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Brio

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  • Posts

    21
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Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Slightly Below Canada
  • Interests
    Design, Computer Building, Tweaking, Illustration, Photography/Videography, Printmaking, Production
  • Biography
    Graphic Designer by trade, computer tinkerer by necessity, taking life one day at a time.
  • Occupation
    Graphic Designer - Production Artist

System

  • CPU
    Intel Core i7 3770 @ 3.40GHz
  • Motherboard
    ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8H61-M PRO/CM6630/DP-MB
  • RAM
    ADATA 8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3
  • GPU
    EVGA SSC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
  • Case
    Corsair Carbide 300R ATX Mid-Tower Case - Black
  • Storage
    Crucial - MX100 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive & Seagate - Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
  • PSU
    Corsair - CX 500W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
  • Display(s)
    Samsung - S24C570HL 23.6" 1920x1080 Monitor & Cintiq 22HDT
  • Cooling
    Cooler Master - Hyper T4
  • Keyboard
    Razer Cynosa Chroma
  • Mouse
    Razer DeathAdder Elite
  • Sound
    Altec Lansing 120i Speakers
  • Operating System
    Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit

Recent Profile Visitors

557 profile views
  1. Over the last couple of weeks I've been setting up a LOT of new iMacs for my work. One thing I've noticed among all of them is that the firewall is off by default and has to be turned on. Then I was tweaking my own settings on my laptop and noticed that my firewall was off despite having turned it on years ago with a "set it and forget it" type mentality, knowing that it'd be on unless something turned it off or I purposefully did that. Is this just a fluke? Sure if your network is protected at least you have some manner of security but it just seems silly to have to turn something on when even Windows has theirs on automatically. (And even screams at you when it's off) The question for me remains, why would Apple have a key security feature on their hardware, off, right out of the box?
  2. Either or. Automatic importing would make life easier but entering things manually isn't too terrible. Though considering I'm trying to parse a list of a couple of hundred items...s'why I'm seeking an app or the like to do the sorting and math for me rather than spending a few hours/days sorting through things manually. For example, you have a list of 10 items: $7.99 $8.90 $49.68 $11.74 $20.47 $29.98 $39.88 $22.00 $23.26 $43.49 It would sort those by price, then list the number of items you could reasonably purchase given a budget of $100 USD. Highlighting them or listing the ones that fall within that range. Then you could adjust the output list, say you favor one item over another that it didn't list, and it'd re-calculate to tell you what else you could still get within a budget.
  3. Does anybody know if there's an app that can: Take a list of items, and sort them by price. (i.e. an Amazon list) Then auto-magically determine the highest quantity of items you can purchase on that list within a given budget? (Optional) is able to import live data via an amazon wishlist or some other database to ensure prices are accurate & up to date. Been Googling for days but all I get are personal finance and budget apps that while useful aren't at all what I'm looking for. I'm imagining the logic for such an app/spreadsheet calculator would be something like: "Sort items from least to most expensive, then collate upwards to the set budget limit in order to ensure the maximum amount of items are selected while still remaining within the set limit."
  4. Upon reading some reviews on Newegg it appears that this card cannot support a drive larger than 2TB. Which probably is the issue I'm facing. Not that, that information is shared on the manufacturer's page for the product or in the listing....I do appreciate the attention you've given thus far though. ;w ; Only options available to me it seems are to contact the support department at Vantec or return the card to Microcenter and reassess my available avenues.
  5. Auto mode unfortunately does nothing but determine the chunk size automatically at 64K and select all available drives for the array. I am hesitant to save the config beyond this point because I don't want to have to format the metadata off the drives to try and change it. As the drives are brand new I don't want to format them over and over in an attempt to get them to work. Changing the amount of drives plugged in from 4 to 3 merely reduces the RAID 5 config down to RAID 10's size. Booting into Windows the drives don't even show up in Disc Management. All I can think of is the card may not be rated for such a "large" RAID size.
  6. You'd think that would do something...yet the chunk size has no effect on the final raid size in this case. In a RAID 5 array here it stays firmly at a max size of 5034GB and in RAID 10 it stays at 3356GB. The only thing that seems to change the size is the RAID type and it merely goes down further on the other options. Changing the number of discs its using also doesn't seem to affect the size beyond the effect of reducing the already tiny size.
  7. These are all the options there are. Logically it makes no sense that the capacity would be so small. Trying to increase the size it goes past the initial threshold down to 2GB and hitting the down arrow to go back it jumps back up to 5034 GB meaning that's the max size its saying it can be. The card supports RAID 1, 0, 5, 10 and everything is as it should be in the booklet instructions here: https://www.vantecusa.com/CKEdit/images/files/ugt-st310r_manual.pdf So either I fundamentally lack understanding of how a RAID works or there's some shenanigans with the math going on here.
  8. Has anybody ever experienced this? I'm setting up a RAID for myself (namely because I wanted to, not because it's the best method) and decided on RAID 5 due to the capacity of 3 drives and the redundancy of 1. During setup I entered my RAID card's BIOS and started manually configuring the thing. Then when I was ready to hit yes I noticed a slight issue. According to Linus in his As Fast as Possible series on RAID arrays; For RAID 5 I should have the capacity of however many drives I have minus one for parity. The math being (Capacity of 1 drive) x (# of drives in the array - 1 drive (for parity). If I'm understanding this correctly then, I should be looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 12TB out of these four 4TB drives. What I find myself seeing is not even close. 5TB? Am I missing something? Gets even weirder with RAID 10: RAID 10 as I understand it (RAID 1+0) should at least be giving me the capacity of half of the drives in the array? So why then is the capacity not even the size of a single bare drive? Can anybody help me diagnose this? It seems really odd. ;w ; EDIT: The RAID card is a VANTEC 6-Port SATA II 150 PCI Host Card Model UGT-ST310R and I'm using four 4TB Seagate Barracuda Drives I have available to me.
  9. Hello everyone, For the past few weeks I've been submerging myself in the ins and outs of setting up a RAID and I feel like I could use some peer review/insight. The plan that started all this was to begin making myself a larger storage area with built in redundancy. I have a bunch of 250GB-1TB hard drives floating around my room and they're all full. I needed a place to store all my files (all. of. them. ) so I can organize them, archive them and possibly use the external drives as live storage or cold storage for things (depending on how things worked out). Doing some research I determined that a NAS or a RAID array would probably be my best options for storage. Having been gifted four Seagate - BarraCuda 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drives, I thought, oh heck, this'll be easy to get working, just plug em in and go right? Wrong, already started off realizing I needed some SATA cables because they of course can't communicate via magic. Then that led to "Oh crap. Do I have enough SATA ports on my Motherboard?!" Upon checking I have six at my disposal on my P8H61-M PRO ASUS motherboard, which provided to me, two problems: Problem #1: I already have a SSD and HDD connected to this computer that hold all that computer's files. (I want that to stay just the way it is because it's working fine and I don't wanna break it.) Problem #2: I have a CD/DVD drive connected which means it's already using a SATA port to exist. So that leaves me with only 3 SATA ports left to use, two of which are completely dwarfed/obscured by my GTX 1060. As a result I don't know how best to attach 4 hard drives to this board so my computer can "see" them. After some digging into solutions I came up short and visited the local Microcenter; they recommended the VANTEC 4 Channel 6-Port SATA 6Gb/s PCIe RAID Host Card Model UGT-ST644R. This card seems to be what I need it to be with one caveat; the back of the box says it supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and HyperDuo (whatever that is?) but makes no mention of RAID 5, or RAID 6. I had hoped to take advantage of RAID 5 because it seems like the best option for my 4 HDD, providing me with 12TB of capacity and tolerance for a single drive failure. The issue I'm attempting to find closure with now is, will I be able to use RAID 5 with this card or is that not possible because the card specs don't mention its supported? EDIT: Upon attempting to see if the RAID card would fit in the PCI slot I learned that because of a small "tab" on the pcb it won't even slot into the motherboard unless I cut it off which will undoubtedly void the warranty. And seeing as how I don't know if it's even going to work I've elected to not use the card...getting it to work would require a new motherboard because the GPU covers up an entire PCIe lane and two SATA ports. (As marked out in the red area) And a new motherboard would would require me to get a new CPU, and new RAM...at which point my computer will be a completely different computer from when I started tinkering. Which just means more time, money/headache that could probably be solved with an external NAS. tl;dr Needed More Storage, feel that a RAID will give me what I need + automatic redundancy. An external NAS also seems like an option but is too expensive to pursue at this time. Have four 4TB hard drives to utilize (Yes they're not technically rated for use in a RAID like Ironwolf drives, but they're cheap and it was something I could utilize immediately.) Didn't have enough SATA ports. (EDIT: Still don't at this point in time) Bought a RAID Host Card with 6 ports (effectively doubling what I have available); doesn't explicitly say it supports RAID 5 and not sure if that's a problem. Questions to solve: Is a RAID the best way to go about solving the initial problem or is this needlessly complicated, with a more elegant solution available that I've neglected? (A suggestion from a friend was to "plug one drive in, copy everything from the old HDD onto it, remove old HDD, plug in second new HDD, and keep the other two as backups if the first ones fail" because they're lazy and what I'm doing seems like a lot of work.) Is RAID 5 the best option here, or would a different type be more beneficial in this case? I read elsewhere on the forums that you need a certain amount of RAM for every GB worth of storage (in reference to a NAS), as I've got only 8GB of DDR3 available to me (and that's the max available to this motherboard), is this something I should be taking into consideration for a RAID? Any input you can give would be greatly appreciated. I'm up for just trying things till I come across something that works, but nothing beats experience. (⁎˃ᆺ˂)
  10. Engineer: Oh you wanted it to be durable? Exec.: Nah pretty is in right now. Can you add RGB?
  11. If used correctly I'm sure it'd last a long time. But I'm just imagining someone plugging this into an ethernet cable and the laptop; then it getting dragged off a table and hitting the floor if someone tripped over the cable during a presentation, or someone yanking at it not remembering that you have to depress the lil plastic tab to remove the cord.
  12. Don't know if this has been shared here yet but this is some crazy port design on a laptop. I foresee a lot of warranty calls in the future for Fujitsu. Although this feels like the mech of ethernet ports. I'm surprised it doesn't have an anime made about it. Original Post by @decryption on twitter.
  13. My concern with a setup like this is less about condensation and more to do with dust management and aesthetics. My computer sits directly beside the air vent for my room (out of necessity rather than choice just because of where I can put my desk.) and I find it gets significantly dustier there after about a month than it does if I were to rearrange my room. So blowing directly from an AC unit unfiltered into a rig might be a bit much unless you kept up with maintenance.
  14. Got my current GPU, an EVGA GeForce GTX 550 Ti from a friend after my power supply blew up and he noticed that my GPU was not up to snuff. (Although it was probably because it was taking up space in his apartment since he had just upgraded and wanted to clean house) Either way, unexpected and lovely gift.
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