NSK2400 build notes

Mercutio

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OSX is at least real Unix and has a real terminal. About 90% of my development practice is on MBPs, I am one of the few holdouts, but I run Xubuntu on a Dell Precision laptop. The keyboard is awful on MBPs, otherwise I would probably switch and install Linux on there.

I think that it's fair to say at this point that all the niceties of UNIX are present on your Linux machine. Apple has nicer fonts but its GUIs will have roughly the same amount of bothersome inconsistency.
 

timwhit

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I think that it's fair to say at this point that all the niceties of UNIX are present on your Linux machine. Apple has nicer fonts but its GUIs will have roughly the same amount of bothersome inconsistency.

Yeah, that's another good reason I don't want to get a MBP, I dislike OSX. I was comparing a MBP with a Windows machine, (e.g. Surface Pro x) when I said at least OSX is real unix.
 

Mercutio

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One of the things that really bothers me about OSX is the frequency with which a designer makes a small button with an icon on it rather than a verbal cue. A perfect example is the Printers window in System Preferences. There's a "+" icon on the left-hand side. It's not even obvious that it's a button, let alone what it does. Sure enough, one of the questions I'm asked most often about OSX is "How do I install a Printer?" For being the company that's supposed to be all about good design, there are a lot of things in OSX's interface that just aren't.
 

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I really notice OSX during most of my day when it comes to organizing windows to get to the content I need and I find it cumbersome to use. I have very few applications installed but the ones I do have installed are mainly because the default tools such as terminal, TextEdit, Windows RDC, Safari, (among others) bother me in many ways that I had to seek out a better alternative. For an OS that at least has roots in a Unix it has a shitty terminal to support this. Using iTerm2 has helped considerably. I spend most of my day in this app. Much like timwhit said, the keyboard is awful to use so rather than stress over it I brought in my own keyboard because of this as well as my own mouse. Both the physical characteristics and the functional operation of key-mappings infuriates me. It greatly annoys me how inconsistent the Home and End keys function in the various utilities I work with. I'm often using these in my day-to-day and it's disruptive when they don't do what one would expect when writing text.
 

Mercutio

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While we're nit-picking, an awful lot of things show up in finder that want to scroll horizontally. I realize that Apple's pointing devices support that via gestures, but not everyone uses Apple's pointing devices or gestures more generally.
 

Will Rickards

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So you know those seagate drives? One appears to be dropping from the system.
Rebooting fixes it. But because I put my programdata on that drive, it causes issues with loading my profile when that happens. So I can't login.
This is like the 2nd or 3rd time it has happened. And reviewing the thread here, something similar may have happened with the samsung drives.

I've cloned it to my spare drive to have a current backup. I haven't got a chance to review the chkdsk scan or run seatools on it yet.

Any ideas on what would cause the drive to disappear if not the drive itself?
The PC is left on when it happens. Usually I'm uploading a batch of photos and leave the computer doing its thing as it take over an hour.
 

CougTek

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It might be because Windows decides to stop powering off the drive when it's not being used aftetr a while in order to save energy. My computer does this with my data drive. I run Windows 8.1.

Unfortunately and unlike on some other devices like network cards, I don't see a section in the drive's properties (device manager) to forbid Windows to put the drive to sleep. There is of course a way to do this, but it might involve changing a registry key or something similar. Google is your friend.
 

Will Rickards

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I don't think I want to prevent it from going to sleep. I just want to ensure it wakes up as it should.
I mean it is in use for a couple hours and then should sleep. The crashplan backups will take a while as well.
But most of the time it is left on I'd expect it to be in a sleep state.

I'm thinking it isn't actually an issue with the drive but with the MB/chipset/driver.
 

Will Rickards

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Anyway I messed with it some more. The power profile already had the hard drive set to always on. I must have set that previously to try and resolve the issue when I had the samsung drives. I tried updating the bios and the chipset driver to the intel storage matrix one.

But it happened again. And this time a reboot did not solve the issue. It required a cold boot.
I'll try switch which sata port it is connected to. If that doesn't resolve it, I'll try swapping in the other drive.
 

Will Rickards

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So I think I had this figured out, started happening when I hooked back up the old UPS and I think because it isn't active pfc supported it must have been causing issues.
So I disconnected the UPS from the computer and all was well. I could leave it on and come back days later and the drive was there and responsive.

Then the other day someone wanted copies of pictures I take for the scouts. And so I transferred a bunch (200GB+) to the backup drive and let it go.
When I came back the next day to check on it, it hadn't completed and wasn't moving. I tried to delete some stuff from the backup drive.
As what I copied was the raws and jpegs and I only wanted the jpegs. Should have used a better copy tool in the first place.
Anyway this did not go well and my backup images on my backup drive disappeared from the explorer view.
I shut the computer down through the windows menu.
When I started it again both my main drive and backup drive show up as raw drives and chkdsk won't check them.
I can login as my boot drive is my ssd.

From what I gather online I need to take my linux boot disk and use ntfsfix to correct the issues.

This makes me wonder whether I had actually solved the issue.
 

Buck

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Will,

I would first clone the disks to new disks (I happen to use X-Ways Disk Clone), then use something like GetDataBack - NTFS to recover the data.

br
 

Will Rickards

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My usb linux stick wouldn't boot. Queue research and finding plenty of others with usb stick booting issues and gigabyte.
So I loaded a DVD and tried that. Yeah it booted.... the first time. Then nothing but problems.
I gave up trying to use that machine. I'm thinking it is actually dying or something. It is old.

I pulled the backup drive out and hooked it up to another laptop with usb to sata adapter. chkdsk (windows 10 version) saw the disk and is working away on it.
I have hopes it will be fine. Once that is done, I'll use that as the destination for recovering the real disk with data I care about.
My usual spare drive I keep on hand currently has the clone of it I did some months ago when it first was unresponsive. So it isn't available for use as a target currently.
I'll use that clone if needed.
 

Mercutio

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Gigabyte boards will boot USB drives just fine as long as Legacy boot is still in the Start Options. Some boards default to UEFI only, which is a tiny headache, but one that should already be overcome by the time Linux gets on a PC. So my vote is dying PC. Which is probably cold comfort at this point.
 

Will Rickards

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This is pre UEFI. 9 years old. Q6600.
I was waiting for Lenovo to release the P50s and P40 laptops to evaluate them as a replacement.

I think it is time to implement the NAS. Suggestions for entry level devices at low cost? Build a cheap system and throw freenas on it?
 

Will Rickards

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Currently I was running 1 3TB drive for data. A second one online but removable for backup images. A third as spare offline. CrashPlan as offsite backup.

With the NAS idea, it would be the primary location for storing my important data. I'd probably do redundant disks in it to avoid a single drive failure being a big problem. But I'd need to figure out how to back it up. I think CrashPlan only likes local drives or something like that. Basically I'd be importing pictures on the laptop and working on them there. Then once done, moving them to the NAS. Maybe a direct attached storage would be better. I don't really need network access. Just local access.
 

Howell

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I currently backup my laptops through Crashplan to an off-site location as well as the NAS. And the NAS also backs up to an offsite location (excluding the backups). One backup destination is linux and one is windows so there is a lot of flexibility there.
 

Howell

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Network attached means more devices can access the destination at any time more easily. I have multiple devices so that it's important to me. That said, the linux destination is a very cheap, low power Dell FX170 and an external single drive.
 

Will Rickards

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So the backup drive ran through chkdsk on the laptop (hooked via usb - sata thing).
It was fine but my actual backup images were not there. As it had no more useful data to me I formatted it. Took forever (I did not do a quick format) but still 0 bad sectors.

Then I was like how am I going to hook both drives up. Then I remembered the laptop has esata port and I had a cable. But it was in use (external drive hooked up to my fios dvr). I ordered another one. Then the question was how to power them. The power adapter for the usb to sata thing says 2.0A, and the drives say 0.7A so I thought I could hook both of them up with a splitter which I had. But this did not work. It wasn't really clear that it wasn't working as both showed up. But any type of activity to both drives proved it wasn't working. So I took the other power adapter from the external drive attached to the fios dvr. Now I had both drives hooked up to this laptop. Keep in mind this is the laptop with windows 10 that up until the recent windows 10 update was having stuttering performance from its own hard drive. It would just seem to pause for a second or two and then continue. And the temps are not my favorite, 60C basically doing almost nothing.

So the data drive ran through chkdsk, it actually did it during start up. Then I could see all the data. Hooray.
So I loaded Macrium Reflect and tried to image it to the backup drive.
It keeps saying insufficient space. Keep in mind the drives are identical.
The partitions listed in the source drive are crazy though. There is the actual data partition which looks normal but then there are like a dozen or more partitions listed that have sizes greater than the drive itself. Clearly the partition table is screwy. As there was only ever one partition. I finally did get it to let me image (not clone) the data partition by itself to the backup drive. And that is running and will be for another day and a half.

Let's hope the laptop stays up for all that time. It has already locked up on me twice when running a full chkdsk checking for bad sectors on the data drive. So I never did get that to complete.

Replacement parts come thursday, right before the big snowstorm apparently, so I'll throw the new guts into my old case this weekend. Probably after sledding with the kids. I intend to use the existing drives in the new machine and see if the problem returns or not. If it does not, it was something in the old guts. If it does, it is the drives themselves. I do intend to order some HGST NAS 4TB drives when they go onsale for $140 again. I might even change to using a RAID1 of the two drives. I haven't decided. I priced some of the smaller NAS boxes and it seemed a better choice money wise to spend $300 and get a general purpose machine.
 

Will Rickards

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So laptop failed again. I gave up on it.

But parts came before the near 3 foot snow storm. So I spent friday night assembling them. Worked great. What's more macrium now saw the data drive without those weird partitions. And it let me image it in forensic mode to the backup drive. Then chkdsk on both found no real problems, though some bad files in the system restore points.

One of my case fans was completely stopped. I didn't notice that. Ordered a couple more.

Anybody happen to have the placeholder for the 5.25" drivebay for this case (antec NSK2400)? I can't seem to find mine and I took out the hot swap drive bay.

It is definitely quite a bit faster. Even the imaging was faster.
 

Will Rickards

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So I think I narrowed it down.
After installing stuff and letting it go (nod32, picasa scanning, crashplan indexing), the machine blue screened a couple times.
I couldn't access folders on the backup drive or certain folders on the data drive. It just hung explorer.
Reviewing the event viewer I see lots of these:
Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.
That port corresponds with the backup drive I had hooked up. Now it is hooked up via esata port whereas before it was hooked up via the hot swap bay. These resets seem to correspond to the noises I was hearing on the hard drive. Now that I disconnected it, the machine is silent once again. The new fans are much quieter too.

So that drive goes into the never to be used again bin.

Which may mean my old system wasn't bad... just that drive. We'll see as time goes on.

Anybody care to interpret this smart data from the data drive?
 

Will Rickards

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So the reset to device messages did not go away after removing that drive. And checking with the Intel Rapid Storage Technology app it thinks port 0 is the data drive.
So I googled this some and it seems other people are experiencing these messages.
So I looked for the updated intel driver, rather than the one from gigabyte's site.
Can I say how annoying that was? They have a driver update utility that doesn't work.
Then they have several versions of RST listed and even within the correct version, there are 5 downloads listed. And the one you probably want is at the bottom. And the page is no real help indicating this.
So I update it and so far no reset messages. But I'll check later tonight again.
 

Mercutio

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Intel's web site is a goddamned marvel of organization compared to HP's. Just be glad you don't have to go looking for that sort of stuff on anything more than a very irregular basis.
 

Handruin

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I can't really offer much help but I will relay that one of my machines suffered a few bad blocks on the primary OS drive and they were remapped according to the SMART data. This was enough to crash/blue-screen the system. I did the same as you and junked the drive and replaced it with another I had and the machine was fine. I'm not using the Intel RSTe controller for mine so I don't have that complication. I guess my point being, a few bad blocks does seem to be more than enough to offer stupid amounts of instability in a system.
 

Buck

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...a few bad blocks does seem to be more than enough to offer stupid amounts of instability in a system.

Indeed it does. SMART is basically a data gathering program, so it won't fix anything. Windows cannot reallocate sectors, nor can it accurately detect the difference between a bad sector and OS corruption issues. The only way to attempt to solve sector issues is to use the manufacturer's tools. If such a tool finds sectors it will attempt to use the internal process that opens up spare sectors. Would I rely on this fix? Not permanently. Bad sectors typically occur because of impact trauma (most likely from the head) or a media defect. Either one of those issues tends to expand over time.
 

Handruin

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Indeed it does. SMART is basically a data gathering program, so it won't fix anything. Windows cannot reallocate sectors, nor can it accurately detect the difference between a bad sector and OS corruption issues. The only way to attempt to solve sector issues is to use the manufacturer's tools. If such a tool finds sectors it will attempt to use the internal process that opens up spare sectors. Would I rely on this fix? Not permanently. Bad sectors typically occur because of impact trauma (most likely from the head) or a media defect. Either one of those issues tends to expand over time.

I agree, I wasn't meaning to allude that SMART would protect me. I've mostly use it as a diagnostic tool for post-error events except for SSDs and their durability monitoring value. In any drive I've had bad sectors if it's under warranty it gets RMA'd otherwise it gets replaced. I've seen bad sectors grow over time and know that it's only a matter of time before things get worse.
 

CougTek

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Intel's web site is a goddamned marvel of organization compared to HP's.
Indeed and the split between HP Inc. and HPE only made it worse. It's faster to search what you're looking for on Google (which often provide a link to what you need on HP's site) than trying to find it by browsing HP's website.
 

Will Rickards

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Okay that reset error didn't go away. Seems both drives I tried on the ESATA port have it reported for them. Though not sure.
I used a bracket that I had with two esata ports and a 4 pin power in the middle. Those were hooked up to sata ports 0 and 1.
But now it happened again with only the ssd (port 3) and hard drive attached (port 2) and of course the DVD-RW drive (port 5). So I'm not sure the port matches up with anything.

Anyway there is another error in the event viewer I've been trying to track down. Actually the reset one is only a warning. So this is the only error reported. It says Event 56, Source: Application Popup "Driver ACPI returned invalid ID for a child device (5)." Seems to occur anytime I start the machine based on the history.

I used one of the old SATA cables for the DVD-ROM drive. Wondering if that is some of the issue. I'll swap it.
 

Will Rickards

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I think I've tracked down the reset. Seems to be the DVD drive. I ordered a replacement.
I tried ripping a CD tonight and it just keeps dropping. Weird as I installed windows from it.
Anyway maybe it was dying. For $20 I just bought another one ASUS DRW-24B1ST.

When just the SSD was attached, no reset message. When I attached the DVD drive, I get the reset message.
I'm going to try just the SSD and hard drive and see if it stays away to confirm.

I also found a firmware update for my hard drive models. I'm thinking about it.
 

Will Rickards

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Confirmed, reset message is no longer with the dvd drive detached. With SSD and hard drive, it doesn't appear.

Flashed the firmware update from CC24 to CC29 on the three seagate 3TB drives. I did it from linux boot flash drive. I couldn't figure out how to run it at first. But I figured it out. sudo -u root ./longfilenamehere.sg-sfx was the command I needed.
Although it warned of data loss, it was non-destructive to the drives data, as I would expect. So after testing it on one drive I did the other two.

I moved the SATA port connections just to have drives on ports 0-3 as per the instructions.
I guess I'll leave them like that even though it is not the easiest cabling job to get them there (had to take out the video card to insert them).
SSD is now port 0, data drive is port 1, dvd drive is port 2 and esata is port 3. Port 4 and 5 are left unpopulated.
The other esata port from the bracket doesn't reach the other onboard sata ports. I don't anticipate needing two so that is fine.

I also had to set some service to automatic instead of manual for the kingston USB3 memory card reader.
I was getting an error about it in the event viewer.
I also found a firmware update for that device and applied it.

Speaking of firmware updates, I found one for the older dvd drive. I suspect it may not be bad per say just incompatible with the intel drivers or something. I mean I installed windows from it just fine. And I was supposed to use those drivers during windows install but I didn't know it. So windows 7 installed just fine but I couldn't see the usb drives and it seemed not to like reading the drivers from the cd that came with it. I forget how I got the drivers on there. I think I used the linux boot cd and copied them from there. I'm not going to mess with updating the firmware on that older dvd drive, not worth the time I think.

Now to figure out what the last error in the event viewer is: child device invalid ID. It must be common to people with this board I would think.

The windows 10 upgrade prompt keeps coming up. I wanted to get the system stable with no errors, then attempt the same type of copy that trashed the earlier one and confirm it works as expected. I don't want to throw a new OS into the mix just yet. I only have a 64GB SSD (Crucial C300) as the boot drive. I used the spare one I had to set everything up rather than the one from the previous install.
 

Mercutio

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You've definitely had more patience with that whole system than I would have. Especially over a bad DVD drive. I'm not saying to set it on fire and then piss on it but I'm just going to say that's something that's made me feel better about a bad DVD burner in the past. ;)
 

Will Rickards

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The new DVD drive worked fine. No reset messages in event viewer. Exact Audio Copy ran just fine. the new Dream Theater - The Astonishing is now ripped and I'm listening to it.

As to mercutio's suggestion, my frustration is really not knowing what caused the problem. I've replaced nearly every component except the hard drives. Both drives originally involved respond fine. The one I used as a backup seems to do the reset or parking noise more than the other drive. But it tests fine, takes data fine. I consider it suspect but not failed. It is exonerated as the cause of the reset messages. That leaves explaining its dropping from the laptop system when I attempted to image the data drive to it. There was a lot of weirdness there. I suspect there is a windows 10 and macrium reflect issue as the weird partitions showed up. And that laptop is suspect itself with its own problems.

I think I'm at the point when I can try reproducing my massive data copying steps and see what happens now. If it succeeds, then the issue could have been the firmware of the drives or some failure in the older computer or even a driver or something. If it fails, one of the drives is the real problem.

As to the Event 56, Source: Application Popup "Driver ACPI returned invalid ID for a child device (5).",
based on my research others with DDR4 memory and the Z170 and B150 chipsets have the same issue. Though others seem to report hanging somewhat related to the realtek audio driver. I have no hangs or system instability or stuttering of any kind. It is pretty fast compared to the old system. The only noticeable delays are when the hard drive has to spin up. People seem to have followed up with the motherboard manufacturer, so I've done the same and opened a support ticket with gigabyte. But I suspect this will be resolved by some bios update or some such.

When picking the DDR4 memory they were out of the 2133 2x4GB crucial kit, so I picked the closest one in price which was a GSkill 2400 2x4GB.
 

Will Rickards

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Amazon had the PNY CS2211 240GB SSD on sale the other day for $65. I bought a couple (one for this box).
HGST 4TB NAS drives went on sale at newegg yesterday/today for $140 (their normal discounted price - nothing spectacular) so I bought two. Thus ends any reuse of parts.

I'll use one as the data drive and one as the backup image/spare. I plan to do monthly drive clones to the spare as my onsite backup, instead of leaving it online and storing the backup images on it.

Current part list for anyone interested.
 
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Will Rickards

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Would you believe that occasionally when I restart windows needs to check the filesystem on the data drive? It finds nothing wrong.
I blame evil computer gnomes.
Maybe a windows 10 install will appease them.

And gigabyte has played the keep asking me for info I gave them when I opened the support ticket regarding the event 56 in the event viewer.
But apparently similar asus boards received a bios update that corrected their issue.
 
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