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1. Take some old desktop you already have sitting around. Install the smallest, crappiest drive you have sitting around and five other, identical drives that are not Seagate or WD "Eco" models. 2. Install FreeNAS. Configure the drives as a single zPool. Turn on SMB networking. Share the zPool...

It's pretty close to zero, except as a stupid penis-measurement tool. The funny bit is seeing scores THAT ridiculous on a virtual computer in the first place. If nothing else, there's no way that number has any real meaning if it's associated with the actual video hardware in that computer.

Is it really such a horrible burden to have a two drive configuration with data on a magnetic drive?

Apps Sync works. It's $50/user/year though. Or free if you switch them to Thunderbird.

The problem is, OCZ just has no support at all. Maybe they have a zillion engineers optimizing the hell out of their firmware, but since I've always communicated with the same human being doing support, I wonder if it's just that one guy doing everything for everybody who has a problem in North...

The drives definitely do drop out of Windows SoftRAID also. They can't even keep their shit together for an ICH10 RAID1 of two drives.

I am absolutely talking about RAID. You're worried about bad sectors screwing up irreplaceable files, and RAID5/6 or distributing the data in a zPool would absolutely help guard against that. It's not perfect or infallible but it's a start. You should probably also look at an online backup system.

I find it endlessly amusing that an instance of Vista running on VMware Workstation on my T420 has a Windows Experience Index score of 5.7 out of 5.9. And it has three 5.9 subscores. That's some fine emulatin'.

Apparently WD isn't the only one that is aware their shit is broken. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess these are just Hitachi 5400rpm drives with a different sticker on them.

I kind of like what the EU is doing, actually prosecuting a banker for manipulating markets. It would be nice if the US were like that.

I haven't found any way to readily monitor for corruption. Presumably the CRC data from a RAID5 or a zPool would help out quite a bit. It's not like you don't have plenty of drives sitting around to do such a thing.

It's not my thing, but I can respect it. Those guys legitimately know how to play their instruments and the ability to improvise is way, WAY harder than it sounds. For jazz I just prefer small ensembles. I think the most recent Jazz recording I've purchased was something by Christian McBride.

It is my observation that heavy metal fans mostly tend to be quiet and unassuming folks in person. The obnoxious meathead frat brother that I'd more readily accuse of closet queerdom is pretty much not a heavy metal fan. Also, I have seen a picture of Coug. I'm not going to speculate as to his...

Sure, but on the other hand, why subject yourself to that when you can pay 2% more and get something that actually has a decent warranty? Intel's RMA turnaround time is in my experience around two business days. Regardless of what that drive will be worth in three years (hint: not a whole lot)...

I most certainly have. My copies of the included DVD-Audio discs have been ripped to multichannel .FLAC even.

Linux and Windows Softraids both work that way. So does ZFS. That said, there may be particulars where one implementation plays nicer than others.

I can probably dig up receipts. I know I was getting them for under $100.

I'm doing with them what I'd do with any other drive, especially when I have a whole, whole bunch of them. I'm only using half of what I have; ultimately I don't think I'd trust anything less than a RAID51-like configuration to begin with.

Computer speakers in the headphone jack. Honestly, that's probably a better deal than the crappy speakers you'll find on a 19" display anyway.

Isn't the deal with gaming setups "push to talk?" vs. having an open channel all the time? Is that configured by the game or by the hardware?

This post makes me sob and wish it were last summer when those drives got down to $95.

I see his point. They don't put everything on the install media but why should he have to do something like that? Windows of course isn't any better. I spend stupid amounts of time maintaing install images for it, too.

Looks like I'm going to need a gaming microphone. Do they make those without headsets?

27 hours after setting up a 12-drive Linux SoftRAID, mdadm tells me the array is degraded. People suggest various fixes online - there's a tool that modifies the firmware to support proper error checking (I'm guessing that voids the warranty); some people suggest disabling NCQ; others claim that...

As long as you avoid a couple chipsets, 802.11 normally works just fine. Unfortunately, one of the vendors that's most hostile to *nix is Atheros, which is ridiculously common in cheap hardware. To me the bigger issue with mainsteam Linux distributions is that they keep fucking with the GUI...

My music of choice is invariably some kind of "serious" or art music. Most of it is classical. I like smatterings of jazz and I listen to some composers whose work is primarily in the form of soundtrack composition or scoring. I'm a big fan of the Holy Minimalists, romantics, impressionists and...

I don't know how much people know about the game universe or setting so... The current game reality is 3048 or 3049. That's after the the fourth succession war of classic Battletech, after the recovery of the Star League memory core by the Grey Death Legion but substantially before the Clan...

The game doesn't launch until the second week in August so you've got some time.

That is the Iraqi Information Minister from just before the second Gulf War.

The state of the world is such that in 2012, there is Apple-people reality and factual reality and now there are all kinds of people who can't tell the difference.

The forums say an average match is 10 - 15 minutes. That seems about right to me. The other interesting thing is that the nature of play lends itself to individual instances rather than a huge shared world. The way it appears to work is that you're dropped on some random world-in-conflict...

No no no. It will specifically be ipads because the Androids don't do anything right. Apple said so and that means it must be true.

I've been slowly reading the developer stuff and it sounds like they've got a good idea on how to combine typical MMO progression (Skill and technology trees) with traditional Battletech. They make a big deal out of player skill being a factor, but most MMOs are all about gear, gear, gear. Even...

I'm only slightly bothered by the mandatory update deal. I think that's functionality that a lot of people would expect to be present. After all, it's more or less what their computers and phones do already. Knowing that they work that way, I wouldn't buy one for myself, but I'm not sure I would...

They have to respond that way for their enterprise customers and investors. Otherwise they're not being good stewards of the good ship RIM and their asses will get canned. Which, granted, probably beats going down with the ship.

No, ipads. Try to keep up. ;)

I can't decide if I should buy in to Mechwarrior Online. I want to play a Battletech game. I don't know anyone else who would.

I think I could do a lot with 48TB of extra disk space if I actually trusted it to be reliable, or if I didn't care about reliability. I can't afford to add that much to my backups. I guess I could mirror my existing NAS, were there a way to make sure the drives operated well enough as an array...

Also, I am now considering the ramifications of what RAID111 would be. I'm thinking It would be a duplex (two controllers) copy of a mirror set on two different physical machines. Which, for WD hardware. sounds like about what I'd need.

I am sitting here thinking that I have two completely empty Norco 20-bay chassis sitting in a closet at home. The drives don't work in RAID but maybe I can set them up in FreeNAS each as an individual zPool or something. Or I could do something with WHS, where I know they'll behave well enough...

I see you have grasped the nature of my conundrum.

The definition of conflicted: One of my students just gave me 24 WD20EADS 2TB Caviar Green drives. They were made in late 2010 but they've never been used. They were classed by his employer as scrap because they work so poorly in RAID arrays.

I suspect that unless sales numbers are absolutely stellar, the market will declare it a failure and furthermore we'll get a whole bunch of "the age of the PC is over" nonsense out of the tech press. I don't think Windows 8 is going to be particularly well received, but this could be the start...

I have no idea. My students say the places in Hammond tend to be priced higher. Personally I think letting off Fireworks anywhere near other people should be grounds for summary execution. But whatever. There are definitely two giant warehouse stores at Burns Harbor.

Practice things like this. You'll have to work on looking innocent and sincere when you say them, though. "It tripped." "No, I don't know how that dent got there." "That server made me do that to it." "Sometimes you have to hit one to keep the rest in line."

Well SD, you're pretty much driving right by my apartment and my office. There's a giant red barn-thing that's just off the US20 Burns Harbor exit on 80-94 that is by far the biggest fireworks store in our little corner of Indiana. The places by the state line are actually priced a little higher...

To be honest, computer stuff is kind of boring right now. Hardware is at this ridiculous science fiction point where even the cheap stuff is generally pretty awesome, and the high end is simultaneously vast overkill and and legitimately affordable. We're really just left to be annoyed about...

This is one of those weeks when absolutely nothing is going to happen at work. If a national holiday falls on a Wednesday, they might as well call the whole week off. I have three classes scheduled this week and at the moment only one person has told me that they are coming to each of them.

No, the ones from Ireland have pots o' gold and shamrocks on them and are called Leprechauns. time doesn't have any shamrocks or pots o' gold. Iceland, on the other hand, is pretty well known for the fact that its citizens are about as likely to believe in elfs as they are in Jesus.

Where are we with this "Hairy Polite Mexican" issue?