PianoPlayer88Key

 

 

 

There's several shots there cause I was trying out different camera angles, but I think I'd be going with B or C or something between those when I stream with the acoustic piano.  You can see the laptop overhangs the piano action & strings quite a bit, I anticipate the Win Max 2 would be quite a bit smaller and not overhang nearly as much.  And if it would open up to 180° I could even put it on the music shelf probably.

 

 

Here's the Clevo sitting on the Roland.  (Ignore the wood stand it's sitting on, I would be using an X style keyboard stand, not the wood nightstand thing.)

 

 

Previous title: [Laptops] Want to replace 8 year old Clevo desktop replacement laptop with something much smaller, considering GPD Win Mini or Max 2 (7840U+64GB+2TB)

 

Okay so I've had this topic sitting in test posts for about 2½ months now, thinking about things, researching a bit more ... and I need to figure out what to do here.  I'll have a very condensed post here, with a LOT more details in spoilers at the end.

 

Anyway, I'm wanting to replace my Clevo P750DM-G laptop (i7-6700K, 64GB RAM (have used as much as 308GB pagefile on top of that), 12TB in 4 SSDs, GTX 970M 6GB, 1080p 15.6", battery life in minutes) with something a lot easier to carry around with me.

 

I'm looking at the GPD Win Max 2 (7840U, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD), and I hear rumblings about an 8840U coming soon, and saw a vendor mentioning a 4TB SSD but no option to buy it.  I also considered the Win Mini, but I think the keyboard would be a bit small.  (I guess I'll just have to spend the $50-60/pair on the Carhartt cargo pants (with a big enough pocket for the WM2) I saw at a local sporting goods store.)

 

There's also a 4G LTE addon available, but I saw a lot of complaints about it.  I'd like to be able to use the internet when I'm away from WiFi without having a 50GB hotspot limit, and having full desktop interface and multitasking / virtualization you can do on a laptop and can't do on a phone.

 

I may want to stream from it in 4K with a few cameras and microphones plugged in. (Mostly I'd be stationary / plugged in, streaming playing an acoustic piano (like my Baldwin uprights), but could envision "roaming around" streaming situations and/or using my digital piano when I don't have access to an acoustic.)  I do have a Sabrent 7+3 port powered USB hub.

 

Also I'd like a way to bring my existing SSDs with me (maybe a USB enclosure) and a battery bank to be sure I have all day plus battery life.  Also I've been generally seeing good reviews on both the Win Max 2, and on Droix, so I think I'd have some confidence there.

 

I've been considering waiting until Q3 2025 to get one (hoping that something would come out in the size range of the GPD Win Max 2 or Mini with at least 40-48+ CPU threads, 384-512+GB RAM, 8-12+TB SSD for <$2.2K), but I'm getting tired of my current laptop's limits. I'm planning to not replace this until probably at least the early 2030s, and would be upset if the configuration I really want came out within a couple years.

 

I'm looking at buying from GPDstore.net or Droix Global, as I've heard good things about them and they have a 2 year warranty.  Should I order one as soon as the variant I want is in stock?

I'm looking at replacing my 8 year old laptop hopefully fairly soon.  It's just way too big, way too little battery life, and while it was fairly high end when I originally got it, I have long since far exceeded its capabilities.

 

 

I adapted some combinations of questions from various forums that had "what laptop should I buy? fill out this form" sections, and will put my answers inside a spoiler a bit farther down, since that section is pretty long.   I'll post a few basic things here first...

 

My current laptop is a Clevo P750DM-G, same as the Sager NP9753, Eurocom Sky X4, Origin EON15-X, configured with an i7-6700K, 64GB DDR4-2133 (4x16GB), total of 12TB of SSDs (2TB & 4TB each M.2 NVMe & 2.5" SATA), GTX 970M 6GB, 1080p 60Hz display, 230W power brick, etc.  I've already replaced the battery once, and I recently tried powering it on with just battery and it died as it was getting to the Windows login screen.

I'll be doing a fair bit of multitasking, running virtual machines (with discord running in each, or possibly 1080p video encodes), among other things, and I'll want to be able to carry it with me.  

I realize that I probably won't find "the perfect" laptop for my needs.  (For example, I've seen my committed usage reach 370+ GB a couple times a few years ago, and I don't know of any laptop with enough RAM so that I wouldn't need pagefile at all.)

 

That said, I'm particularly eyeing the GPD Win Mini, specifically the 7840U + 64GB RAM + 2TB SSD variant, probably without the grips, as I want something that will fit in my pants pockets  I currently wear Wrangler relaxed flex 38x30 jeans or cargo pants, but I wonder if there might be some other pants with slightly bigger pockets that might fit the Win Max 2 in one pocket and a DSLR camera (or maybe a Panasonic LX10 if I also get one sometime, idk yet but that's off topic for this post, my Panasonic FZ1000 doesn't fit) in the other.  As I said, I'd also consider the WIn Max 2, main thing I want is portability, be able to carry it with me without having to wear a case all the time, etc.

 

My budget will allow for those GPD devices, and if I could find a better config, for example more RAM, more CPU cores and threads, etc, in the same physical size, I might be willing to consider going as high as what I paid for my current laptop's configuration (about $2200 or so, as upgraded).

 

I might be fairly flexible on when I buy - anytime between later this month and Q4 2025, but leaning toward no later than Q1 or early Q2 2024.  (I would prefer to order something like the GPD Win Mini when it's readily available, and not have to wait weeks or months for it to ship after ordering.)

I'm located in southern California, a bit east of San Diego (near the edge before it starts going from suburban to rural), about an hour and a half or so without traffic from the Tustin Micro Center, if that would influence where I buy from.  (I'd prefer to not do overseas shipping, like Ali Express.  A Reddit post I saw mentioned Droix and Indiegogo, or are there other options for GPD or similar devices?)

 

Should I consider going with one of those GPD devices, or is there something else I should look at instead? 

 

The Win 4 is kind-of the wrong form factor for me, and I need a physical keyboard.  Also having internet / cell data on the go (that's not limited by some hot spot plan) would be very nice.  (I'm currently with T-Mobile on my Pixel 6a phone.)

 

 

1. What is your budget?

I’m thinking around $1000-1300 or so (price of top variant of GPD Win Mini / Max 2), but would be willing to consider up to about $2200 (what I paid for my current laptop config including upgrades), or would prefer as low as $300-550 (prices that netbooks were in the mid 2000s or smartphones in the early 2010s, I think) but don’t think I’ll find what I’m looking for in that range.

2. What (screen) size laptop do you prefer?

Netbook / handheld PC size, like around 7” screen but might consider 10” screen too.

3. What country do you live in / would be buying the laptop?

USA.  I’m about an hour and a half (or more with traffic) from the Tustin, CA Micro Center.

4. Any brands you prefer or don’t like?

No specific preferences now.  I had some ideas several years ago but things change and those preferences are likely obsolete now.  (If prompted, I could possibly answer some questions as to what I’m looking for in whether to buy from a particular brand.)

5. Would you consider a refurbished laptop?

No, I’d prefer new with a full warranty.  (And I don’t think what I”m looking for exists in a laptop that’s old enough to be refurbished anyway.)

6. What are some primary tasks you’ll be doing? (besides or in addition to games)

Oh boy, where do I start, or how do I condense it.  Basically everything that I’ve done with my current laptop, and then some.  I do a ton of multitasking, might have several (I anticipate upwards of 20 or 30 or maybe more) virtual machines running.  Each of them might have a discord app plus a few office apps or browser tabs open, or, some live video playing, while simultaneously encoding 1080p 60fps 6-8 mbps H.264 video.  

I could consider doing some of the multi video encodes on my existing desktop, but the way I want to do it doesn’t work at all.  (It has a Ryzen 5950X, 128GB DDR4-3600, GTX 1060 3GB, a 1TB NVMe boot SSD and several 8-18TB hard drives.)  I want to keep each audio/video source isolated for the video encodes, so was thinking of doing them in separate VMs since I don’t otherwise know how to keep different browser sources separated.  And, I’d like to be able to have a one-button kill-all, without killing everything else, so I was thinking of running those VMs nested inside another VM, which I could then kill if I wanted to without affecting everything else.  Problem is, just PLAYING video inside a nested VM in my desktop is like a few seconds per frame or something like that.

 

7. Will you be taking the laptop with you or leaving it on your desk?

I’ll be carrying it with me pretty much all the time, so it needs to be portable, that’s why I’m looking for a small one.  I want to be able to carry it hands free without having to carry a case, whether it be a sling type case or a backpack.  I currently wear Wrangler 38x30 relaxed flex pants, either the regular jeans / denim type, or cargo pants, so I’d want it to fit in one of the front pockets of those.  (I’d also be open to considering other pants with larger pockets if I could find them, but I won’t be putting it in a back pocket.)

 

8. Will you be playing games with the laptop? If so, what games or types of games, resolution, settings, fps is desired?

Gaming isn’t very important for this, so an iGPU would probably be fine.  If I do play games, it would mostly be older ones, like early 2000s and older, at lower resolutions and settings like 720p or 900p and 30 or 60 fps, as long as it’s locked at that fps and not jumping all over the place.  (A few example games include Team Fortress Classic, Total Annihilation, Commander Keen, Castle of the Winds, Sopwith 2, Alleycat, and others from that general era, mostly retro games.)

9. How much battery life do you need?

I’d like it to last all day if possible, with charge to spare. I mean, from very early in the morning before early shift workers (like managers at restaurants that serve breakfast) are rolling out of bed, until after bartenders have gotten home and settled into bed after bars close.  I’d be willing to consider supplementing a built-in battery with an external battery pack, like the same concept as the power banks I have for my phone.

 

10. Would you prefer to see the notebook first, or be willing to buy it online without handling it first?

I would prefer to see and try it first, but would be willing to buy one that’s not available locally.  (It would help if it has a good return policy that basically means if something doesn’t work out, I’d only be out time, not money, if I get one then return it.)

11. What operating system do you prefer?

I’d prefer WIndows 10, and would also be fine with Linux.  I dont’ really like WIndows 11 or any OS for PC that requires a cloud account, and Mac or Chrome OS wouldn’t work for me.

 

12. What ports do you need? (for example USB, headphone, display, etc)

I’d like at least a few USB ports (I do have a 7+3 port hub too), and a 3.5mm jack for sure.  As for display, those aren’t as important but if it does have something I’d want HDMI or DisplayPort.

13. What screen resolution do you prefer?

I’d like a minimum of 1920x1080.  I’d also consider 2560x1440, and might not reject 3840x2160, but, with the size laptop I’m looking for, 4K might be a little too high resolution.  I’ve been able to read text that’s like 0.5 to 0.8 mm tall, or see an individual pixel on a 538 ppi phone screen, but, I’m 42 and my eyes aren’t expected to get better as I age, so those days are probably numbered.

14. Do you prefer a glossy or a matte screen?

I’d prefer a matte, non-reflective screen.  I might be using the laptop outdoors a lot, and don’t want the direct sun to be glaring in my eyes off the screen.

15. Is looks or style important?

No, except I don’t want fancy RGB or gamer-like styles.

16. How much storage space do you need?

I already have 12 TB of SSDs in my current laptop, which I would like to be able to take with me and use with the new one.  (There’s two 2TB and 4TB SSDs, one each M.2 NVMe and 2.5” SATA.)  I don’t think any laptops the size I”m looking at exist with two 2.5” bays and two M.2-2280 slots, so I’d be fine with getting an external enclosure or a few that would let me use them.  (I’d just prefer that they be no slower with the external interface with the new laptop, than they were with the internal interface with the old laptop.)

17. How soon do you plan to buy the laptop?

It could be as soon as later this month (but I don’t really care about any Christmas rush), or as late as a couple weeks before TwitchCon 2025 or 2026, whichever is the next one I go to.  (I’m thinking of skipping 2024, as my experience at 2023 and 2022 weren’t the greatest, but still may want to go again sometime cause 2019, 2017 and 2016 were awesome for me, especially 2019.)  I’m leaning toward possibly Q1 2024, maybe spilling somewhat into Q2 2024.

18. How long do you want to keep the laptop?

I’d like to keep it longer than I’ve had my current laptop (since late 2015), so more than 8 years.  I had been planning to wait to replace my laptop until DDR6 was widely available, but that’s not happening.  Maybe this one could last me until DDR7 or DDR8 RAM is out?

19. How long could you do without the laptop if it failed?

It depends on where I am and what’s going on when it fails.  If it’s at home (or I’m just out on the town during a normal day), I could just use my phone or desktop PC for some things, and wait a while to have it repaired.  But, if I’m at some event (whether it’s across town, or out of town or out of state), I’d  need something working within a few hours or so, with my data, apps, settings, open tabs, etc.

20. Would you be willing to pay extra for on-site warranty?

I’d prefer something that’s good enough quality so I don’t have to worry about that, or something that’s easily repairable.  If I had to though, I don’t ant to spend more than about 5% the total cost of the laptop or something like that.

21. What stores would you consider buying the laptop from?

I’d prefer established / well known stores, like Amazon, Newegg, Micro Center, Best Buy, Adorama, B&H, and would be willing to consider others if I knew more about them, heard consistent good reports on their reputation, etc.  (For example i’ve seen antonline mentioned various places but know pretty much nothing about them, and there might be others.)

 

22. Do you need an optical drive?

No, I rarely use them anymore.  If needed, I have an external ASUS DVD Writer I could plug in.

23. Do you prefer any particular form factor, for example 2-in-1?

I’m mostly looking at standard landscape clamshell laptops, but would also be willing to consider a 2-in-1 or detachable device.  (Come on now, why is a King Missile song from 1992 coming to mind….)

24. How / would you prioritize things like build quality, performance, battery life?

I’d prefer a balance of all 3, and don’t want anything to suck but would prefer them be fairly good all around.  I can be El Klutz-o, so I don’t want something that readily breaks.

 

25. Do you need certain other features, like touch screen, fingerprint reader, good keyboard / touchpad, color, webcam, speakers, etc?

Most of those aren’t necessary, but what it does have, I want it to be good quality and reliable.  (I suppose a touch screen would be nice, and I’d prefer the touchpad have very good palm rejection, or be behind the keyboard.)  A webcam would be nice, 720p 30fps or 1080p 60fps would be good enough.  Hopefully the speakers, if it has any, don’t suck too much.  For color, black is preferred but I’d maybe consider other dark colors like blue, green or a few others.  

I’m fine with a smaller than normal keyboard, would like to be able to reach all the way across it with my four fingers not including the thumb.  I can reach Win+L with the 2nd and 5th finger on the same hand with some stretch, or almost L-Shift+Backspace with thumb + 5th finger on my desktop’s Logitech K270 (but I mash a few keys in between on that one).  If I could reach R-Ctrl+Esc or L-Ctrl+F12 with the 4 finger span, that might be nice, as long as i’m not mashing keys in between.  (Back in the late 1990s to early / mid 2000s, I had a TI-92 Plus graphing calculator, and could type well enough on that.  Actually still have it but don’t use it hardly at all anymore.)

Also a numpad would be nice, and I’d be fine with an external one since laptops as small as what I’m looking at don’t have one built in.

26. What are some other specs you’re looking at, for example CPU, RAM, or other specs?

I’d like at least a Ryzen 7840U and 64GB RAM at minimum, but would prefer enough cores, threads and RAM for the extensive 20 or 30 or more virtual machine multitasking I mentioned earlier.  Also I’ve had a couple occasions with my current laptop where I blew way past its 64GB RAM, and counting the pagefile, had 370+ GB RAM committed.  If I could avoid using pagefile completely that would be really nice.
I’ve been thinking recently, I’d like something responsive enough so that once I’ve ever opened / loaded something once, whether it was 0.08 seconds or 8 decades ago, I could ever after recall that same resource right away - faster than my display’s refresh rate.  (Now what do do about the bottleneck that is my own memory, remembering WHAT I want to re-open or alt+tab to )

 

27. Any additional info you want to share?

I’m honestly doubtful that anything on the market today will come all that close to meeting my needs.  I’ve been eyeing the GPD Win Mini, specifically the 7840U, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD variant, or if it’s not too big, might consider the Win Max 2 with the same specs.  I’d like to know if there’s something better that’s either available, or coming soon (and I’d be willing to wait as late as 2025 or 2026 if there’s a huge improvement coming, for example a GPD Win Mini with a 40-48+ thread CPU, half a TB of RAM, workstation-level GPU, etc), or should I just go ahead and buy something like the current Win Mini or Max 2?  (I’d prefer to buy one when it’s actually available, looks like for now it’s a bit too early to put in an order for the Win Mini yet.)

 

Android 14 ~ Windows 11

Android 13 ~ Windows 10

Android 12 ~ Windows 8

Android 11 ~ Windows 7

Android 10 ~ Windows Vista

Android 9 ~ Windows XP

Android 8 ~ Windows ME/2000

Android 7 ~ Windows 98

Android 6 ~ Windows 95

Android 5 ~ Windows 3(.1)

Userbenchmark and videocardbenchmark / passmark don't list the 7900 XTX yet, but UB says the RTX 4080 is 6,485% faster than the HD 3870, and VCB scores the 4080 at 34648 vs the 571 they give the 3870.  The 3870 isn't listed on UL / TimeSpy as it doesn't support DX12, and I'm not sure where's a good game benchmark repository to look for benchmarks of GPUs that are a couple decades or more apart in age; passmark has pretty much been the only place that I can do wide-range comparisons, for example the RTX 4090 vs the Rage 128 Pro, or the GeForce2 MX.  (I'd call some of those lower end benchmarks in question though, for example it says the GeForce3 Ti at score 3 matches the GeForce2 MX at 3 which I'm pretty sure was not the case... any ideas of a better site that lets me compare benchmarks of every video card that has ever existed, even going all the way back to, say, the IBM graphics adapter in the original 1981 IBM PC, or even the original Apple 1 or before that? ) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Okay so this is super annoying ... I've been editing this (in the
> drafts section) and at least a few times now I've gotten most of the
> way through, then made a mistake and hit Ctrl+Z to undo ... and it
> didn't just undo that last little mistake I did, it undid almost
> EVERYTHING I'd been working on.

Yeah I know how that goes.  The forum needs good emacs integration.
Mail-mode is your friend.  I think I already said quite a while ago
that it needs a mailing list ...

 

 

 

► 001 - emacs / mailing list

Ahh, it's been a while since I've participated on a mailing list, but I remember the ">" characters for quote replies.  (I've also seen other forums that allow you to nest multiple levels of quotes ... I was manually doing that in my draft for my previous reply, although I took those out of the final post.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Also some of my replies to various points were getting pretty long.
> I left them in spoilers in case you want to see more details, but I

Spoilers?

 

► 002 - spoilers

Spoilers are those boxes that say "reveal hidden contents".  People use them for various purposes, I'm using them so that longer blocks of text are initially visually compressed, if you want to read them you click/tap "show hidden contents".  (The post would have been even longer if I had left them readily visible.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> put some condensed comments outside the spoilers.  (There may be a
> couple other things in spoilers that are pointed out, those were
> originally going to be in spoilers anyway even if I didn't put the
> other things in spoilers.)

Huh?

There's no way I could edit this on the web site.  I've copied it into
emacs so I can edit it in mail-mode, and I guess it'll best to paste
it later as code.

In case it becomes difficult to reply to, let me know and I'll edit
the post and paste it as not-code.

 

 

► 003 - emacs / mail mode

It took a bit of effort, but I was able to take it out of the code box and prepare / format it to reply.

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> For now, re: the original post topic ... I think I'll get a couple
> 18TB WD Ultrastar HC550 (0F38459 / WUH721818ALE6L4) drives, they're
> available from B&H for $320 each.

Ah that's what I thought last night when I was looking out for early
black friday offers.

 

 

→ 004 - black friday, 18TB $320 ea

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> (I was also considering 20TB WD Ultrastar HC560 (0F38785 /
> WUH722020BLE6L4) for $380 each from Newegg, but that's a pretty big
> jump in price for just an extra 2 TB, so I think I'll go for the
> 18TB drives.)  I just need to order soon, as they do Sabbath there
> (they're Jewish) and their checkout is closed from Friday sunset to
> Saturday sunset NYC time.

Hm, I found a seller that apparently has newer releases of the same
drive, and the newer ones cost like 150 more.  So it's all relative.

 

 

► 005 - newer release, same drive
I think I've seen a couple things like that, at least on the 20TB drives, there's 2 versions of the same 20TB HC560 or whatever it is, and one site said on the older one's page that there was a newer one, and linked to the other one.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Update: Ordered 2x 18TB 0F38459 from B&H earlier today (a few hours
> before sunset in NYC), hopefully they'll be here next Wednesday
> (16th).

nice

 

 

► 006 - nice, after ordering 2x 18TB

Turns out I wasn't early enough for it to ship out before Friday sundown, but hopefully it'll still be here by Wednesday.  (Earlier when I was looking on Newegg on the 10th, it was saying estimated delivery Nov 11, then when I refreshed the page later (I think Friday morning or so) it said estimated delivery Nov 14.)

Update: Came this afternoon (Wed, 16th), now gotta get my system ready to install them and reboot to Linux so I can start doing some data transfer.  (Windows might not see some of the files, and there's at least one ext4 partition on one of the drives.)

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> > Yes, that's called fake raid.  When you use that and your
> > mainboard fails, you will have to find one that can read the
> > disks, so using fake raid isn't an option.
>
> Ahh.  (And I'm guessing real raid would be with a hardware card like
> an LSI 9211-8i or similar?

Something like that, I guess.  Hardware RAID should have it's own
cache and a backup battery.

 

 

► 007 - hardware raid

Ahh, I've heard that HW raid is on its way out though, and raid is more done in software or something, but idk.

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> I've thought in the past about getting one, or a 9200-16e or, if I
> found a good deal on one, a Highpoint Rocket 750 so I could add more
> drives, but then my problems would be not enough SATA connectors on
> my Corsair RM850 PSU or 3.5" bays in my Fractal Define R5 case.)

That's one of the reasons why you need a case with drive bays and a
backplane.  I have one of these wonderful Chenbro cases with 16 bays.

 

 

► 008 - case, bays, backplane.
Chenbro, I've seen a couple, but those seem to mostly be rackmount.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> > It's also not an option to store data on only a single disk.  When
> > the disk fails, you may loose your data, and it's a big hassle.
>
> Yeah... I plan to buy two disks of the same size, one will be for
> the data and the other will be for the backup.

Why don't you use RAID1 with these disks and do something else for
backups?  When you don't, you'll have the big hassle when a disk
fails, and especially new disks can fail.  If they run for 3--4
months, they should be fine; after that, they fail not long after the
warranty has expired and if not, they're likely to last until they're
being replaced by disks with more capacity, with some exceptions.

 

► 009 - RAID1, extra backups, last until replaced with more capacity, etc.

"replaced by disks with more capacity" ... I like to be able to replace several smaller disks with a single larger disk that's equal or larger than the smaller disks' combined capacities, for about the same price that I paid for one of the smaller disks a few years earlier.

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> But, I'm a bit wary of "fake raid" so I guess I won't be running
> RAID1, which, among other things, eliminates Seagate drives from my
> shortlist.

Do you think Seagate disks would fail even sooner then they usually do
when used in RAID arrays?

 

 

► 010 - seagate failure, RAID, etc

I just don't trust them really, if I was going to try one, I'd want a non-Seagate fallback in case the Seagate failed.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> I'd want some kind of setup that is platform, OS, cotnroller,
> etc. agnostic, so no matter what I plug it into, I'd be able to read
> it, unless of course the specific drive itself had died.

There's no such thing.  The very disks themselves do have either a
SATA or a SAS interface (unless you use fiber, but I don't know about
that and it's still an interface) and without that, you can't access
them.  They come with a controller and firmware without which you
can't access them.  The list goes on from there ...

What you can do is use hardware that is easy to replace, or you keep
spares.  Like I have two RAID hardware cards in my backup server
because each can only handle 2x4 disks.  These controllers have been
somewhat abundant and are still readily available on ebay starting at
$30 for the basic card.  They are also somewhat compatible to other
models of the same line, so if I need to replace one, chances are that
even a different model of controller could access the disks.  Then,
it's somehwat unlikely that both would fail at the same time, so if I
had to, I could use the controller that still works.  It's brilliant
because I have a spare without actually needing one

If the backplane fails, I can get mini-SAS to SATA cables and connect
the disks without the backplane.

Thing is you need to use decent hardware and not mess around with
crappy stuff, like stuffing a bunch of hard disks into a case that
doesn't even have bays with trays and no backplane.  You can do it
with like 4 disks, but beyond that, it becomes a mess of cables, tends
to be difficult to cool and just sucks.

Decent hardware makes live so much easier, and live is way too short
for bad hardware.  Seeing your pictures, you need to get a rack and
some nice 19" cases ...

 

 

► 011 - server, rack, etc

fiber interface - I've heard of it but never actually used or seen it.

$30 RAID cards ... I've seen those, for example the LSI 9211-8i, although when I was looking into things like that, I was seeing people recommend making sure they're in IT mode to pass the individual disks to the OS, like for FreeNAS/TrueNAS or similar.  I've also occasionally seen the 9200-16e fairly cheap as well which supports 4x4 disks (but via external ports, not internal), and once in a while I see the Highpoint Rocket 750 not as cheap, but still cheaper per disk it supports or at least similar, and that supports 10x4 disks.  (But then there's no standard tower / microATX / miniITX case that can mount that many 3.5" drives, that I'm aware of.)

Backplanes from what I can tell are crazy expensive.  IF I was going to spend a lot on "decent" hardware, I'd need to spread the cost over a much longer period of time - for example, the case, motherboard, etc. would last through at least 3 or maybe 4 PSU swaps (because the Seasonic Prime PSUs with 12 year warranties died of old age).  Also I'd need to wait a while before buying (since I absolutely will NOT use credit / borrow money to pay for it, would be paying cash / debit / similar) - for example, getting a DDR2 or DDR3 based setup around the time DDR5 is getting old and DDR6 is coming out.  (But then there's the issue with power consumption with older hardware, but if I could keep the CPU+GPU combined under about 35-50 watts....)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> > You really need to use redundancy for your active disks.  I also
> > recommend it for backups, but when one of the backups fails, you
> > can make a new one and it's not too much hassle since you have to
> > make backups anyway if you have at least the minimum of 2
> > generations of backups.
>
> Ah, would redundancy be RAID1, or something else?  (Also my system
> as-is only supports 8 3.5" drives, which I'd prefer to all be
> available for storage.)

Yes, there are lots of RAID levels that provide redundancy.  ZFS is
doing it's own variants in software.

 

 

► 012 - RAID, ZFS, redundancy

Ahh, I've figured Z1 is like RAID5, Z2 is like RAID6, and there's Z3 which is 3-disk parity but I think RAID7 is something else if it's a thing at all.  (I've also heard of RAID50, 60, 10, and a couple others but am not very familiar with them.  (I'm aware of a Wikipedia article but I'm sure there's some they left off there as well.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> > Hard disks are anything but cheap  If you have the disks,
> > there's no reason not to use redundancy for backups as well.
>
> "HDDs aren't cheap"... true  I remember when tape was a tiny
> fraction of the cost per capacity compared to HDDs, for example in
> 1994.  I was wanting to see a backup solution today that has a
> similar price ratio.  (See the spoiler for more details, but you
> would be able to get a 16TB tape for ~$21, or a 128TB tape for ~$63,
> and the tape drive would be about 1/2 to 2/3 the cost of a
> similar-size HDD.)

How did you get tape drives that cheap?  Tapes were basically done
when the capacity of DAT drives couldn't keep up, and those were
expensive and were wearing out all the time.  The tapes weren't too
bad, though.  Anything better than a DAT drive cost a fortune.

I do wish we could just use tapes for backups still.

 

 

► 013 - cheap tapes

That was in January 1994, when tapes were much cheaper than HDDs for the same capacity.  A 250MB HDD was $215, a 250MB tape drive was $145, and media was $20.  A 2.1GB HDD was $1850, 2.3GB tape drive was $925, and 2GB media was $59.
I haven't looked recently, but last I checked, tape was only slightly discounted per TB compared to HDDs (maybe 20-35% or so, idk), it would take 2 or 3 tapes to back up a single large HDD, and the tape drives were several thousand dollars or more.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Hmm ... "redunancy for active disks" ... wouldn't that require
> RAID1, or is there another way?

Sure, you can use different RAID levels.

 

 

► 014 - RAID levels

Yeah, I'm aware of RAID5, 6, or Z1, Z2, Z3, and I know there's others but haven't looked into them much.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> (And while my case+mobo+PSU does support 8 3.5" devices, I'd prefer
> them to be all available for storage and not have to lose some to
> redunancy, etc, and even then I'd probably be running out of
> bays/ports.

The disadvantages of loosing your data, of the hassle and of the
unwieldyness of having to deal with so many individual disks all the
time instead of being able to use a larger volume outweigh the cost
of, at the minimum, using a single disk for parity.

Look out for a decent 19" case with 16 bays (or more).

> Also what about some of the pitfalls of, say, fake raid....)

I've never used it.  What kind of reliability and performance do you
expect?  There's reasons why RAID controllers have backup batteries,
and what does fake raid have?

 

 

► 015 - fake raid, reliability/performance
For performance, all I expect is single-HDD performance.  (If I want more, I'll use an SSD for those situations.)
For reliability, I want something that if a disk fails I can replace it and rebuild from parity or mirror or something, and if more disks fail than I have for parity, I don't lose the entire array/pool, I only lose the data on the extra disks, like UNRAID.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> "Hard disks are anything but cheap" Tell me about it  Actually I
> was looking at the cost of backup media vs HDDs in an old magazine
> ad I have from Q1 1994, and...  A 250MB HDD was $215, 215MB tape
> drive was $145, and 215MB tape media was $20.  A 2.1GB HDD (SCSI,
> though), was $1850, a 2.3GB tape drive was $925, and 2GB tape media
> was $59.

Yeah it's never been cheap.

 

 

 

→ 016 - cheap HDDs

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Today, there's a 16TB Toshiba MG08 HDD for $230 from a 3rd-party
> Amazon seller.

Are those any good?

 

► 017 - Toshiba 16TB MG08, any good?
I have a couple 14TB and a 12TB MG07, they've been fine so far.  (I don't remember where I heard it a while ago, but I heard that when HGST was sold to WD, some of the technology / equipment, like for 3.5" HDDs I think, went to Toshiba, but I don't remember for sure how it all got sorted out.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Calculating similar ratios, etc, if tape backup was available today
> like that, I'd be able to get a 16TB tape drive for $155.12 and a
> 16TB tape media for $21.40.  Or, there would be a 134.4 TB SAS
> (that's the successor to SCSI, right?) HDD for $1970.07, a 147.2 TB
> tape drive for $989.53, and 128 TB tape media for $63.12.  (It would
> be nice to be able to have backup media for which I could fit
> several HDDs worth onto a single backup.)

yeah

 

→ 018 - "yeah", to backup media that fits several HDDs

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Yes, I know tape is very slow for random access (I imagine it
> basically making a HDD look like an NVMe SSD), but it would

It takes a while to seek, but that's ok for backups.

 

→ 019 - tape takes a while to seek, ok for backups

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> primarily be for full backups and restores.  (And one idea I've had
> would be to have some kind of secondary SATA SSD or flash drive or
> something that just stores the data of where things are on the tape,
> and maybe short previews of things, for example the first couple
> pages of text files, several second short clips at 24 kbps 11kHz
> mono for audio or 240p 15fps q=28 or so for video, and you'd use
> that to find what you're looking for, queue up everything you wanted
> to restore, THEN hit "go" and it would arrange the queue
> sequentially then go through and pull everything off the tape.

You still have to seek to where the file is, and that means you must
read the index on the tape or whatever the backup software used to
figure where to start reading some file.  The backup software had to
keep some information as to which tape to use and where the file might
start on it.  Tar works fine, it was made for that kind of thing

 

 

→ 020 - tape, seek, tar

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> On the other end of the slow vs fast spectrum ... I wonder if we'll
> ever see HDD duplicators that can duplicate HDDs as fast as
> commercial optical disk stamping machines can duplicate
> CDs/DVDs/Blu-Ray...)

That might not even be possible if we had replicators like they have
in Star Trek.

 

→ 021 - stamping CDs, vs HDDs, star trek replicators

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

>> I have to order everthing online [...]
>
> Ahh.  Well my local Fry's went out, and now pretty much all we have
> is Best Buy and WalMart.  If I want an actual computer store I have
> to go to Micro Center about an hour and a half away, and I usually
> only go there if I'm planning to get multiple things, or if I'm
> going to be in the area for something else anyway.  (At least it's
> on the side of Los Angeles area closer to me, so I don't have to
> deal with as much traffic as if I had to completely go through L.A.)

It's so much easier to order online.  And the attendends in stores
tend to be complete idiots and I'm better off ordering online anyway
because they have no clue what they're doing.  I've had one standing
right in front of a wall display full of headsets/-phones I was
looking at, and when I asked for a headset I could use with a phone,
he said they don't have headsets.  I went home and ordered something
online instead.

 

► 022 - online vs store

I've been to a store where... well just take look at the caption in the pic, and what's below it...

maybe paste pic of Fry's, ultimate gaming, 210, HD 5450, 8400 GS

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> > Besides, I remember times when there were interesting stores in
> > town [...]
>
> I remember those times too, although in my case I think it was all
> the online ordering and things that eventually shut them down.

Oh they closed well before there was internet.

 

► 023 - stores closed before internet

QUIte a few stores here were still around when the internet was getting started in the mid/late 1990s, but I noticed they were going away in the early/mid 2010s.  Several years ago there were only 1 or 2 local ones left that I was aware of, and at least one of them closed down, idk about the other one.  There were also a couple that had changed from retail to consulting or something like that.

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> But, there were times when my brother said you could stand on some
> street corners in the area where most of those stores were, start
> throwing stones, and probably hit like 8 or 10 computer stores.

There were never that many around.

 

► 024 - never that many stores around
In San Diego there were probably a few dozen or more.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> In the spoiler are some links to photo albums of old magazine ads
> from various stores we had in the San Diego, CA area, from 1990 to
> 2007.  (I have quite a few more magazines still in my paper-and-ink
> collection, but am missing a few; I remember having some as old as
> 1987.)

Cool, maybe scan them and make them available to museums or so so they
can be preserved for generations to come

IIRC, here you would find ads like that only in computer magazines,
and only a couple pages of them.

► 025 - scan magazine ads, museum, etc
I've actually wanted to find a way to do that sometime, but I don't have the proper equipment to quickly scan entire magazines or stacks of magazines at a time, I'd have to do it one page at a time and it's too big a project for me.  (I'd like to get rid of my paper copies except for a few, to clear up the space they take up.)
Also while I have a couple file boxes of them, I don't have all of the magazines from that particular series.  I think the original publisher might still be around (magazine was Computor Edge, published from 1983 to 2007 or so, started as Byte Buyer until about 1988, he is Jack Dunning I think), he may have a blog or something on a different topic (I think something like auto hotkey but I forget)... I haven't tried to contact him but I almost wonder if he might still have the original files from which the print copies were made, and maybe there's a way to put the entire collection online or something...  Also I've heard that at least one or two authors of "For Dummies" books had done regular articles for ComputorEdge back in the day.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

 

> The cat on the laptop pic at the end of some albums is just a
> placeholder, or to remind myself that I've reached the end of the
> album. [...]

After all so much reading, it's not surprising that it's tired

 

→ 026 - cat after all reading tired

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Also I'll include an album of purchase invoices we've saved.  (I
> removed personal info before posting.)  This includes the first PC
> my dad ever bought, a 286-10, 640k RAM, EGA graphics, 40MB HDD, etc,
> for around $1800 in January 1989.

I looked at it and I thought "wow, what a luxury!" If you wanted
to spend money like that here, you had to figure out where you could
buy something like that, and the store had to order it for you.  A
couple years later, you could find something in larger cities, but not
long after that, they worked harder on removing parking and the stores
closed.

 

→ 027 - luxury, sort order, larger cities, closed, etc

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I cut my computing teeth on that PC at home, although maybe a year
> or two (not before Q3-1986 cause that's when I started kindergarten
> / school) before that my parents would take me to a home education
> center where they had Apple computers, not sure what model they
> would have been though.

That's amazing Back then, there were only a few computers around
here, and they didn't really want anyone to use them because they were
expensive.

The thing is that back then, everyone kept saying you have to learn
about computers, especially when you want to get a job.  Nobody cared
and nobody learned except for a handful of people, so the computers
took over and the jobs were removed.

 

 

→ 028 - few computers here, expensive, learn, job, etc

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> > I have no idea ... it didn't occur to me that anyone wouldn't
> > order them online [...]
>
> Ah.  As I said / hinted earlier, I typically order online, but might
> go to a store in certain situations. [...]

Dunno, for a time, in some cases, it seemed advantageous to buy
something locally because you could go back and have them fix it if
necessary.  It became exceedingly difficult to do that, and it has
never been a real advantage to do that.

 

→ 029 - advantage buy local, fix, difficult

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> (I used to only buy at stores though, cause I was afraid of damage
> in shipping, but I guess me driving home with the HDDs isn't that
> big of a difference or might even be worse considering i'm not
> exactly a slow driver.)

Yes, and if it happens, what's more annoying: Going back to the shop
and take the risk of them telling you you broke it yourself or
returning it?  Here we have the right to return things that we bought
without seeing the seller in person, like everything we ordered
through the phone or online, within 14 days after it arrived, and we
don't need any reason at all.  So if your hard disk arrives broken,
just return it and take the chance that they won't plug it in to see
if works It's probably more trouble telling them that it's
broken. And you can always say it worked before you returned it
... They might be unhappy with returned media, but if anything fails,
you can always withdraw the money through your bank account and put
them into the position that they would have to actually sue you, and
that's a pretty bad position for them.  But I never had to do that,
yet it's a last resort.

I'm picturing it:  You drive an hour to the store and drive around
another half hour to find a parking spot.  You walk a mile or two and
finally buy two disks.  You walk all the way back and drive all the
way back home and the day off you had is over.

After about a week, one of the drives fails.  You take another day off
and drive for an hour to the store and drive around to find a parking
spot.  After 3/4 hours you give up and drive back home (yeah I
actually had to do that and I basically quit going to movie theaters
mainly because of it even when there still were some worthwhile going
to, long time ago) and watch some movies for the rest of the day.

So one day, you finally make it to the store and they are willing to
return the disk for you and they'll call you when they got the
warranty case resolved in six weeks or so, and when that happens, you
can come back and pick up the disk. Maybe even that works out for you
somehow.

Three weeks later one of the disks fails again --- perhaps
not very likely, but you could have bought Seagate.  There you are,
more days to waste with driving back and forth, with trying to find
parking and more miles of walking.

Where's your buyer protection you could have through paypal buying
online when you're buying in a store?  Is the store going to pay you
for your time and for all the driving and are they going to somehow
give you the days you had to take off of work back?  With fuel prices
as insane as they are nowadays, anywhere you drive is an emergency you
haven't been able to avoid.

You still consider buying in stores?

 

► 030 - ends in "You still consider buying in stores?"
Not as much, but for some things maybe.  I wouldn't drive an hour and a half just to buy something cheap for which it costs me more in gas than the item of course but I did buy an AMD CPU at Micro Center cause the cost of the CPU there AND the gas would have been less than the cost of buying it on Newegg or Amazon, at the time.  (It's cheaper now of course, but I've already had the CPU for almost a year.)  Also it only took maybe a total of a minute or two to find a parking spot and walk into the store, they have a decent size parking lot right by the store.  (It wasn't Black Friday or GPU launch day when I went though, I've heard it can get crowded then.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

 

> I've thought about it, but right now I don't have any physical place
> to put a server, never mind any kind of rack cabinet or anything
> like that.

You have lots of pictures with many tower cases and piles of disks
laying around all in a mess.  That takes at least as much space as a
rack, probably much less space when you get a 42U rack.  The server
goes into the rack on top of the UPS, and the disks go into the server
and you end up with both more space and more disk space and your data
is more secure.

 

 

► 031 - tower case, piles of disks, rack, etc

but where would I even PUT a rack?
(show pics of cluttered house)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> (Also when I was considering building a NAS / backup server, one of
> my criteria was having the entire cost of the setup, not counting
> the storage, be less than the cost of a single HDD.)

Well, you just spent like $600 on two disks you might not even need.
You may be able to find both a sever and a rack for less than that.
With a server with a ton of RAM in it you can experiment with
deduplication with ZFS, or you can use btrfs which apparently doesn't
need as much RAM for deduplication as ZFS.  You can get the server
before getting a rack and you might not need so many disks when your
data is deduplicated.

The more disks and data you gather, the more unwieldy and expensive it
gets.  Deduplication doesn't cost you.

It's not like there aren't options:

 

 

→ 032 - server, zfs, youtube link

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> > You have way more capacity then I do and kept your data since the
> > 80ies, so of course you do qualify.
> [...]
>
> I thought to qualify for "data hoarder" I had to have never deleted
> anything, ever (I have deleted some things), and I had to have more
> capacity than any system available for purchase (either complete
> system, or parts) could support.

Just talk to HP or Dell and the like.  They'll provide you with
something that can store more data than you could ever gather during
your whole life.

 

 

→ 033 - store more data, entire life

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> (For example, let's say I got one of those dual-socket Supermicro
> motherboards with 11 PCIe slots, and put a Highpoint Rocket 750 in
> each slot.

I doubt that would work.  I have an old RAID controller here which I
have retired that would support up to 256 drives through using SAS
extenders.

 

► 034 - RAID, support 256, SAS extenders
Yeah but I"ve heard that extenders / splitters / whatever onl still limit you to the bandwidth on the original ports, hence I don't like to use them if I don't have to.  (For example if you used them to plug 256 drives into what ended up being 2 ports (4 drives each), you'd still be limited to the bandwidth of 8 ports.  Maybe with 16 or 32 drives it wouldn't be a big deal cause they individually fall short of saturating a port's bandwidth, but with 256 of them that would be an issue, I think.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Each of those cards supports 40 drives, times 11 is 440

only 40

 

→ 035 - "only 40" drives on a card

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> drives, times 22 TB per drive (I'm ignoring the WD 26TB host-managed
> SMR drive)

host-managed?

 

► 036 - "host managed"

I'm not sure how it works, but I think the OS / software has to be involved with dealing with where the SMR data is, whereas with "drive managed" the drive itself takes care of it.  I've heard that only enterprise / server level software / OS's are able to deal with host managed stuff, not consumer level like Linux / Ubuntu, Windows, Mac OS, etc.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> would be 9.68 PB on that system.  That doesn't account for
> on-motherboard ports, or using bifurcation / splitters to, for
> example, plug 8 PCIe 2.0 x8 cards into a single PCIe 4.0 x16 slot,
> or whatever would be the eqiuvalent bandwidth.  A data hoarder, I
> thought, would have more than that )

Nah, it doesn't really matter much data you're hoarding.  You're
already hoarding a lot of data and a lot of disks.  What are you /not/
hoarding, i. e. how much do you delete?

It doesn't matter anyway.  What matters is that you find a good
solution for you.

 

► 037 - hoarding data, delete, solution

I probably delete less data than I should. I hope to find a good solution.  Also for some things like family/friends documents, photos, audio, videos, etc, I'd like to someday find a good long-term archive solution that would still be usable several decades from now or longer.  When I've passed away I'd want people who are still around to be able to access those things without having to go through any special fancy rituals.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Ah, I do plan to buy two disks, but idk how I'd set up real-time
> redunancy if I won't be running somehting like RAID1.  (What I've
> done so far is have one disk of each set of 2 be my data, then the
> 2nd has stuff manually copied to it then it's unplugged for a while
> until I need to update or restore, and I'm way behind on updating.)

Use a different RAID level maybe?  When you have disks in sets of two
(or another even number) of the same size, you're fundamentally well
prepared to use some kind of RAID.

Perhaps take a look at a basic overview like this one:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/raid-redundant-arrays-of-independent-disks/

That would be classic RAID like with hardware RAID controllers or
software RAID with mdadm.  And there are some more RAID levels and
variations.

 

→ 038 - RAID levels, hw/sw, etc

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> >    Using a warranty usually would require that you return your
> >    disk to someone.  There is no way that I would give my data out
> >    of hands.
>
> True ... but how else would I deal with a failed drive if I wanted
> to replace it without having to buy another one.

I don't know, I considered it one time but it seemed to be too much of
a hassle to tell the seller I'd crush the drive with a fork lift or
something before sending it in if they would want me to send it back.

To get on the safer side, you could run the disk for 3--4 months
without using it and assume it might not fail before the warranty has
expired.  But nowadays, the warranty is 5 years.

Or you could encrpty the data.  It's a bit unwieldy and may cost
performance, but at least you can make use of the warranty even if you
need to return the disk.

 

► 039 - warranty, failed disk

Ahh, yeah I'm aware of the pitfalls of data on a disk being sent back, it would be nice to not have to deal with that.  Also in most cases I haven't been encrypting data, except for one of the Linux VMs on my laptop.  (I want to be able to access the data without having to deal with that, or if something happened to me I'd want friends and family to be able to access it, even if something simultaneously happened to everyone that might have the credentials to bypass encryption.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Yes, there's the issue of the data on it, but that's what backups
> are for.

Backups won't prevent someone from reading your data from a disk you
returned under warranty.

 

► 040 - warranty, backups not prevent others reading data

Well that aspect of it is true, but it would still let ME have the data right away and not have to wait for the replacement disk to come back.  (Also they would just send a blank disk back anyway.)

 

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> (Backups, however, won't save you the cost of a new HDD when you
> need to replace one that died prematurely, afaik.)

right

 

→ 041 - backup save cost new HDD "right"

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I'm pretty sure warranties don't apply buying used parts from
> private sellers.

That depends.  When you have a switch from HP with a lifetime
warranty, and lots of them have one, they'll send you an
as-good-as-new replacement even when the switch is like 15 years old
and you bought it on ebay for $20, at least when you're a company that
returns it.  Fans don't last forever ...

I don't see how it should matter who you bought something from.  Who
the seller is doesn't alter the product in any way.

 

► 042 - switch HP life warranty, replacement, seller doesn't alter product

The seller may not alter the product, but I thought buying something from the wrong seller could affect the warranty?  Like, "We're sorry, but you didn't buy this from an authorized retailer, so the warranty is void", or "The product you purchased was either refurbished, or intended to be part of another system, or shucked from an external enclosure, so contact the seller for warranty."

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Also I've heard that they may not apply when buying refurb parts
> from non-authorised sellers (in those cases the sellers are supposed
> to provide the warranty, same if you bought a complete system with a
> drive inside it from a retailer).

Claiming you could refurbish a hard disk is bullshit.  There's no way
that a seller who got a hard disk could somehow improve its
condidtion.  Such a claim is fraud and I'm surprised that ebay, for
example, tolerates that.

What's the seller gona do to it?  Change out the bearings and other
parts that might have experienced some wear?  Replace some capacitors
that may be on the controller board?  That would cost way more than a
new disk.

All they could do is blow off the dust and delete the data.  Deleting
the data makes the disk worse through usage.  It's been a long time
that you could actually format a hard disk.  Perhaps you still can
when you have the right equipment, but I'd like to see the seller who
has that.  Back then, you could also drive the reading arms all the
way over the platters until they hit the limiter and cause the disk to
make bad noises.

Maybe that's what they do when they're refurbishing them, drive the
arms all over into the limiters through the use of some special
equipment and when the disk makes funny noises it's still good to go
for sale.

And other parts?  What's there to refurbish?  You can pick the good
parts from the hardware you have and use that to put something
together that works, but I wouldn't call that refurbishing,
either. The parts remain unchanged and you're still selling a heap of
old parts that still work.

The broken parts that remain are the ones you can refurbish buy
recycling them to create new parts.

As to warranty, there are legal requirements here.  Of course, when
your hard disk fails after 4.99 years, the seller may not be around
anymore.  If you buy solar panels with a warranty of 25 years and have
them installed on your roof and one fails after 22 years, whoever who
installed them may not be around anymore; neither might be the
manufacturer.

Just check what warranty you get and what the chances are that you can
make use of it before you buy.

 

► 043 - refurbish HDD

yeah, to me, "refurbish" an HDD... whaaat?  at most that would involve wiping the disk, MAYBE erasing some smart data like power on hours, etc (and there would be problems with that too), basically only "software" "refurbish".  Only the manufacturer themselves or MAYBE someone like DriveSavers or another data recovery place capable of opening up a drive in a clean room / flow bench could replace platters, heads, motors, etc, and I imagine they'd rather sell a new drive.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

 

> > What I meant is that if I were to buy 16TB hard drives, I'd have
> > to buy at least two of them and that would cost me over EUR 1000.
> > Discs always come at least in pairs.
>
> Ahh, one for data, one for backup basically.

No, it's for redundancy.  Backups are extra.  (Fortunately, I found
chaper ones, but still ...)

 

► 044 - backup, redundancy.

Are you hinting / saying something about THREE disks for each disk of data or something?  One for the data, one for redunancy, one for backup?  Or something else?
I thought the 3 disks was for something like .. 3 disks, one with your data, one as a local backup preferably on a different media, one as an off-site backup.  (Or basically the 3-2-1 backup strategy.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> "Discs always come at least in pairs" ... maybe it translates to
> English a bit different han whatever your native language is, but to
> me, what I imagine is that it's not possible to buy one disk at a
> time.  In reality though, at least here, you CAN buy one disk at a
> time if you want to, but it's much more advisable to buy two.

Well, yes, in theory, I can buy a single disk.  But what would I do
with it?  It's not that I couldn't buy one, it's simply not an option
to buy only one because I won't have redundancy, and without that, I
can't store data on it and it's useless other than for backups maybe.

So you might think sure, only $300 for 16TB is a good price and not
expensive.  Actually, it costs $600, and how much data you can store
depends on the RAID level.  With only two disks, that's only 16TB, so
16TB actually cost $600.  What else did you think?

 

→ 045 - theory buy single disk, but no redundancy, actually 2x cost per disk because redundancy, etc

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> > You can always check with hdparm. [...]
>
> Apparently hdparm isn't on here, and idk if it's available.

You said something about having Linux somewhere.

 

► 046 - hdparm, linux

I have Linux on a secondary SSD in my desktop, and in VMs on my laptop, but I mostly boot WIndows 10 Pro for now as my main OS.  (In the back of my mind I've been considering switching to Linux, and I may be forced to eventually once WIndows 10's support ends if Windows 11, or 12 if it becomes a thing, doesn't allow me to create just local accounts, among other times.  My brother is still running Windows 7, I think I've heard him say things like he'd switch to Linux rather than upgrade to 10 or 11.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
>
> I wonder if other things could possible be causing issues.

like multiple issues maybe

 

→ 047 - other things, multiple issues

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I just hope I don't have to rip my entire system apart, [...]

Perhaps you have too many disks in it and it's overwhelmed because of
that.

 

► 048 - too many disks, overwhelmed
I don't think it's how many disks I have. I'm suspecting other things but idk what.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Maybe; although idk if firmware updates are available or not,
> haven't checked (and I've never updated firmware on a HDD anyway
> that I can remember).

I have done it once with disks that would disappear after a while. I
had to turn off the computer to get the disk back.  So I had to keep
checking every now and then if had gone away because sooner or later,
I wanted the RAID to rebuild.

Almost 10 years later there finally was a firmware update for these
disks.  One of them had already failed and the other one was usless
because it would disappear all the time.  The firmware actually fixed
it and I was able to finally use the disk.

 

 

→ 049 - firmware updates, 10 years, etc

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> I'm not 100% sure if it's the disks, cause other things also act up
> around the same time.

like when you have multiple issues ...

 

 

→ 050 - multiple issues

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]
> While I'm sure some people can take apart and rebuild an entire
> system in maybe a half hour or so, it takes me probably a full day,

It gets so much easier when using 19" cases like you wouldn't believe.

 

► 051 - rebuild, 19" cases, etc

Ahh I haven't had experience with those.
I technically have an audio cabinet that just happens to be 19" wide internally, but not with rails, and it's only about 13-16" deep or so, but the back end is open.  No way would I put a 30" deep case in it though.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> and don't even get me started on configuring my OS, software,
> etc. the way I want it, or the way I had it before.)

That was never really possible with Windows.  Just use Linux, then you
have package management amongst other things.

 

→ 052 - windows, configure, linux, package management

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> So is there a firmware update for those, or is there anything else
> special about them?  Maybe broken cables?

Maybe; you could find out.

 

 

→ 053 - firmware update, broken cables

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]
> SATA cables that have been slightly modified with the aid of my
> cat's teeth, one had its retention clip broken off, etc.

Are you hoarding broken cables?  Give them to recycling so you don't
accidentially use broken cables.

 

► 054 - broken cables
I may still have a few laying around, but I'll want to get rid of them once I've tested to be sure they don't work.  (By "test" I mean plug it in and see if it recognizes a drive.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

 

> > It depends ...  Unfortunately, ZFS isn't compatible with Linux
> > only for stupid licensing issues (you can get it to work, but that
> > isn't a good option)

I have to correct myself again, you just have to know how to.

 

► 055 - ZFS, linux, compatible

I've heard it can be made to work, but ... is probably beyond my level of expertise.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
> I've never used ZFS.  Had considered it for NAS/backup server, but
> would lean more toward UNRAID or similar.  (I like how it lets you
> [...]

Maybe that's a good option for you then.  I guess you can always try
it out and see how you like it.  But how compatible is that with other
stuff, what if you want to switch to something else and can't read
your data anymore?  For all you know, they might call in your license
and then you're screwed.

 

 

► 056 - UNRAID, license

yeah that could be an issue, hadn't thought of that.  (I wonder if there's a way to make ZFS behave the same way, or if there's something else that's license-free, that lets me add disks one at a time, and if more than parity fails I only lose that extra data, not everything.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Dedup/backup ... A while ago I was wanting to back up a bunch of
> SSDs to a 12TB HDD.  If I didn't use compression I could just "dd"
> to a disk image and they'd still all fit for now, but... (see in the
> spoiler).

What prevents you from compressing the disk image created with dd?

 

► 057 - compess, image, dd

I did compress it in at least on test I did.  Problem is, it would take forever (like maybe a few dozen minutes or an hour or more) to open the image in 7-Zip, and when I tried a while ago, it was basically trying to open the entire image in RAM, and failed cause I only had 32GB RAM in that system and was trying to decompress an image of a 240GB SSD.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Also I'm not familiiar at all with BTRFS, or with VDO.

That means you need to learn more.

 

 

→ 058 - learn more, btrfs, vdo

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]
> but I also have a couple 2 TB SSDs I'd want to back up as well,
> preferably compressed, and I don't have 2+ TB of RAM (or want to
> take the time) to decompress the image file before I can access its
> contents.

That seems like a rather unwieldy way to make a backup.  Why don't you
just copy the files you want to back up?  It doesn't seem like you'd
still need a functional disk image.  You're probably wasting 60GB of
space with that.

Maybe use this: https://clonezilla.org/

 

► 059 - backup SSDs to HDD, clonezilla

Well I was wanting to have disk images that, at least for my boot drive, would be bootable, and from what I remember I"ve had trouble doing that with Clonezilla.  (Maybe I'm doing something wrong though, idk.)
As for saving space, that's why I was trying to compress the "dd" images with gzip. (Maybe that's where I'm going wrong, maybe gzip isn't the right thing to use...)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

 

> > How well did that work?
> [...]
> HAH  .... not well
> [...]
> I imagine my ASRock B550 Taichi might have a bit more DMI (or
> whatever it's called) bandwidth, maybe PCIe 4.0 x4 or 3.0 x8 but I
> forget, so it might do better with HDDs connected.  (One factor that
> made me choose it was the factor that I can have all 8 SATA ports
> and both M.2 slots populated simultaneously without having ports
> disabled.  I think it might cut one of the PCIe slots bandwidth in
> half if I have everything populated, but idk if I'll use that slot
> unless I plug in at least two SAS/SATA HBAs.)

Imagine what software RAID might do.  That's the beauty of hardware
RAID.  You can have a single RAID card to drive 8 (or even more) disks
without all the overhead and without all the copies of the data going
to each disk going all through the mainboard.  Not having that may be
fine for a file server that doesn't have much else to do, but for the
maschine you're sitting at and are using for what you want to use it
for, it can be a nasty and quite noticable burdon.

 

 

► 060 - sw/hw raid, copies through mainboard, etc

"file server that doesn't have much else to do" yeah basically if I was setting up a backup server that's ALL it would do - no Plex, no transcoding, maybe not even zip/unzip or anything like that, JUST storing and serving files.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> > Older cards were limited to 2TB.
>

> Ahh, I guess the BT-PESAPA card I had (actually still do, but only
> use it rarely for PATA) was limited to tthat, it's from around 2005
> or so I think so maybe 2TB drives didn't exist then.

yeah

 

→ 061 - "yeah" BT-PESAPA, 2TB

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Also several years ago I wanted the ability to pull individual
> drives out of a system to use with a 3.5" dock somewhere else, but
> I'm pretty sure USB flash drives and external SSDs would be better
> for that now.

You can do that with SAS drives.  I don't recommend it and I still
rather turn the machine off when possible, but replacing a failed disk
by pulling the failed one out and plugging the new one in without any
further ado is really nice and not something I'd worry about (because
when the disk has failed, no data gets lost).  Being able to do that
is another beauty of hardware RAID.  Not being able to do that can be
expensive.  SATA really sucks, why couldn't they make it hotpluggable.

 

► 062 - SAS, SATA, hot plug

Actually one of the specs of SATA is that it IS hot-pluggable, at least for internal SATA.  (I don't think I was able to hot-plug eSATA though but idk.)
On my B550 Taichi, there's an option in BIOS to enable SATA hot plug, if I remember right it's just one setting to globally enable / disable it, so I have it enabled and can just unplug and plug disks in as I wish without shutting down the system.  Also if I click the "eject devices button" in the tray, there's several HDDs listed there, plus an M.2 SATA SSD but I don't think M.2 supports hot plug on my system.
Linus did a video a while ago where he was showing a server motherboard that supported PCIe hot plug.  Mine doens't support that, although it would be nice to have in a future system.  (Also if it supported hot plug on RAM, and if I had dual sockets, CPUs, that might be interesting.)
On my Z97 Extreme6, each of the 10 ports had its own setting to enable / disable hot plug, so I enabled them on 9 of them, but left SATA0's hot plug disabled cause that's where my boot drive was plugged in.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...] (I've wondered if it was a limitation of SATA II (3Gb/s)
> though... but I think I've heard of people plugging in >2TB drives
> into SATA II ports on other systems and it was fine, but idk.

IIRC it had to do with the BIOSs (and sometimes the hardware) not able
to handle so many sectors.

 

 

→ 063 - BIOS, hardware, sectors, limits

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Interesting thing though, the BT-PESAPA's boot spalsh text doesn't
> pop up on my AM4 board,

That's because EFI sucks.  There are tons of issues with older cards
in newer boards.

 

► 064 - EFI sucks, older cards, newer boards

I wonder what would be a good solution then.  I dream, sometimes, of being able to plug in an MFM hard drive and 5.25" or 8" floppy drive into the same system that would also have a U.2 (or is U.3 the newest server version or something) and M.2, among other things. (I've heard of "industrial" motherboards that had ISA and PCI Express slots, maybe with LGA 1150 or 1151 or something like that.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> and I can't see devices plugged into it from WIndows, but I can see
> them from Linux.

perhaps there's no module that would support the card

 

 

→ 065 - windows, linux, see devices, no module support

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]
> Also I mentioned earlier about liking UNRAID in that drives could be
> added one at a time.

... which probably means that it's not compatible to anything else

 

→ 066 - unraid, add one at a time, not compatible anything else

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I've also wanted the ability to pull a single drive with things on
> it and take it to a friend's house for whatever, but I imagine that
> a USB drive or external SSD would these days be much better suited
> for the purpose.

indeed

Even with SAS drives, what to you expect to happen when you pull a
disk while it's been written to or read from?

 

 

► 067 - pull disk while reading/writing
Well I would try to make sure it's not reading or writing to the disk when I pull it. For example, make sure no program is accessing the disk, or if I'm copying something, make sure it's finished copying.  Also I try to turn off write caching, as I don't want the progress dialog to disappear until it's ACTUALLY done.  I've had issues before where I had caching enabled, then when the dialog hit 100% and disappeared and I pulled the drive it popped up and said "oops we weren't done some of your data didn't properly copy" but if I turned off caching I didn't have that issue.
(One thing though, at least on my other PC, I've sometimes seen my RAM usage spike up when doing a large copy, idk why, maybe there was some caching enabled there or something, idk; also at first it was copying at a rate that was several times faster than the maximum rated sequential transfer rate of the media.  Or could that be how dramless SSDs or USB flash drives work, or whatever uses HMB - host memory buffer?  I don't think I have any DRAMless SSDs that I know of, I try to avoid those.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]
> > The overcommitment doesn't really matter until the RAM isn't actually used.
> [...]
> Ahh.  Also something I haven't figured out is why my PC often gets
> lag spikes (sometimes small and barely noticeable like the one I
> just had where I typed 2 or 3 words before it appeared on screen,
> but sometimes also pretty big where half the system is unresponsive
> for a minute or two or more), even though I might only be using
> 5-10% of my CPU, and my RAM is only about half used.  (I would have
> thought I shouldn't be getting input / processing lag spikes or
> whatever until my CPU and RAM were both maxed out.)

That's like long interruptions ... try it with only two disks in a
RAID1 and see what happens, instead of having 10 single disks plugged
in.

 

 

→ 068 - long interruptions, try 2 disks in RAID1 instead of 10 singles

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Also just now I was editing a portion of the draft for this post,
> and... I highlighted a selection of text, Ctrl+X'ed it, clicked the
> spot where I wanted to paste, Ctrl+V'ed, then clicked another spot
> to click and drag to highlight and delete some text .... but there
> was a delay from when I hit Ctrl+V until it actually pasted, and it
> pasted the text in the other spot where I was going to try to
> delete.

So that's extreme ...  Maybe you're having multiple issues ...

 

 

→ 069 - extreme, multiple issues

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Side note, it's super annoying when websites either load elements
> that move things around on the page AFTER it has visually started to
> appear,

That could be the web browser figuring out that it needs to display
stuff differently when more of the page gets loaded.

 

 

► 070 - web browser displaying stuff differently when page continues loading
I think I remember a decade or two ago it didn't do things like that.  (Sometimes I wonder if there's a more sinister reason behind it, to "prey" on people that have habits like me, remember how things used to be, and we go to click on one thing expecting it to be what we wanted, but they somehow move things around and we end up clicking on an ad (which to me is anything where they hope to get anything of value, financial or otherwise, as a result) - I've lost count of how many times that happened to me.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> or when, on a login page, it jumps your cursor to the
> username entry field.

Isn't that where it's supposed to go?

 

► 071 - cursor, username, supposed to go

Well, maybe, but not if I've ALREADY clicked / tabbed there, typed, then tabbed to the password field.   And I suppose someone (I imagine my brother would be this way) could make the argument that the site should not force / suggest you to do something, the user should have total control over how they interact, what they do, etc, and I'd personally agree at least on the user having total control over how they use their PC, websites, etc.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I've lost count of how many times I go to click one thing and I
> click something else instead cause it moved, or, I'm in the process
> of logging in and start typing my password in clear text in the
> username box.

Just wait until it stabilizes.  Or get faster internet

 

► 072 - wait stabilize, faster internet
Yeah, but I grew up in the era when it took minutes to boot up, AND you could start doing things before it finished booting, at least on the PC.  As for faster internet... I want it, but it's not available here.  Yeah, I can get 1 Gbps down, but only 35 Mbps up, and I want a minimum of 1 Gbps up.  (I'd REALLY like internet that's at least as fast as my storage, or as fast as all the PCIe / RAM / VRAM bandwidth combined of all devices in the house that might ever be connected to it.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I remember the days in the MS-DOS era when, while the PC was booting
> up, there was some kind of keyboard buffer or something so we could
> start entering commands and things before it had even finished
> booting.  (Why a similar ability doesn't seem to carry forward to
> modern times escapes me.)

That's still there, isn't it?  The keyboard does that, it least it
should.  Maybe you need a better keyboard?

 

► 073 - keyboard buffer, better keyboard

Well for now I'm using a Logitech K270 on my desktop and K360 on my laptop.  I'd like something better sometime, but I've had trouble finding anything that's actually silent.  My existing keyboard is almost blowing out my eardrums from the sound of the keypresses, but maybe I'm typing too hard cause sometimes my fingers are a bit sore.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> > It seems like you need hardware that's more reliable.
>
> Maybe.  I thought the stuff I had was supposed to be at least fairly
> decent, at least if I remember right reading reviews on it, there
> weren't a lot of complaints about DOA, failures, etc that I could
> remember.

I guess it's standard consumer hardware.  Since I started buying used
workstations off ebay with Xeons in them, I don't have weird issues
anymore.  Sure I don't get the fastest and greatest, but it's more
than fast enough and costs a fraction of the money I'd have to spend
buying new.

It might be fun to buy some new parts and put them together, but
besides cost, what holds me back is that I don't know if I can get
something that stable that way.  It's still comsumer hardware, unless
I were to buy a new workstation from Dell or HP.

And that means 'sufficiently stable'. These workstations just work.
It's amazing.  I have a $2700 CPU in my workstation I payed 150 for
when I upgraded the CPU because I wanted a few more cores.  Now I have
2x14 cores.  I guess you get what you pay for.  It redefines what
'sufficiently stable' means.

 

► 074 - consumer hardware vs workstations

Ah... if I had the $ I'd like to get an Epyc system sometime... but I also happen to generally prefer the aesthetics of consumer cases and things, but not all the fancy stuff like glass windows, RGB, etc.  I'm satisfied with the aesthetics of my Fractal Design Define R5, for example, although I've taken the front door off it cause I hate those things.  (I had a previous case with a door that I broke several years ago.)

 

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I mentioned earlier I'm not considering Seagate HDDs - that's
> because of possible reliability issues I've heard from some people,
> including my brother and others.

Yeah I've seen Seagates consistantly having very high failure rates
over the decades.

 

► 075 - Seagates, high failure

Yeah, that's a reason why I'm wary of them, and would only use one if I was using it in a RAID1 array with another brand of disk.

On the other hand, I've read stories on various retro computing forums, at least several years ago, of people with drives like the ST-225, that were still working totally fine 30 years later.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I wonder if the newer IronWolf Pro or Exos drives might be okay
> though, but I would only consider one if I was running it in a RAID1
> array with a different brand drive, like a WD Ultrastar/Gold or a
> Toshiba MG-series drive.  (As for that, see the comments earlier
> about "fake raid".)

Why would you buy Seagate?  I wouldn't want to be forced to encrypt my
disks so I can make use of the warranty.  Even then, what do I do
while I'm waiting on the replacement?  Run the RAID in degraded mode
for the 6 weeks or however long it takes before I get it replaced?

 

► 076 - seagate, warranty, encrypt, replacement

I'd be wary of Seagate, and wouldn't use it as my only / primary drive.

idk where to put this comment but ... I basically want to minimize my cost in case things go wrong.
One thing I was thinking of... if I was using an online backup / storage that charged by how much data I was using, my maximum budget would be something like ... take the hard drive that is the cheapest per TB, accounting for warranty length.  For example, if the cheapest is a $256 16TB drive with a 5-year warranty, then my maximum budget would be (250/16/5) $3.20/TB/year. (Or is my assumption wrong that big companies like google, amazon, backblaze, etc) can buy drives in bulk, like several thousand at a time, for a tiny fraction of the cost per drive or per TB of what it would cost me to buy them one at a time?)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
> "Stuffing more disks", I can't really do that, 8 is my max right
> now.

A nice Dell R720 can fit that nicely.  I'd go for a 12xLFF, though,
that gives you more to add more disks if you need to.  And you need
something to boot from.

 

→ 077 - Dell R720, 12xLFF, etc

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> At this point though, I'd be replacing smaller disks with larger
> ones,

So yes, get your storage server up and running and move the data to
it.  You could go the easy route and simply make a hardware RAID5 and
put btrfs on it.  I was told you can use bees which would do the
deduplication in the background and keep deduplicating stuff while
you're writing.

Then you end up with a bunch of small disks which you can use for
backups.  That's what I do with my old disks.

 

 

► 078 - storage server, dedup

Where would I put a storage server though

(insert pics of cluttered rooms)

(((

 

From

F:\Pics\from Pixel 6a\DCIM ; Camera\2022-11

 

PXL_20221113_045530581 = living room from entry hall, but not wide

PXL_20221113_045544802 = living room from entry hall, but not wide

PXL_20221113_045731497 = in living room between couch and stuff, looking toward computer, wide angle

PXL_20221113_045803502 = living room from entry hall, wide angle

PXL_20221113_045954563 = living room from pantry, piano on right, wide angle

PXL_20221113_050328828 = my bedroom, from door, wide angle

PXL_20221113_050412105 = in my bedroom, from near bed, toward closet, wide angle

PXL_20221113_050923618 = guest room & work room, from doorway by hall, wide angle

PXL_20221113_050951387 = spare bedroom, from doorway, wide angle

 

 

)))

also as I said, I don't know if dedup would be what I exactly want.  Yes it would free up space, but my system and I would still think there's logically multiple copies of things there, and THAT is what I want to clean up, get rid of that extra clutter.  Problem is which copy in which place to keep, and what to--- or, maybe I just need to completely overhaul my organization system, it's a hodge-podge of methods that hearken back all the way to when we first had a PC in 1989.... I'd like to find a method that I can set it up that way, then keep using it in almost perpetually, even when I'm 80 in 2061, or if I live that long, 90 in 2071 or 100 in 2081.  (Then when I've passed away, if my kids / grandkids, or if I never have any, nephews/niece (only 1 so far) want to do things differently they can.)

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> I don't have a working UPS now.

Ugh.  Get a nice 19" UPS from APC and put it at the bottom of your
rack because it's heavy.  You can buy them used, it's not like they'd
go bad except for the batteries that need to be replaced every now and
then.  The good thing with APC is that you can get new batteries
easily.

 

► 079 - 19" UPS, APC, rack, etc

I just have no place for a rack.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Also I'm using 4x32GB Team Expert DDR4-3600 CL18 in my current AM4
> system, but running at 3466 cause it's not quite stable at 3533 I
> think, [...]

I'm glad I have my workstations.  They work.

 

► 080 - glad have workstations

Ahh. I'm for now limited to consumer hardware.  A while ago I was thinking of getting LGA 771 or 1366 Xeons and building a NAS / backup server with them, but was having trouble finding standard (not rack) cases that would support all the drives, and then I got to thinking of the power consumption, and the factor of electricity being upwards of 35-67+¢/kWh here, and that was several years ago so who knows it could be flrting with or even past $1/kWh in some cases...

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> As for "stuffing more disks into my computer"... if there was a way
> to actually safely mount all of them AND hook them up...

That's what a decent case is for.  When I see all these funny tower
cases and what not that have all these cooling issues, I always wonder
'ok and where are the drive bays?'.  People put useless lights into
their computers but they don't even have drive bays, not to mention
backplanes.  How would that be useful?

 

► 081 - decent case, cooling, bays, lights, etc

Haha yeah, I don't really like the fancy lights and stuff.  (Although a while ago when I was having power issues with my system, my B550's default RGB lights did come in handy as a "power on" status indicator, although that problem was fixed when I replaced my PSU, from a Corsair AX760 that I'd carried over from the previous system, to an RM850, although I was a bit disappinted to be downgrading from 80+ Platinum to just 80+ peasant Gold.)

I remember several years ago seeing cases with drive bays taking the entire height (and sometimes even ones with a partial second stack), now it's rare to find even a full tower case that has more than 2 3.5" bays, even if it could fit an SSI EEB motherboard.  (And contrary to what some people think, if it won't fit SSI EEB, it's not "EATX", or, 12" x 10.7" is not "EATX", but 12" x 13" is.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> (Also if I was using a low profile CPU cooler, like something that's
> not taller than the VRM heatsinks, then I'd have room for several
> more HDDs...)

There you go:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/144404111197?hash=item219f27df5d:g:9O8AAOSwrZhhZ1kA&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAA4Gd1O5vyvyoOW8IY7xiInNzYaIhHzWGYsB9uG%2FBy9No%2FRFycFaB2vLBVCAkTzk2mARHqw4byVGoz5WrfKjZPmHrNC9KznX%2FedCAOPPgLbQPWF3QeO6e3c%2Bo1VzQz%2FE6VlwfrKtqMOxqQspmFyh0WHfKfPIJ5OdVnB0fSgQBpawv5IeTrnCY28NPGZt71JcIcewXylV%2FF%2Bjt0ZOx%2FGA2vHzdOrLINkpbiquIBBKGXfGwIhTV8ScfySa8R401vi6LVUf%2FNisXknEewUWze14IyZvI8w2%2FuebQ5uE%2BoCxJ3f0c2|tkp%3ABk9SR6SEz7yNYQ

https://www.ebay.de/itm/284981250850?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20201210111451%26meid%3D28e63db09b324ae4a36854e8ccbea38d%26pid%3D101196%26rk%3D4%26rkt%3D11%26sd%3D144404111197%26itm%3D284981250850%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D0%26pg%3D2047675%26algv%3DSimplAMLv5PairwiseWebWithBBEV2bAndUBSourceDemotionWithUltimatelyBoughtOfCoviewV1%26brand%3DSupermicro&_trksid=p2047675.c101196.m2219&amdata=cksum%3A28498125085028e63db09b324ae4a36854e8ccbea38d|enc%3AAQAHAAABMIep8YrnpoI5Ip1Fr26ya5Zdwg2V78Yl01uYLsdPZcFTvxKxDts2M2LiSIpUM3yyPCg4I%2FI%2F%2BBr%2B3lbC%2BxYqInYGBmzIxc4EMw3YF0EDxTKyEHLT%2F%2BSMG2X2Go1miFYKtC00MzMQyW9gDfbMtyClMOXZ8xJKGtjoLzUP%2FdiLuNWupvrVbgXCTDewZ4VueuJxRUMMZnXCy%2FDutw%2FxnITm48hlHbLvuMw3l6iBYxzde1cCgdhPRpOr3GLW%2BVqnkBvK2bQ6zIKPiX2RUJokpE%2Fbl83Sl9REJhrS0BYpSBleJScnEzI6pT11MsM153kyy4ma2Rj7Q7cJZh%2BscrwME71FUisxmmg8JNI%2Bwc7NlH8p7l8kzUTYUOCx8vRWWzR%2BuBe7MuZzk1rBbjZsLaRuwoLBA58%3D|ampid%3APL_CLK|clp%3A2047675&epid=149985814

What's the problem?

 

► 082 - case, lots of bays, ebay.de, examples

Well those are from Germany, I'm in the USA.  Also the cheaper one is about 25-35% or so more expensive than my entire budget for the system would be, not counting storage, if I was using it as a backup server.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> This is how I might have wanted to connect extra drives if I used a
> SAS HBA with external ports, like tha 9200-16e...

I'm not sure which picture that is.  Some look as if you're trying to
create a fire hazard.

 

 

► 083 - which pic, 9200-16e

The picture is below the caption, not above.
And what would be creating a fire hazard?  The way I'd have the cables set up, or something else?  I don't want to have wasted space in my case that could be taken up with hard drives.  (If it could be as densely packed as a laptop or tablet or phone, that might be nice.  I hate the full tower cases mentioned earlier that only have 2 3.5" bays, that's such a huge waste of space.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
> But, maybe it's better to have a dual-chamber case

It's better to get a decent case.  Chenbro really makes great stuff.

 

► 084 - decent case, chenbro
Hmm... I guess I haven't found any decent non-rack / non-server cases though...

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Sometimes I've had to run drives outside my case as well...

Ugh.  For testing, ok, but other than that, it's like stiching buttons
to your cheeks.

 

► 085 - testing, stiching buttons,

Yeah, I was testing stuff that way, doing DBAN, etc, but I wouldn't be comfortable running it that way all the time.

Also another situation I was testing was...
(insert, in spoiler, pic of laptop booting from IDE drive, powered from desktop PSU)

And stitching buttons to WHICH cheeks? The ones on my face, or...

 

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
> > Why more than 512?  I wouldn't use that much but it kinda makes
> > sense to use sector size as orientation.
> [...]

> Okay now I see the "compare no further than the first byte that
> differs"... that's a good idea probably.

Yes, there's no point in comparing any further.

 

 

→ 086 - comparing after first byte differs

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]
> Also, some media files might have been en-/trans-coded with
> different settings, but are ultimately the same thing.

But the files are different.

I was planning to make some backups today.  Maybe I can experiment
with deduplication with btrfs.

 

 

→ 087 - experiment deduplication btrfs

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> In some cases I might have a bunch of different bitrates / codecs of
> the same thing, and I need to pare some of those down and only keep
> the max quality / uncompressed one (a "master" so to speak), and
> maybe a couple lesser bitrate ones probably.

That'll be a lot of work.

 

→ 088 - (may not reply) "lot of work" different bitrates/codecs of same songs

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Well I think it's possible that the first 512 or 4096 bytes or
> whatever might be identical, but somewhere later in the file might
> not be.

Yes, it would only serve to be able to say which files are different.

 

 

→ 089 - (may not reply) 512, 4096 bytes, later different, only serve say which different

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Also I don't really need this to be super fast, as in, finish the
> entire job in like a half hour or an hour or so.

But I don't like inefficiency.

 

► 090 - don't like inefficiency / don't need super fast

True, but I also want to make sure I do the job completely.  (I do hope it's not a lot slower than about an hour and a half per TB or so.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I'd be totally fine if it takes several hours or even a full day or
> two or three to process.  I can just use my laptop in the meantime
> while my desktop is churning through the data.

Is your computer so slow that it would be overwhelmed by gathering data
about a few files?

 

► 091 - "so slow, overwhelmed, data few files"

No, the 5950X isn't that slow, it's just having so many files. WinDirStat says there's about 5.77 million "items" on this PC as of a week or two ago, and that's with a "backup" hard drive logically unplugged/unmounted. (By that I mean it's still physically plugged in, but I unassigned its drive letter in Disk Management.)

This is a short video of scrolling through a little of what WinDirStat found, just scratching the surface...

(upload "F:\Pics\from Pixel 6a\DCIM ; Camera\2022-11\PXL_20221118_082644231.mp4" to youtube, then link)

I noticed quite a few folder structures that looked like they could be duplicate hierarchies while looking through that. 002

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> As for where to put the database... I do have about 650 GB of space
> free on my NVMe boot SSD, maybe the database could hopefully fit in
> a few hundred GB of that, leaving the HDDs free for doing the main
> operation of going through their data, etc.

How many files do you have?  Don't you have mariadb running on your
server?

 

► 092 - how many files, mariadb on server
About 5.14 million files, and I'm not sure what mariadb is and I'm not running a server for now.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> As for files of different sizes being identical - of course they
> wouldn't be "identical" ... but they could have been taken from the
> same audio, photo or video source, and just be a different
> resolution or bit rate of the same thing.

Yes, but why would you keep so many dupes?

 

► 093 - why keep so many dupes

I don't want to keep so many, just a couple, basically the original straight from the camera / recording device, maybe one that was transcoded for editing, and one or two "final" copies for devices, etc.  There's a few I might still have laying around someplace, where I was experimenting with mp3 encoding, and basically had every possible bitrate, sample rate, and a couple other things of one song, while I was testing the lame encoder or something like that, to learn what would be good settings to encode mp3 with.  I remember several years ago I generally found I got better quality results by using about 2 or 3 bins higher bitrate for a given lowpass filter setting than was automatically suggested.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
> Nothing prevents you from making a check sum of all the check sums
> of all the files in a directory and from comparing those check sums
> of check sums.
>
> Ahh, checksums of checksums... but in my case I also have a bunch of
> partially duplicate folders, some maybe only 2 or 3 levels deep,
> some well into the double digits.

That won't matter because you'd be comparing directories and not
directory hierarchies.  If you were to comare the heirarchies, what
are the chances that there would be dupes of folder hierarchies?

 

► 094 - dupes of folder hierarchies

I already know of quite a few, problem is finding them again.  I was working on finding some files earlier, and found the same file in a couple different locations, and I found there were some partial dupes of folder hierarchies.  (But finding them will be a chore, cause I deleted some of the duplicate files and folders, but not all of them and I forget the names of what I had left, also either file explorer crashed or the system needed a reboot so i can't easily find it at the moment.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
> And there's the issue of the structure, for example,
> E:\a001\b001\c001\d001 might have a similar structure to
> H:\a003\b003\c003\d003\e003\f003\g003\h003\i003\j003\k003\l003\m003
> and so on,

How's that simialar?

 

 

► 095 - folder structure, how's that similar?

Similar once you go down farther in levels.  The top level of one duplicate of a particular hierarchy might by 3 levels down, while the top level of another duplicate might be 8 levels down from the root folder, and often even on a different drive.  (Maybe even on a different filesystem, but that's less likely.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]  (too bad there's multiple reasons why I can't just boot
> Linux, do cd /, then use a terminal command to recursively list
> everything then save & upload the resulting txt )

Why not?  Don't you have an USB stick you can boot from?

 

 

► 096 - have usb stick can boot?

I do have a couple USB sticks, one with a Windows 10 installer and another with multiple Linux ISOs on it, as well as a dead USB stick somewhere and one or two others laying around, one of which i've misplaced so idk where it is.  (Side note, I'd like to see about maybe updating the BIOS on my B550 Taichi motherboard, but I don't have a spare blank USB stick to put the bios file on, unless there's a way to do it without USB....)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> quick note, speaking of backups... the idea of something like "dd
> if=// ... " comes to mind,

No, dd is not for backups.

 

 

► 097 - dd not for backups
Ahh, it's what I'm currently using, as it seems to be the only way I know of to do a full backup of every single sector, and the only one that if I back up an OS drive, I can then plug the clone in and boot from it.  If I plug the original AND clone in simultaneously, I get a signature collision error, which I have to do something to reassign the signature to get the extra drive to come online.  Also a while ago (this one's complicated so I'm gonna leave a lot of stuff out) I'd had an OS clone or two... well one time I had my SSD plugged in, and the clone, hit F11 to pull up the boot manager to boot from the SSD... and it booted from the CLONE, which was a hard disk, instead.

As for differential or incremental backups, you're right, dd is not the tool for that. 

Also to me, a full backup wouldn't just restore the files, and also not just the programs, settings, operating systems, it would restore the actual partitions, free space, etc, even to the point of being able to use a tool like TestDisk to recover deleted partitions, if those would have been recoverable from the original media at the time it was backed up. 

TestDisk is how I restored some partitions from drives the time or two that I accidentally plugged a 4+TB drive into an older controller that maxed out at 2TB support.  I first "dd"-ed the mangled drive to another one of equal or greater size, then I restored to a third drive.  (I think I did notice an issue though, is that the "dd" didn't properly get everything - I was able to restore from the original drive, but trying to restore from the dd'ed clone was corrupted I think, so maybe I need a better tool than "dd"; also it might not be the best tool if the drive is actually failing.)
Yes, there was at least in one case a couple years or more between when the drive got borked, to when I did the restore, but I made sure to not use the drive at all (left it unplugged) until I was ready to attempt the restore.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> but if I'm backing up the ENTIRE filesystem including connected and
> network devices,

Such devices have their own filesystems.

 

→ 098 - (may not reply) devices, own filesystems, backup entire, connected + network

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> problem is what would I back it up TO, if I'm already specifying to
> back up not just everything directly connected to that PC, but also
> everything on the network...

Why would you do that?

 

► 099 - why ... back up everything on pc AND network

Well for right now I wouldn't do it, it's just a hypothetical idea, but basically back up all PCs, phones, etc in the house, AND back up the backups as well but maybe that last one is getting into some kind of circular / loop concept or something (I forget the proper term for it)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> (Also in my book, if I'm not including every single bit / sector
> including boot sectors, landing zones or whatever, normally
> inaccessible areas, firmware, etc, it's not a complete backup.)

Maybe you want to use clonezilla to make a clone.  That would be a
rather unwieldy way of making backups, and you'd be cloning a lot
every time you don't need to clone.

 

► 100 - clonezilla, unweildy, cloning a lot....
Well I'd only do it once in a while, basically for complete backups.  For differential or incremental backups I'd just need to back up whatever changed, and I'd need to learn how those work and how to implement them.

A while ago I had thought of maybe having one large hard disk onto which I'd put those diff / incr backups, then when it gets full, pull it and get another one to back up onto the new one.  (And/or, dump the entire contents of the full drive to a cold-storage backup server / NAS, or something like that.)
I've also heard that some people at least a number of years ago were advocating doing full backups daily, and incremental or differential backups hourly .. but when I have multiple tens of terabytes of total capacity, doing full daily backups would be rather unweildy, both from the time it would take to read from HDDs, and the cost of all that storage.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> (I'll admit that the thought of just deleting everything has come to
> my mind more than zero times, but I don't really want to exercise a
> nuclear option as there are some things I want or need to save.  )

You can always get your storage server up and running and copy the
data to it before it's lost, and use deduplication so that the
required storage space doesn't get out of bounds.  Once you have that,
you can make a backup and then start to go through all the data and
delete the stuff you don't need to keep.  Just make a snapshot before
you start deleting, and you may not even need your backup.

 

 

► 101 - storage server up & running, copy data, dedup, backup, go through data & delete, snapshot, etc
That actually might be a good idea, thing is right now I don't have a place to put a storage server.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> Also I'm maybe considering getting a couple 2TB or 4TB SSDs (one
> SATA 2.5", one NVMe M.2) for my laptop, to replace a couple 1TB SSDs
> so I have more space.

Why don't you get your storage server up and running and store the
data there?  Do these laptops even support redundant disks so it's
possible to store data on them?

 

► 102 - storage server up running, laptops support redundant
I've thought of that, cause it actually in some cases would be nice to have a centralized place to have stuff.  Several times now I've looked for something on the desktop and realized oh, that's on the laptop, or the same thing the other way around.

From what I understand my laptop supports RAID0 and RAID1, but I'm not using that.  (It may also support RAID5 or RAID10 due to having 4 disks, but I don't think it would work when mixing NVMe with SATA.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...] I'm just a bit hesitant to pay that much, for example, for a
> 4TB

Yeah get your storage server up and running.  Not doing that holds you
back and makes everything difficult and totally unreliable, makes you
throw endless amounts of money at buying more storage all the time and
all you accomplish is that you make the mess worse and uselessly store
endless amounts of duplicate data.  And you still have no way to
prevent data loss, like due to disk failures and power surges, and no
way to make backups.

 

 

→ 103 - (may not reply) get server running, buying storage, endless duplicates, data loss, no backups, etc

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> [...]
> Also ... I've been thinking a bit recently about getting a couple
> more SSDs for my laptop,

How many can you fit into it?

 

 

► 104 - how many SSDs can fit into laptop

My laptop, a Clevo P750DM-G, has two M.2 slots (supports NVMe or SATA) and two 2.5" SATA bays for a total of 4 disks. 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> either 2TB or 4TB to replace a couple 1TB

Why don't you keep the data on your storage server?  There's no need
to have that much storage capacity in a laptop.  Wireguard works fine.

 

► 105 - data on storage server instead of "that much" in laptop

That might be okay when I'm at home, but when I'm out somewhere for a weekend or longer, I want some things accessible locally.

Sometimes, for example, I've been in places where there's absolutely no internet connection, so there's no way I could access stuff from home.
And even if I did have a connection, my home internet has a bandwidth cap of 1 TB / month, and a max upload speed of about 10 Mbps, making it unusable for hosting a remote storage server.  (FIber isn't available here.)
I'm considering moving to near Provo, Utah sometime for a possible training / job opportunity (not involving PC / tech), and I'm thinking for the first few months or so I might have a more temporary living situation, so I'd probably only bring my laptop with me.  (Right now I'm near San Diego, CA.)  Once I'm more settled into more permanent housing (whether in Utah or somewhere else), THEN I'd want to set up a storage server, and go get my desktop PC and other furniture (and a couple acoustic upright pianos I have) from California.

(I'm not sure at what point it would be called "permanent" housing... my concept / experience might be a bit skewed, cause so far I've lived my entire life in the same house.)

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> Looking at pcpartpicker prices.... [...]

Stop buying any more storage before you got your storage server up and running.

 

► 106 - don't buy storage before server up

If only I had a place to put it.... I may end up having to move to my own place THEN set one up.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I've also wanted to compare the speed of some old HDDs vs current
> ones and SSDs -- but not in terms of MB/s transfer rates, I'm
> thinking more like "How long does it take to fill the entire disk if
> you're constantly writing to it".

Why?  Put your old disks into your backup server and make backups on
them, then you'll know how fast you can write to them.

 

 

► 107 - how long to fill disk, put in backup server, know how fast to write to them

Why? well I have a feeling that older disks were "faster" in that way than modern ones and I wanted to find out if it's true.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I wanted to buy a couple old <80MB PATA HDDs on ebay,

Stop buying any more storage before you got your storage server up and
running.

PATA?  Wasn't that the predecessor of IDE?  I may have had a 386DX16
that had one.  60MB was kinda huge ...

 

► 108 - PATA / predecessor of IDE
PATA was what IDE was renamed to.  (Also I've heard that SATA is "technically", in a way, IDE, which means Integrated Drive Electronics if I remember.

I think you're thinking of MFM / RLL, or ST-506 / ST-412 interface.  With those, there were two ribbon cables, one for control, one for data, and the controller was a separate expansion card.  When IDE came along (later called Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment, if I remember right), then later SATA, the controllers are those boards that are attached to the drive, I believe.

The old drives had boards too, but I think they were more dumb.  Those were the days in the 1980s when you had to manually configure sectors, interleave, cylinders, heads, write precompensation, landing zone, etc, and do low-level formatting before you did the actual filesystem formatting.  I never had personal experience working with them, as I was born in 1981, but I did use a computer with one of those drives in it.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> (I'm thinking that some of the older/smaller drives, like 40MB or
> 20MB, or if anyone has 10MB or 5MB MFM drives laying around and a
> working system capable of interfacing with them, could fill the
> entire drive in maybe half a minute to a few minutes or so,

You probably mean hours and days, not minutes.

 

 

► 109 - meant hours/days not minutes, fill small drive in a few minutes

I did mean minutes.
It took me about 11 or so minutes to fill an 8.4GB hard drive from 1998 a few years ago.
Also there's a Tom's Hardware article on "15 Years Of Hard Drive History: Capacities Outran Performance" from November 2006 - the page I linked was "Time Required To Write A Full Platter".  The largest drive they tested at the time was a 750GB SATA drive, and it took 52 minutes to read 200GB, or ~27% of the capacity.  Compare that to the 37 seconds it took to read 26 MB of a 40 MB IDE drive, or 65% of the capacity.  (Extrapolating, I'm guessing it would have taken about 3 hours 17 minutes to read the entire 750 GB drive, vs about 57 seconds for the entire 40 MB drive.)

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> [...]
> Maybe instead of me buying the drives, maybe someone else already
> has a system with drives like that, or better yet, something that
> supports MFM drives and has some of the early 5 or 10 MB drives.

Oh those are very rare ...

 

► 110 - old MFM, very rare

I've seen them for sale on ebay sometimes, but I don't have a system to put them in or the expertise to format / test them.  I've seen people on other forums geared toward more retro tech mention having them, but I don't have user accounts on some of those places (and part of my clutter includes already having too many user accounts lol.)  I have seen some retro tech youtubers with those though, maybe I should ask there sometime.

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

 

> I wonder how quickly those could be written or read...

You could probably dig up some old benchmarks or something.  You're
gona like this, for example:

1 5 2 8 - 1 5    MICROPOLIS
NO MORE PRODUCED                                      Native³  Translation
                              ÄÄÄÄÄÄÅÄÄÄÄÄÂÄÄÄÄÄÂÄÄÄÄÄ
Form                 5.25"/FH              Cylinders    2100³     ³     ³
Capacity form/unform  1346/ 1535 MB        Heads          15³     ³     ³
Seek time í / track  14.5/ 4.0 ms          Sector/track   84³     ³     ³
Controller           SCSI2 SINGLE-ENDED    Precompensation
Cache/Buffer           256 KB DUAL-PORTED  Landing Zone
Data transfer rate    2.916 MB/S int       Bytes/Sector      512
              4.800 MB/S ext SYNC
Recording method     RLL                            operating  ³ non-operating
                          ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÅÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Supply voltage     5/12 V       Temperature øC         5ö50    ³    -40ö65
Power: sleep              W     Humidity     %        10ö90    ³     10ö90
       standby       25.0 W     Altitude    km    -0.061ö 3.048³ -0.305ö15.240
       idle               W     Shock        g         2       ³     20
       seek          30.0 W     Rotation   RPM      3600
       read/write         W     Acoustic   dBA        43
       spin-up            W     ECC        Bit   48
                MTBF         h     150000
                Warranty Month        60
Lift/Lock/Park     YES          Certificates

That was actually a really good drive.  IIRC it was more like 2MB/s,
and the power consumption was hilarious (You realize that 5.25" is
really 5.25" and not half that like everyone thinks?)  Wow that was
one heavy disk ...  I liked it a lot, it made such a trustworthy heavy
tock tock tock sound when it was doing something that you always knew
when your computer was working.  I mean /working/, you know ...

Oh, look at that: I just noticed it had a 5 year warranty.  Not
surprising, it really was a tank.

 

 

► 111 - Micropolis SCSI 1.5GB, 2MB/s 5.25" drive, etc

Ahh I think I've seen some kind of site similar to that with old drive benchmarks and things, I think stason.org or something like that.

If that 1346MB drive transferred data at 2 MB/s, then the drive could theoretically fill in 11 minutes 13 seconds.

I looked on that site for some smaller drives, and saw several interesting ones, including the 5MB Fujitsu M2231AS and Seagate ST406 (I didn't see the ST506 on the site), the 10MB IBM WD 12, Seagate ST412 and Tandon TM252, which have an internal transfer rate of 0.625 MB/s.  Then there's the 21MB Seagate ST325A/X, rated for 1.5MB/s in AT mode and 1.75MB/s in XT mode, and the 42MB Quantum Prodrive ELS 42 AT at 2.5 MB/s.  Even if their actual transfer rates are slower, like in your 2MB/s vs 2.916MB/s example, it looks like they would theoretically transfer the entire capacity in about half a minute or less

 

 

 

On 11/12/2022 at 7:05 AM, heimdali said:

> I hear the ST-506 MFM interface supported up to 5 Mb/s, not sure if

Does that seem realistic?

 

 

 

 

► 112 - ST-506 MFM, 5Mb/s, realistic?

Well, it may not quite reach that high in the real world, but I did see a few youtube videos (01, 02, 03, 04) that included benchmark results from some older MFM and IDE hard drives.  Some of them might have only transferred data at like 300-500 KB/s, but with small capacities like 20 or 40 MB it would still transfer the entire capacity in about a minute or two.

 

 

 

Also ... I've been thinking a bit recently about getting a couple more SSDs for my laptop, either 2TB or 4TB to replace a couple 1TB SSDs I have now, but I'm not sure if I'll do that yet or not.  (We might be getting kinda close on the 2TB drives being close in price to what I paid for a 1TB, but we're not there yet on 4TB drives being the same cost, afaik.)
I paid about $105 for a 1TB 2.5" WD Blue 3D in August 2020 (my laptop's current Windows 10 boot drive), and $228 for a 1TB NVMe Samsung 970 Evo in November 2018, those are the drives I'm looking at replacing.  (No they're not failing, I just want more space, and all 4 SSD slots are filled - the other 2 slots are occupied by a 2TB 2.5" Seagate Barracuda 120 SSD and a 2TB NVMe Silicon Power P34A80.)

 

Looking at pcpartpicker prices.... I see a 2TB NVMe Mushkin Pilot-E for $138, a 2TB NVMe Silicon Power P34A80 for $145 (I already have one, plus a 1TB that's my Windows 10 boot drive in my desktop; Linux in the desktop is served by a 250GB SATA M.2-2260 Crucial MX200 which had previously been my Windows boot drive in my laptop but I "dd"-ed it to the 1TB WD Blue but now I can't update Windows past 1909 cause it thinks I don't have enough disk space for some reason even though it has ~600+ GB free, and I REALLY don't want to reinstall, hence why I'm still booting from SATA and not NVMe in the laptop cause I couldn't figure out how to migrate an existing install that way)), a 2TB 2.5" WD Blue 3D for $168, and a 2TB 2.5" Crucial MX500 for $172.  As for 4TB drives, I see a 4TB 2.5" Samsung 870 QVO (probably the only QLC drive I would dare to maybe consider; also I won't consider any DRAMless drives) for $330, a 4TB 2.5" Crucial MX500 for $345, a 4TB 2.5" WD Blue 3D for $348, or a 4TB NVMe Team MP34 or ADATA SX8100 for $350.  An 8TB SSD would be nice, but the cheapest is > $700 or so and it's QLC.

Also another thing I've thought about experimenting with was checking transfer rates - not in MB/s, but in time to write & read the entire drive, of some older drives, but maybe that's better suited for another thread.  Anyway in a nutshell, I had thought of getting a few 40MB or 80MB or so IDE drives on ebay, but when I looked at them, those things are crazy expensive per MB, compared to the $/MB on modern HDDs.   Basically though, I think those old drives were "faster" in writing / reading the entire drive - there's an article several years ago on Tom's Hardware (something about 15 years, capacities outran performance or something like that) where you could basically read / write to an entire 40 MB IDE drive in like 2 or 3 minutes.  But, it takes probably a full day to read/write to an 8TB or 10TB drive, and I imagine an 18TB or 20TB drive isn't any faster.

Maybe instead of me buying the drives, maybe someone else already has a system with drives like that, or better yet, something that supports MFM drives and has some of the early 5 or 10 MB drives.  I wonder how quickly those could be written or read... I hear the ST-506 MFM interface supported up to 5 Mb/s, not sure if that translates to 500 KB/s (10-bit, overhead, etc) or 625 KB/s (straight-up 8-bit), and I realize that they may not have hit that full speed, but if they did, a 5 MB drive could theoretically be written or read in like 8 or 10 seconds.  How long until we have modern hard drives or SSDs that are even faster and are NOT expensive... closest concept I can think of (which afaik doesn't exist for HDDs yet) is the comparison to the optical disk stamping I talked about earlier.