them called suspensions or HGA's. Different terminology. Someone had a section of his cube wall covered with them. Haven't seen anything else done with them. I quickly learned why it's better to use pliers when having to pry apart magnets. Must be a form of hazing not to explain...

Flex arms? If you mean the actuators, I've seen some assemble them hodgepodge into abstract sculpture. Of course, another person had a VCM sculpture (it was literally a pile of magnets about a foot tall and a foot wide at the bottom). She had a warning sign up for it. Yes, I work with...

Blanks? I have plenty of regular disks lying around. They make dandy mirrors in the cube for seeing when people are coming around corners and the like. I don't have any blanks, but I know some folks that do. If someone wants it, I can probably scrounge them up. Just make sure it's an aluminum...

Oooh, that looks sweet indeed. Someone in one of my grad classes did a project with an arm that would swing back and forth (think of a metronome's motion, only faster). It had LED's mounted along the length and probably worked on the same principle. Now, how do you mount an LED on a spinning...

My thoughts exactly. Code is such an important part of drive performance, and it's usually the one part that takes the longest to optimize.

Putting an LED on the top head would make it fly unstably, or at the very least, really hurt performance because you'd be adding inertia to the actuator. The inside of the housing is usually black. Sometimes it's a dull aluminum finish (alodyne, I think). I've never seen one shiny; it'd have to...

:lol: The last pic was sweet! blakerwry, you're probably right about only enthusiasts being interested in made-to-fit parts. Still, a marketing person once approached me about selling drives with clear covers already installed (lights, too). These would have the same warranty as a regular...

D'oh! :oops: I kept thinking you'd only need one mold. You're right; you'd just end up with a pretty fancy paperweight that looked just like a drive if you only had one mold. You know, this brings up an interesting idea. How many people do you think would be interested in being able to buy...

If it's like silicone gasketing, it should break down once it gets too hot. I had to bake some in an oven to cure it and couldn't use the regular one in the lab because it didn't get hot enough (needed close to 200 C). I made the mistake of fishing the parts out w/o mitts before it had...

I've read of modelers using Plaster of Paris for molds, first coating the original surface with a light layer of petroleum jelly to make it easier to remove later. Just be careful not to plug up any of the breather holes in the cover (if the drive has any) with plaster. Maybe stick a piece of...

Foams tend to work best when they're compressed. They don't work very well if they're just floating as a barrier. Home Depot carries a selection of foams. A friend used one for getting his case quieter, but I don't remember the exact kind. I believe a closed-cell would work, like maybe a PVC or...

Thanks, CityK. I didn't even know this place existed until recently. :oops:

blakerwry, how did you do the measurements? I've been wanting to do something similar at home but all I have is a Radio Shack SPL meter.