Search results

Whichever. The important thing is that WD drives are just as good at being fish as storing data.

I'm guessing it's something like a trout trying to return to its native stream.

The IBM M1015 cards I use have LSI 9220 chips. I did have to flash them to support target initiator mode, but that takes all of about 90 seconds. I've seen them as cheap as $85. They do work with 6TB drives, SATA drives and with SAS expanders. They seem to be a very good choice for at least...

The overhead for getting large RAID6 arrays up and running is definitely an inconvenient starting point. Perhaps 3 - 4TB single drives are large enough chunks that few people see the reason to extend to multiples of that value?

It's useless when you exceed a 12 - 15TB on a volume because of the statistical certainty of encountering a URE. I usually target storage volumes of ~15TB with parity snapshots to minimize the likelihood of data loss and my important stuff (i.e. not porn) has an extra parity drive and an...

The Multi-OEM project works exceptionally well for building a Windows installer image that automatically configures product keys. I've found this to be useful several times, particularly for Windows 8 machines with no product key or recovery media. I've tested it on Acer and Toshiba machines and...

Perhaps they're meant to be pared with something like SnapRAID (parity snapshots) for additional error correction of presumably stale data? The error rate does seem unreasonably low for stand-alone data storage.

SPDIF is SPDIF but are you sure that the port you're connected to on the TV is an output?

Inexpensive modern AV receivers tend to be kinda crummy from a reliability standpoint. Everything is inexpensive and built around the HDMI ports, which should in theory provide the highest possible fidelity for digital audio. Unfortunately, dying HDMI ports also seems to be endemic to low-end...

Tell them to fuck off. You're doing something productive while you're on a conference call instead of playing Solitaire or Facebook stalking like everyone else.

My porns are already sufficiently well categorized, thank you. :P

Storage Pools are a not-quite-ready-for-big-time option where there's definitely a certain amount of "Well, that's how it's SUPPOSED to work" in Microsoft's documentation vs. an endless stream of "This isn't working" edge cases from people trying to use them. For example, I have a...

It's a Scandinavian ISP of some sort. They clearly did a lot of work and I thought it should be recognized.

Yes. The cheapies.

When I open Seagate USB enclosures they almost always have the eco-type drives in them.

This is pretty awesome.

HDDs are very much an undifferentiated commodity product. Of what benefit would allowing alternative branding be for WD? I mean, besides the fact that its own name is already synonymous with terminal ass cancer. When was the last time Seagate used the Maxtor brand name?

I believe that they historically buy in sufficient volume that they're more concerned with getting a certain number of spindles of a certain capacity at a time rather than any other characteristic or metric. They buy whatever their logistics can give them. During the storage crisis after the...

You might look at a soundbar as a compromise option, if you can find one that supports at least HDMI input (e.g. Yamaha YSP-2x00). You certainly can get low-end receivers with HDMI support for $200 (here in the US, they show up on woot.com fairly regularly), and then it's just a matter of...

At one point, Microsoft was making some noises that the 8 to 8.1 "upgrade" was only going to be available for a year as well. There's probably not a technical reason why there can't be a direct update path and it's in most peoples' interest to be running the newest thing, but I'm sure it'll...

Stuff breaks. Especially on crummy laptops. You probably do have a better machine now, though.

I was toying with the idea of trying a Transcend cheapie since they're priced comparably to common 240GB drives. I just got a 1TB SSD, but M.2 is a straight pipe to PCIe, so I suspect I'd see a qualitative improvement over the drives I have now. It looks like the Samsung is alone at the top of...

Windows 3.1 did not have a startup menu. DOS was more or less the startup menu. You could control portions of startup by editing win.ini or system.ini with a text editor (edit.com et al.) In this case, commenting out the line in system.ini will take care of the error, but IIRC that was a...

You could also start a Linux LiveCD on that machine and probably do useful things.

The NZXT Source 210/Source 220 are my go-to cases. They're less bulky than something like an Antec Sonata Solo, though I don't think you're going to find a mid-tower much under 440mm (17.3"). As an alternative option, why not something like a Silverston LaScala? They're media center chassis that...

It's a laptop and the CPU is soldered in.

I'm sitting in front of a Toshiba Satellite A5005 with a first-generation Core i3 CPU in it. It absolutely refuses to operate with GPU accelerated drivers. Standard VGA? Fine. Software rendering in X? Fine. But if I try to start a GUI that matches the purported capabilities of the panel and the...

2012r2 Essentials is... lacking compared to SBS2011. Specifically, it lacks Exchange, Sharepoint and MSSQL (i.e. all the things that justified SBS). Exchange won't even install on r2 Essentials. The only nifty feature it does have is deduplicating client backups, something that must've been...

One of my customers has an Avaya phone system that depends on Exchange for functionality. The owner doesn't want to pay for new Windows Server stuff, so I migrated his SBS 2003 installation to Xen on a fairly modest Linux box (i7 2600 w/ 16GB RAM) that handles file access with Samba. The process...

You can add storage. The guys selling the knock-off versions of the Intel stick even say they can get units with more RAM added, quoting $80 for 8GB.

I don't think Marvell makes a bad SATA controller, but I've only used them in simple SATA mode. I'm more inclined go Handy's route and use an LSI-based card for SAS and expander card support. Oh and high-density cabling, though I suspect that's not a problem for anybody else on SF. Is anybody...

Toss up whether this belongs in the Crap Laptops or the Media Appliances thread, but I clicked this one first so... Intel has moved in to the PC on a Stick form factor. Broadwell-based Atom CPU, 32GB internal storage, Windows 8.1 Bing Edition, 2GB RAM, uSD slot.

Interesting. I've not found a situation where the copy completely failed in that fashion.

Windows NT needed mind-boggling hardware for the early 1990s, sed. Requirements for NT 3.1 were 12MB to boot and 16MB to be functional, probably $3000 worth of just RAM at the time. If you had a PC expensive enough to have that kind of horsepower, it almost certainly had exotic 7200rpm SCSI2...

I just had a user try to describe their computer issue to me. They managed to use the word "Download" as four different parts of speech and in place of at least three different nouns in a single sentence. As near as I can tell, "download" is both the name of the device that they look at and/or...

See my post, above. TrueImage (and most other Windows tools that do the same thing) can clone bigger to smaller, but only if all or at least most user data (or whatever is taking up space) has been moved off the drive. Depending on the PC in question, one process may be faster than the other. I...

I just set it to 8GB on pretty much everything. The way I see it, if the machine actually needs more swap space than that, it needs more RAM or better hardware that can support more RAM. I have one server that occasionally uses more than the 32GB it has, but since the machine will probably be...

Given the age of the drive and the fact that it apparently still has useful data, I wonder if it was pulled from some kind of non-PC equipment. One of my customers has a (photographic) film printing system that runs an operating system called ROX that originally used early-90s era x86 hardware...

It would be useful to plug it straight in to something that natively supports IDE. Maybe you have an old Pentium4 or AthlonXP sitting around? We don't really know if the problem is the USB bridge or the drive itself, so just the fact that no file systems are detected MIGHT not be the end of...

I left mine without, though I wasn't terribly aggressive with overclocking. My 5930k is in an NZXT Source 220, which is pretty well ventilated all by itself.

That's the story of dev tools and really at that point you're talking less about a laptop and more about a portable workstation. Whose hardware is it? HP? Lenovo? Apple?

I spent the better part of the afternoon refurbishing my old T61p. I upgraded it to 8GB RAM and installed a 240GB M100 and a new battery. I'm probably cheating because of the SSD, but it was pretty funny to watch it smoke a brand new i3-based Satellite C55 in terms of startup/browser load time...

I'm not as fond of Samsung's tablets as its phones, but for $250, a Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 is a pretty solid compromise device. It has a 2560x1440 IPS screen, 2GB RAM and a 128GB-capable uSD slot. Only 16GB internal storage, but it only weighs 311g. Seems like a pretty solid choice.

They're neck and neck for desktop applications, but Lunar's specific needs are almost all content creation-related. That stuff eats extra cores and better memory bandwidth for breakfast. The pricing difference on DDR4 will go away soon enough. There's definitely a case to be made for the less...

Even that can be a trick. I've run in to boards that won't update if the flash drive is over a certain size or pukes if the drive isn't formatted with exFAT.

1366 motherboards are UNBELIEVABLY primitive by current standards. It was always a niche interface and those boards were only made for, what? 24 months? With zero consumer refreshes and maybe one Server/Workstation lineup refresh. If you're even thinking about going back for another round of...

All I want is something more than 1080 vertical pixels to become the standard. I absolutely cringe when I run in to vomit machines with less than 800 vertical pixels, but at this point that is the norm. It feels like desktop display technology is moving backwards, especially since it's well...

I have a huge amount of storage space. It's used for storing everything I want to store. Some of it is porn. Most of it is not. It's also used and enjoyed by anyone who has access to it (predominantly through Plex), not just for myself.

Why do panel makers hate vertical pixels?

Intel controllers can do RAID0 with SSDs. Who knows what that guy is doing? There's no explicit mention of RAID there. Maybe he just owns every single game and needs a place to put them all.