Decided to give my modern PC a near-end-of-life refresh. I wasn't on planning on it, but the random freezes and lockups with the FX6300 processor are becoming to frequent. It appears to be a widespread problem with this platform.

So shelled out on used s1150 motherboard and an i7 4790 with 32gb ram (could not re-use the ddr3 from the AMD system). Think I will be able to re-use the Noctua NH-U12P cooler and obviously all the other components, so should be fairly painless upgrade hopefully. Then I will have a 5 year old system instead of a 10 year old system 😁

$230 in total which was more than I wanted to spend on this system but if I can get another 5 years out of it and get to the point where ddr5 has been out long enough to be cheap then I will be able to do a clean-slate new-build and retire this aging beast.

ISP upgraded my modem (goodbye 250/50, hello Fibre 1Gb 😁).
I had to disassemble my old copper TV/Internet installation... (even my TV get's decoder with Ethernet/WiFi connections only).

2,4GHz WiFi (Netgear R7800 + Intel AC 9260) :

5GHz WiFi (Netgear R7800 + Intel AC 9260) :

I had posted it in the wrong topic, but now I corrected it.

Just received a gift from my dad. He's now a retired programmer, but used his free time to build for me a hand-crafted wood dock/stand for my MacBook Pro. Excellent work. Current docks/stands sold on stores are so damn expensive in Brazil, so we designed ours.

Nicely finished but the ergonomics are crap. Your wrists are going to ache using it on a regular basis. I guess any Blue tooth keyboard would be an improvement over the crappy scissor keyboard shipped with those systems though and cost less than $20. They come with a nice holder/protector/case for tablets like Andoids, iPads and such. Cost me $25 for 2. Well worth it.

The ergonomics are perfectly fine! I have both Apple keyboard and trackpad as well as magic mouse. The scissor keyboard is amazingly good. Better than the butterfly one. I am mostly using my computer plugged into my 40” 4K TV over hdmi in clamshell mode anyway, it was designed for that - the stand was a plus in our design and it can also dock the keyboard in when not in use. I’m satisfied, cheaper than the expensive stands like the Twelve South BookArc stand.

End of discussion. 😀

My entire RAID collapsed, again.

Previously the backplane failed and hosed the volume. This time the controller failed (or better put, the SCSI chip on the controller and not the RAID controller itself) and a bunch of services failed to stop because for some reason the controller and IBM's software didn't want to talk to the rest of the system, so Remote Storage ran and blanked out the database because it saw a monitored volume with nothing in it anymore and for several days I had no audible, visual or message alarms going off. I swapped in my spare controller and found out that even with the latest firmware flashed it would not import the RAID definition due to version conflicts and so far that I can tell the spare RAID controller doesn't want to even rebuild the RAID from scratch because of said weird version problems, so I'm unable to access all of my serverside files (about 15 years of stuff) until I can find another PCI-X RAID controller, build a new RAID5, restore the RAID contents from backup, rollback to the last system backup two days before the failure and then baby the system for a few more hours to make sure that it's not running into errors with the restored datasets.

It's also the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada, so I'm REALLY enjoying having all this on my mind when I'm trying to enjoy an extra day off work.

bfcastello wrote:

The ergonomics are perfectly fine! I have both Apple keyboard and trackpad as well as magic mouse. The scissor keyboard is amazingly good. Better than the butterfly one. I am mostly using my computer plugged into my 40” 4K TV over hdmi in clamshell mode anyway, it was designed for that - the stand was a plus in our design and it can also dock the keyboard in when not in use. I’m satisfied, cheaper than the expensive stands like the Twelve South BookArc stand.

End of discussion. 😀

Hell no https://wccftech.com/macbook-3rd-generation-b … witch-problems/ The MS fabric covered surface/note book stuff is stupid as well.

CelGen wrote:

My entire RAID collapsed, again.

Previously the backplane failed and hosed the volume. This time the controller failed (or better put, the SCSI chip on the controller and not the RAID controller itself) and a bunch of services failed to stop because for some reason the controller and IBM's software didn't want to talk to the rest of the system, so Remote Storage ran and blanked out the database because it saw a monitored volume with nothing in it anymore and for several days I had no audible, visual or message alarms going off. I swapped in my spare controller and found out that even with the latest firmware flashed it would not import the RAID definition due to version conflicts and so far that I can tell the spare RAID controller doesn't want to even rebuild the RAID from scratch because of said weird version problems, so I'm unable to access all of my serverside files (about 15 years of stuff) until I can find another PCI-X RAID controller, build a new RAID5, restore the RAID contents from backup, rollback to the last system backup two days before the failure and then baby the system for a few more hours to make sure that it's not running into errors with the restored datasets.

It's also the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada, so I'm REALLY enjoying having all this on my mind when I'm trying to enjoy an extra day off work.

Ouch. 😵 If you can get it up and running again, back it up. I'm done with hardware RAID controllers.. had too many failures like this in the past.

I now store all my stuff on a modern server using SnapRAID (3 parity drives), backed up to the cloud with Backblaze. The server just has a bunch of IBM M1015 SAS HBA's. I can accomplish sharing to old machines with FTP.

If IBM had sold a SATA/SAS upgrade for FRU 00N8951 I would of long ago upgraded to modern disks and something like an Adaptec AAR-2610SA. Those 220 Xseries servers are far too well built.

RAID 5 makes me nervous. I don't put anything on a RAID 5 array that isn't regularly backed up.

The rebuild time for RAID 5 is long enough to make a second disk failure a very possible, catastrophic risk.

What is the big deal of having RAID on a home system anyway?

1) Data integrity when using BTRFS, ZFS, or similar.
2) Avoiding the inconvenience of having to restore a backup.
3) A few smaller disks are less expensive than one huge disk.

gdjacobs wrote:

1) Data integrity when using BTRFS, ZFS, or similar.
2) Avoiding the inconvenience of having to restore a backup.
3) A few smaller disks are less expensive than one huge disk.

If the RAID pack craps out?

Less likely than an individual drive failing, all else being equal. Still, RAID doesn't take the place of backups.

RAID replacing backups?

oeuvre wrote:

RAID replacing backups? […]
Show full quote

RAID replacing backups?

Nope, although RAID should mean fewer failures, so less need for backups.

gdjacobs wrote:

RAID should mean fewer failures

🤣

gdjacobs wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

RAID replacing backups? […]
Show full quote

RAID replacing backups?

Nope, although RAID should mean fewer failures, so less need for backups.

What a load of beeeeeeep!

Maybe I'm not communicating well here.

Part of the purpose of RAID is to reduce the incidence of data loss and unrecoverable faults. There are plenty of scenarios where RAID doesn't save you, but more reliable storage pools should make those scenarios more rare. So while backups are still important, part of the intention behind RAID is that you won't need them as often.