General Computer Thread

[Ar-Pharazon]

Failed how?

It's been several years, so I honestly don't remember. They just stopped working, A 1TB and a 2TB. I started getting failure messages from Windows, I don't think I lost anything.

seagate have been shit for quite some years now. Some brands have bad batches (hello IBM deathstar) but seagate have never really seem to have recovered.

That said I do have a 4TB one that I use for offsite backup of my media collection.

Never had experience with Samsung spinning though I've just gotten an EVO SSD. Probably get a couple of more over the next 6 months, got a couple of SSDs that are very high wear (one's at 43%) that I'll swap out.

Toshiba give me shudders. Years ago had a client that liked sony vaios which used toshiba drives in RAID-0 config and they'd always break.

Have at 4TB HGST 7200rpm (pre-WD buyout) that's just ticking along nicely.

Crucial has range of the SSDs (can't remember it was the BX or MX) that were solid reliable performers but not the fastest drives their quality has taken a dive recently.

I have 2 Samsung 500GB HDD's from a desktop I built around 2006-2007. I think that was the top end at that point. I still have them and had been using them for backup stuff until I got too much backup stuff for a 500GB to be particularly useful.

As far as Toshiba (2TB & 4TB), those are all my ripped movie & TV storage, doubled. SO even if one does decide to take a dump, I have a backup.

 

[Santaman]

The oldest harddrive I have is a 1981 Seagate ST-412, it is 10 MB, yes that is Megabyte in size and it still works.
The most reliable harddrives ever are also Seagates the ST-225 I have at least 8 of them and they ALL still work.
As for reliability, I've worked for a large computer firm and every manufacturer has its bad batches and also great batches and I am talking volumes of 1000+ per month so you sometimes get 500 Seagates, 100 Maxtors, 200 Samsungs etc etc, out of them early Samsung was iffy, later Samsung though probably the most reliable with the least DOA's
We're down to three manufacturers Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba, I've got drives from all three the WD's I have are quite old, the rest only a few years, so far none have failed.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I have a small portable seagate spinning rust drive and so far no hassles with it. Used as a backup for drive images.

 

[Unicron]

^^ Congrats old fart!

I admit, if I have a main nitpick about the MB Air so far, it's that the speaker system isn't nearly as good (in my limited experience atm) as the one on the MB Pro, although that's partly just a reflection of the Pro being more of a heavier desktop equivalent laptop and the Air being lighter and more compact. Maybe I'll get used it over time, but I just wish the Air's speakers didn't tend to sound like they're muffled by where they're located relative to other hardware. Sometimes it also seems like the balance between right and left channels is a bit off as well.

I might also look into a different dongle than the one I had to buy to keep using my optical mouse, which uses a common USB-A size connector. The modern Air only has two Thunderbolt Cs, but this dongle connects with a hanging cord and it seems like the mouse at times has a strange hesitation that it never had on the MB Pro (when I could plug in the signaler flush with the computer). It's been a bit frustrating to try and sort some stuff in an onscreen table and feel like the mouse is reacting way too slowly in terms of movement or clicking.

 

[Santaman]

I do use a laptop but these always are the rather big ass clunky desktop replacingy business kind of laptop, these usually are high quality and have something called "sufficient cooling" which is not always the case with lightweight and more portable laptops.

Found some old stuff lying around, two Pentium III 450 chips, a few old graphics cards, soundcards and even 10/100 network cards, I should have a few slot 1 mainboards around as well.. hmm.. I do feel the need to mess around with that stuff..

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

On the Mac Air don't they have options for cursor speed?

 

[Marc]

been trying to get vgpu working under Promox and have now got it working (very picky about driver and kernel versions).

Playing around last week I messed up the bios and had to pull the battery to reset it.

You'd think sitting in rack it would be nice and easy except genius here decided to short power cable would be help with cable management. Well that and for some reason the network cables won't stay clicked in (think it has to do with the io panel) and then there's the lack of a bracket on one of my nics (think it was tossed long ago).

One day when I'm feeling maschostic and the wife is at work I'll pull everything apart and rebuild.

 

[Santaman]

Ew! Ew! Bad you! baaaaaaaaaaad you! Cable manage that thing ASAP!

Found a little treasure, one of the P-II/III chips I found was a 500Mhz slot1 P-III.. oeh... TEH POWAAH!!! I've got a machine which at the moment has a P-II 400 and I bet the 100Mhz more and the 15% IPC uplift from the updated architecture would give that some really nice ooomph!!v

 

[Marc]

Ew! Ew! Bad you! baaaaaaaaaaad you! Cable manage that thing ASAP!

yeah it needs some tidy up but you can't see the worst of it

I am glad it's a modular PSU so not all the cables are attached. The case has 4 120mm fans connected via molex and daisy chained plus a hot swap bay that uses molex connectors (why rosewill why?)

Finally there's an LSI HBA to run most of my drives at 6Gbps (limit on the C602 chipset that there's only 2 SATA3 ports the rest are SATA2) and don't want to bend those cables too much.

 

[Santaman]

LSI is nice, I also know the ICP Vortex line of cards and some cards by Intel which always had unpronouncable names like SRCRM and SRCZCRX

 

[Marc]

LSI is nice, I also know the ICP Vortex line of cards and some cards by Intel which always had unpronouncable names like SRCRM and SRCZCRX

anything that works with out major issues no matter what the OS is nice I'm sure VMWare will break that anytime now though I jumped to Proxmox as the v2 Xeons are dropping off the support list so I don't care

Mine is flashed to IT mode so the RAID functionality is disabled but I didn't pay close enough attention when I bought it on e-bay. It's a 9240 and the SAS connectors are at the top and the cables do not have a 90 degree connector. Sufficed to say it wasn't a good mix with the 2RU case I was using at the time (no more cover for you).

 

[Santaman]

^^ That sucks, but a good excuse to get a 5U enclosure..

 

[Marc]

^^ That sucks, but a good excuse to get a 5U enclosure..

4RU and I had been thinking of it for a while due to limitations with the my 2RU case which being Supermicro was also a noisy little bugger then again their motherboards like to run the fans hard (3000rpm +)

At the same time, I got the SM case in 2012 and it's run almost non-stop ever since with all four fans in the case and the one in the PSU spinning nicely (well other than the noise)

 

[Santaman]

^^Yeah Supermicro indeed runs the fans REALLY HARD AND LOUDLY.. usually when you enter a datacenter the loudest buggers are all Supermicro..

So updated the P-III machine and it now runs at 500Mhz, has a Diamond stealth II G460 main graphics card, yes that's an Intel i740.. and wait for it.. a VooDoo II 3D accelerator card to deal with the 3D stuff if the i740 can't handle it.

 

[Marc]

^^Yeah Supermicro indeed runs the fans REALLY HARD AND LOUDLY.. usually when you enter a datacenter the loudest buggers are all Supermicro..

So updated the P-III machine and it now runs at 500Mhz, has a Diamond stealth II G460 main graphics card, yes that's an Intel i740.. and wait for it.. a VooDoo II 3D accelerator card to deal with the 3D stuff if the i740 can't handle it.

should post them on reddit in r/retrobattlestations

 

[Santaman]

I don't have an account there but we'll see, I've got a lot of machines, 80486, Pentium I, II, III, Socket A machines etc.

 

[Unicron]

So, I've noticed something odd in the past day or so. If I'm searching for stuff on Google, it seems to work fine but then stops loading results or even letting me reach Google in Safari. No other website is affected, and it seems to work fine in another browser like Chrome.

At first, I thought it was a cache issue because I'd been doing a lot of online stuff when I first ran into it last night. I cleared everything and that seemed to initially work, but then the problem started up again. I've never encountered this problem with Google on Safari before, and I'm using a brand new MacBook with the most updated version of the browser. Any advice?

As mentioned, every other website loads and works fine as far as I can tell. Only Google is having issues.

ETA: Google seems to be running again, so maybe it's something on their end?

 

[Santaman]

^^ No idea, could be a DNS issue, DDOS attack etc etc etc.

Found another possible Pentium II machine, so far I've got a mainboard, a Biostar M6TLC which is one with the 440LX chipset, I should have some memory left to give it 256MB RAM, maybe more, depends on it, and I have a Pentium II 266Mhz Slot 1 chip, I certainly have graphics cards for this machine, soundcard too, network card is also not an issue, casing, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive and the like I probably will have too, the PSU might be an issue though, might need to have one of my old beasts refurbished, aka replace the capacitors.
And no, while it is all ATX based, a modern PSU can't run a Pentium II system, old machines like that draw most of their power at 5 Volts so old PSU's have most of their power output at 5Volt, newer PSU's have most of their power output at 12Volt and barely anything at 5Volt..

 

[Unicron]

Well, perhaps I'm just paranoid. Seems to be working now, so I'll keep an eye on it.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

For that matter why is it when visiting some websites like the IMDB for example on my desktop machine the fans go from normal happy sound to jet engine? then when I leave that site things return to peace and calm.. Also my cpu usage spikes like hell there.

Even gaming a lot which I expect to ramp up the fans does none of this.