Thor was dirty. No, Thor was filthy. Thor is Pam’s desktop computer, an Intel quad core box I built for her back in 2008. Next to her desk, it’s raised off the floor a few inches and we regularly clear off the surface dust and air filters but it had been a while – a couple of years, probably, since it’s been properly torn open and cleaned. Lately, signs of instability were growing more frequent. So the other day I opened the case.
Well, I guess it was to be expected. The innards were choked with dust. The squirrel-cage fan on the graphics card, one of those big honkin’ GeForce cards, hardly had room to spin! I looked inside the box, looked at the can of Dust Off in my hand, looked back inside, thought about how many cans I might have in the basement store… Nah, this would never do.
So I set up a work table outside the garage door and hauled out my shop compressor. 100 PSI? I thought about the possibility of blowing components right off the motherboard, the moisture that would accumulate in that air after a few cycles… I changed the blowgun tip to something a little more diffuse and got to work.
It took a while. But when I was finished Thor’s innards once again looked like new. I closed the box, cleaned up my tools, wrestled the box back upstairs. And it wouldn’t boot.
Nothing really seemed out-of-place, I was careful with the air streams, I hadn’t forgotten any cables. Still, no boot. Or, more precisely, the pulsating orbs of Windows 7 starting up would halt and the blips of drive activity would take on a regularity that indicates a hang. To add an interesting twist, it booted nicely to Safe Mode.
Because of the way Windows works, this was pointing toward an issue with video. The card was obviously initializing so I replaced the driver and exercised the various modes. All looked fine but the situation was unchanged.
Maybe the boot drive was going south from running in all that heat before the cleanup, and the shock of moving stuff around pushed it over the edge. Before I went to work I imaged the drive. I could virtualize the image, recover Pam’s settings and apply them to a new Windows 7 install. As part of Thor’s long-overdue maintenance I planned to change out the boot drive for one of those hybrid drives I like and the drive was in there anyway, empty and waiting. The install media booted fine and the installation began. Wouldn’t you know, though, when the installer got the point that it boots the newly installed kernel, before personalization, it hung again!
Puzzling. The hardware POSTs, Safe Mode boots, a normal boot hangs, as does a new Windows install. Log checks in Safe Mode, as well as other diagnostics run from bootable media all seem okay. Everything pointed to a video issue.
So I pulled the GeForce card out, grabbed a loupe and looked it over. Aha! There was corrosion on some of the contacts! Cleaned ‘em up, that’s what I did, and coated ‘em with Stabilant. What’s that? From the tech notes…
Stabilant 22 is an initially non-conductive amorphous-semiconductive block polymer that when used in thin films within contacts acts under the effect of the electrical field and switches to a conductive state. The electric field gradient at which this occurs is established is during its manufacture so that the material will remain non-conductive.
Thus, when applied to electromechanical contacts, Stabilant 22 provides the connection reliability of a soldered joint without bonding the contacting surfaces together!
It’s amazing stuff. It’s also seriously expensive. It’s by far the most expensive fluid in the house. Old whisky? Nah. Even printer ink is way cheaper. But it works. On the good side, a little goes a long way. I’ve still got more than half of the 15 mL I bought back in 2006.
The graphics card slipped into its connector with friction-free ease. And not only did Thor POST faster than I’d ever seen it POST, but it booted like nothing had ever been amiss.
When I built Whisky, my current work-a-day desktop, back in November 2009 I wanted to boot from one of those blazin’ solid-state drives. Bummer, though, either they were seriously expensive or performed poorly. Poorly, of course, was a relative term; for the most part even the poorest smoke conventional hard drives. Still, as the build expenses mounted the SSD finally fell off the spec list.
Sometime after the build, Seagate brought their hybrid drives to market. Hybrids combine a conventional spinning disk and conventional cache with a few gigabytes of SLC NAND memory configured as a small SSD. The system sees the drive as it would any other drive; an Adaptive Memory (Seagate proprietary) algorithm monitors data use and keeps frequently used stuff on the SSD. You’ll find people arguing over whether or not a hybrid drive provides any kind of performance boost. I wrote about my experiences with the Seagate Momentus XT (ST95005620AS) back in June 2010. Today when I build a multiple drive system I routinely spec a hybrid as a boot drive. It’s cheap and it helps.
So about a month ago I ran across a good deal on a fast SSD, a Corsair Force Series GT (CSSD-F240GBGT-BK) and I jumped on it. The specs are just tits: sequential reads and writes of 555 and 525 MB/s respectively. (Sure, that was with a SATA 3 interface and my motherboard only supports SATA 2; I wouldn’t see numbers like that, but still… It even looks great.
Integrating the thing into a working system was a bit of a challenge, mostly because I didn’t want to purchase additional software simply to clone the existing boot drive. I’ve got no trouble paying for software I use; it simply seemed like too much for something to be used but once. So part of the challenge was to find a cost-free alternative.
Strategy and Concerns
The general strategy would be to clone the current two-partition boot drive to the SSD, swap it in and enjoy the performance boost. The SSD partitions would need to be aligned, of course, and somewhere along the way the C partition would need to shrink to fit onto the smaller SSD.
The top concerns came down to security and reliability. Erasing a conventional hard drive is easy: repeatedly write random data to each block. You can’t do that with SSDs. Their blocks have a specific (and comparatively short) lifetime and so on-board wear-leveling routines become important. When data is overwritten, for example, the drive writes the data elsewhere and marks the old blocks for reuse. And unlike conventional drives, it’s not enough to simply write over a block marked for reuse; the entire block must first be erased. The bottom line is you can’t ever know with certainty whether or not a SSD is ever clear of confidential data. Disposing of them securely, then, means total destruction.
As for reliability, a conventional hard drive has to have some pretty serious problems before it becomes impossible to recover at least some data. There’s generally a bit of warning – they get noisy, start throwing errors, or something else that you notice – before they fail completely. Most often an SSD will simply fail. From working to not, just like that. And when that happens there’s not much to be done. This makes the issue of backups a little more thorny. If it contained confidential data at the time of failure you’ve got a hard choice to make: eat the cost and destroy the device, or RMA it back to the manufacturer (losing control of your data).
Considering backups, you can see that monolithic backups aren’t the best solution because they’re outdated as soon as they’re written. Instead, a continuous backup application, one that notices and writes changed files, with versioning, seems prudent.
In my case, this is to be a Windows 7 boot drive and and all confidential user data is already on other storage. The Force Series GT drive has a 2,000,000 hour MTBF, fairly high.
Software
SSDs are fast but they’re relatively small. It’s almost certain that existing boot partitions will be too big to fit and mine is no exception. Windows 7 Disk Manager will allow you to resize partitions if the conditions on those partitions are exactly right. There are commercial programs that will do the job where Windows won’t but my favorite is MiniTool Partition Wizard. I didn’t really want to do that in this instance. The fundamental problem I had with pre-shrinking is that it would involve mucking with a nicely working system. Come trouble, I wanted to simply pop my original drive back in the system, boot and get back to work.
For cloning and shrinking partitions there are several free or almost free applications. I found that most of them have drawbacks of one sort or another. I’ve used Acronis before – Acronis supplies OEM versions of their True Image software to some drive manufacturers, it’s an excellent product. But their free product won’t resize a partition image, bummer. I used EaseUS some years back, too, but a bad run-in once with their “rescue media” – in that case a bootable USB stick. My disks got hosed pretty bad from simply booting the thing and I… wasn’t pleased. Maybe they’ve gotten better, people say good things about ‘em, but I wasn’t confident… Paragon seemed very highly rated but in testing I had too many validation failures with their images. Apparently the current version is worse than the back revs. Whatever, I was still uneasy. I ended up settling on Macrium Reflect from Paramount Software UK Ltd. For no rational reason the name of this product bothered me, sending it to the bottom of the test list. Macrium. The word makes me think of death by fire. I was reluctant to even install it. About the only negative think I’ve got to say about Macrium is that it takes a fair bit of effort to build the ‘rescue disk’ – bootable media to allow you to rebuild a failed boot volume from your backup image(s). The rescue media builder downloads and installs, from a Microsoft site, the Windows Automated Installation Kit. WAIK weighs in at more than 2 GB. The end result is a small ISO from which you can make bootable media of your choice. Except for that final burn – you’re on your own for that – the process is mostly automated; it just takes a while. Probably has to do with licensing or something.
Finally, I bought a copy of Genie Timeline Pro to provide the day-to-day realtime backup insurance, mentioned earlier, that I wanted.
Preparation for Migration
I started by installing both Gene Timeline Pro and Macrium Reflect and familiarized myself with each. I built the rescue media for each, booted from the media, and restored stuff to a spare drive in order to test. It’s an important step that many omit, but a backup that doesn’t work, for whatever reason, is worse than no backup at all.
I did some additional maintenance and configuration which would affect the C: partition. I disabled indexing and shrunk the page file to 2GB. The box has 8GB RAM and never pages. I suppose I could omit the page file entirely, but a warning is better than a BSOD for failure to page. I got rid of all the temp junk and performed the usual tune-up steps that Windows continues to need from time to time.
Satisfied, I imaged the System Reserved partition and the C: partition of my boot volume, verifying the images afterward. For each partition, which I backed up with separate operations, I used the Advanced Settings in Macrium Reflect to make an Intelligent Sector copy. This means that unused sectors aren’t copied, effectively shrinking the images. Then I installed the SSD via an eSATA port. Yes, this meant it would run even slower than SATA 2 but it saved a trip inside the box.
It was at this step that I noticed the only negative thing about this drive. The SATA cable is a bit of a loose fit. It doesn’t accept a retaining clip, if your cable is so equipped. Ensure there’s no tension on a cable that might dislodge it.
Creating Aligned Partitions
Partition alignment is important on SSDs both for performance and long life. Because of the way they work, most will read and write 4K pages. A very simplistic explanation is that when a partition is not aligned on a 4K boundary, most writes will require two pages rather than one which decreases performance dramatically and wears the memory faster. (There’s more to it than that, really, but you can seek that out on your own. The Web’s a great teacher. Being the curious sort I learned more than I needed to.) Windows 7, when IPLed, will notice the SSD and build correctly aligned partitions for you. Some commercial disk cloning software will handle it automatically, too. But migrating users are on their own. Incidentally, it’s theoretically possible to adjust partition alignment on the fly, but if you think about the logistics of how this might be done – shifting an entire partition this way or that by some number of 512 byte blocks to a 4K boundary – you’ll realize it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Better to simply get it right in the first place.
Fortunately it’s easy!
Using an elevated command prompt (or, in my case, a PowerShell), use DISKPART. In my case, my existing System Reserved partition was 71 MB and change, and the remainder of the SSD would become my C: partition.
diskpart
list disk
select disk <n> (where <n>is the disk number of the SSD)
create partition primary size=72 align=1024
active (the System Reserved partition needs to be Active)
create partition primary align=1024 (no size specification means use the remaining available space)
exit
You can also use DISKPART to check the alignment. I’ll use mine as an example.
diskpart
list disk
select disk <n> (where <n>is the disk number of the SSD)
list partition
exit
To check the alignment, divide the figure in the Offset column, expressed in kilobytes, by 4. If it divides evenly then it’s aligned. For Partition 1, the System Reserved partition, 1024 / 4 = 256, so it’s good. Partition 2′s Offset is expressed in megabytes so we have to convert to kilobytes first by multiplying it by 1024. So, 73 * 1024 = 74752 and 74752 / 4 = 18688, so it’s good, too.
Whew!
It’s worth noting that what DISKPART didn’t show in the list is the tiny unused space – about 2MB in my case – between Partition 1 and Partition 2 which facilitated alignment.
Someone pointed out to me that partition alignment can be checked without DISKPART. Fire up msinfo32. Expand Components, then expand Storage, then select Disks. Find the drive in question and divide the Partition Starting Offset fields by 4096. If it divides evenly you’re all set!
Migration
I used Macrium Reflect to restore the partition images I created earlier. Rather than allowing the software to create the partitions (which would negate our alignment effort) I pointed it to each target partition in turn. When the restore was finished I shut the system down.
I pulled the SSD from the eSATA port and pulled the existing boot drive from the system. I mounted the SSD in place of the old boot drive. (Windows gets upset when it finds multiple boot drives at startup, so it’s a good idea to have just one.) I took extra care with the data cable.
I powered up and entered the system BIOS, walked through the settings applicable to a drive change, saved and booted. Things looked good.
Living With the SSD
Wow! Coldstarts are fast. (See below.) So fast that getting through the BIOS has become the perceived bottleneck. Applications start like lightning, especially the first time, before Windows caches them. Shutdowns are snappy, too. (See below.) There’s no shortage of anecdotes and benchmarks on the ‘net and I’m sure you’ve seen them. It’s all delightfully true.
But all wasn’t perfect. After a week or two some new patterns seemed to be emerging.
Every so often, unexpectedly, the system would become unresponsive with the drive use LED full-on solid, for some tens of seconds. Most of the time the system would return to normal operation but depending on what application was doing what at the time, the period of unresponsiveness could sometimes cause a crash. Sometimes the crash would be severe enough to bring on a BSOD. The biggest problem I have with BSODs or other hard crashes is that it causes the mirrored terabyte data drives to resync, and that takes a while. Usually the System Log would show Event ID 11 entries like this associated with the event:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort6.
And once, following a BSOD, the boot drive was invisible to the BIOS at restart! A hard power cycle made it visible again and Whisky booted normally, as though nothing abnormal had ever occurred.
Hard to say for sure, but it seemed as though these oddities were happening with increasing frequency.
Firmware Update
Prowling the ‘net I found others reporting similar problems. What’s more, Corsair was on the case and had a fresh firmware update! The update process, they claimed, was supposed to preserve data. I checked my live backup and made new partition images anyway. The drive firmware update itself went exactly as described, took but seconds and left the data intact. The next boot had Windows installing new (or maybe just reinstalling?) device drivers for the drive, which then called for another boot. All this booting used to be a pain in the ass but when the box boots in seconds you tend to not mind that much.
Benchmark performance after the update was improved, but only marginally – nothing I’d actually notice. The troublesome hangs I mentioned seem to occur on bootup now, when they occur at all. They seem less ‘dangerous’ because they don’t interrupt work in progress at that time. So far, anyway, I just wait out the length boot and log in, followed by a cold shutdown. The next coldstart invariably goes normally, that is, very, very fast.
What’s going on? Maybe some periodic housekeeping going on in the drive? Maybe some housekeeping that was underway when I interrupted with a shutdown? Or maybe it’s that data cable? Remember, I mentioned it’s sort of a loose fit without a retainer clip. Time will tell.
Videos
I goes without saying that SSDs are fast. Many people like to judge that by how fast Windows loads. I threw together a couple of videos to illustrate.
System Startup with SSD 00.00 - Sequence start
01.30 - Power on
04.06 - Hardware initialization
13.20 - Video signal to monitors
15.83 - BIOS
23.93 - Windows Startup
39.83 - Login prompt
44.93 - Password entry complete
54.50 - Ready to work
Power on to Windows startup duration is 22.63 seconds.
Windows startup to login prompt duration is 15.90 seconds.
Password entry to ready-to-work duration is 9.57 seconds.
People that know me know that I’m not a big Mac fan. By extension, not a big Apple fan either. That’s why people that know me are astonished when they learn that there’s an iPad in my house. The initial shock gives way to questions so I figured I’d just handle some of them here.
My friend Will, just the other day over on Google+, said “Trims atas advise nya.” Oh, wait a minute. That’s spam from some shitstain with an anonymous gmail account. Will actually said “Rick, what do you use it for? On TV people are watching videos, email or looking at pictures on it – nothing very interesting. Is it a glorified internet appliance?”
Well, it’s a funny thing. Tablets have been the Next Big Thing for a while and everyone has been bringing them to market. For most, er, scratch that, for everyone except Apple, success in the tablet space has been varied. For Apple success has been astounding. Eventually, I figured, we’d have to get one to play around with, to see what all the hype was about.
I think it started with a TV commercial. I casually said to Pam, “So maybe you want one of those?” and she said she wouldn’t mind. So a few days later I drank some Kool-Aid…
I’ve gotta admit, the iPad’s an absolute marvel of design and engineering. It feels really good in your hand, looks really great to your eye (both the display and the form-factor), and the UI is slick and responsive. Besides the device there’s not much in the box: a cable and charger cube (which promptly got lost for weeks) and a cute little Apple sticker. I powered it up, answered a few questions, and in a minute or two I was exploring the built-in apps. Apps. I was playin’ with apps. I felt so… trendy. We picked up the Smart Cover a day or two later. It, too, is a product of incredible thought and design. Just as you hold it near, wondering how it attaches, it attaches itself magnetically, in perfect alignment. Forty bucks.
Getting the iPad onto my network was a bit harder. We have two active WiFi networks in the house. Each serves different purpose and both are reasonably secure. (Hold your comments about being neighborly and running an open hotspot; I don’t care and I’ll only ignore you.) So I cleared the way for the iPad and tried and tried to get authenticated. Didn’t work. A search turned up plenty of others with similar problems. I forget exactly which magic incantation did the trick but after a while it was working. And here’s the thing: other than that initial hurdle the iPad connects and makes itself ready to communicate the moment you pick it up. The secret? It keeps a periodic chatter going with the router or access point, all the time. It’s always ready.
Instant-on network performance like that is usually a battery suck but Apple seems to have nailed the power management. Battery life is several weeks to a month.
“Huh? Did you say a month? Don’t you use it?”
Yup, that’s what I said: a month. And, mostly, nope, we don’t really use it all that much. None of us do. Three different people with three widely varying sets of interests and the iPad hasn’t become relevant to any of us. WTF.
What I sought most from such a device was simple (and, I might add, completely satisfied by my old netbook). I wanted to read, mostly stuff from my network where I keep a fair library of subscription material. I wanted to write, notes, posts like this, etc. And I wanted to be able to control different parts of my network, logging into a Linux console, adjusting this or that, maybe a bit of ftp to import or export a file or two, maybe shutting things down during an extended power failure.
Producing written material with the virtual keyboard is an exercise in futility. I’m not the best keyboardist in the first place but my meager productivity dropped like a stone. Y’know how they say to use strong passwords for stuff? Let me tell you, the way you need to switch modes for numbers, caps, punctuation, and everything else will have you setting your passwords to ‘asd123′ – and wishing you could skip the digits altogether – in no time flat. Forget writing.
On to reading. Well, this is actually pretty good. The display is nice, like I said. Consuming some written matter – WIRED comes to mind – the content designed for this device is, in some ways, superior to the print experience. You miss out on the tactile enjoyment of well-laid-out pulp – the color, the rich fonts – but the ease of navigation (no continued on page 134) and embedded multimedia could be a valid trade. Sometimes, at least. I mentioned that I have a rather large cache of subscription material – professional publications, books, newsletters, etc. – on a server here. The vast majority is in PDF format of one type or another. Reading any of those makes for a pretty good experience. The iPad will try to add them into the built-in iBooks app, which simply means that they’re downloaded and stored locally for use off-network.
Next up, handling network chores. Nope, can’t do that. Maybe buying a terminal app would fix that, maybe not. I’m not pressing because I have other alternatives. Also, you can’t get files onto or off of the iPad. In fact, the very concept of files on the iPad seems profoundly foreign. I’ll bet a dollar Apple would call that a feature.
Now, Pam’s expectations are markedly different from mine. She’ll play a few games, use Google+ and – gasp – Facebook, and use the Web browser. She’s bought a few apps. Sorry, can’t tell you which ones. Since the iPad is hers, it’s tied to her computer and it synced with her iTunes library painlessly and quickly. I can tell you that the Google+ client, while touted as made for the iPad, is simply an iPhone app that lives in the middle of the screen. Sizing it for the larger screen looks chunky and childish. When I tried, Hangouts didn’t work at all. Sort of too bad, that, as the hardware seems like it’d be perfectly suited to video conferencing. YouTube videos play nicely, but content-rich sites that don’t offer Flash alternatives fail.
I expected Damian to play with the iPad but he doesn’t. Not at all. Some weeks after it had been floating around in such obvious places like the dinner table, he said “Oh? We have an iPad now?” That was that. I don’t think he’s touched it since. That was a little unexpected since I think he’s in the target demographic. Oh well.
I’ve got a few closing random thoughts… The lack of multitasking hurts. The instant-on, instantly-connected Web browser – albeit a weak one like Safari – is a definite win. The lack of Flash can sometimes make a Web site unusable. Not that I’m arguing for that insecure wart on the side that is Flash, but some sites, well, that’s what they do. Sort of the way a site might be built for IE and render poorly on a standards-compliant browser. You can wish for a long time that it weren’t so. The security model kinda blows. I wouldn’t store any confidential stuff on the device. The virtual keyboard encourages the use of weak, easy-to-use passwords because good ones are such a pain to type, yet even routine updates prompt for the Apple account password.
The bottom line? I guess all told I spent something under $800 for the device, a cover and some apps. Worth it? For design, lots of points. For usefulness, very few points. Did I learn some stuff? Undoubtedly. Do I feel trendy? No, I feel like I threw away a wad of cash.
If I knew then what I know now, would I buy an iPad? No.
[edited 29 October to include this unique use for the device.]
A few days ago I was swapping email with my friend Paul about laptop batteries. He had some concerns about runtime and stuff. I thought that parts of our conversation seemed like a good candidate for this space and he agreed. Yeah, there are plenty of tip lists and whatnot out there, but what follows is based on my actual personal experiences.
[...] how much run time do you (or should I) expect? Seems to me like I’m getting 10-15 minutes, always running plugged in, and that can’t be helping the battery to take a deeper charge.
My laptops (now old, creaky P4s with conventional hard drives, since we’ve all moved back to fast, powerful desktops) get about an hour or so of work on the network, maybe an hour forty-five backing off the screen brightness with mostly local work. My SSD-equipped netbook OTOH goes for 5-10 hours, depending. Once, on a bus back from DC, I had the netbook running a LAMP server virtualized under VirtualBox, doing Web development to while away the hours. A single charge lasted the whole trip back to Jersey! Oh, yeah, and a seatmate’s iPhone died on the way so I let him plug into a USB port to charge up. (Bonus: I got a bit of ‘net access!) So, battery life can vary greatly.
You’re right about not liking to be constantly charging. But LiIon batteries are kind of predictable once you get to know them.
Don’t subject them to temperature extremes, high ambient heat is especially bad so don’t let ‘em sit in the sun. Don’t let them fully discharge. In practice, your box will shut down before full discharge becomes a problem. But don’t forget to charge a spent one before long-term storage. A battery on the shelf will discharge slowly, a battery in a powered-off laptop will discharge faster. So, to maximize life remove it when it’s not being used for extended periods.
The LiIon chemistry doesn’t wear out (like lead-acid) so much as it develops an ever-increasing internal resistance over time. You’ll notice that a new battery charges fast and lasts a long time. After a while it takes longer to acquire a full charge that doesn’t last quite as long. At end-of-life you can charge it all day and it won’t show full, while delivering only a few minutes of use (if that). The charging circuitry can only push so hard, and as the battery’s internal resistance climbs it has to work harder and harder to deliver fewer electrons. You end up getting some number of useful cycles out of a battery and that’s that. It makes sense, then, to use the battery until depleted, charge it, set it on the shelf for next use. Nobody really uses ‘em that way, though…
Keep ‘em in the laptop, use it on AC? Not ideal, the charge circuitry will keep cycling them near the top of charge, you actually tend to wear out the battery quicker that way – but you won’t notice it until you’re away from AC and actually need that charge. Using your laptop on AC most of the time? Take the battery out. The charge circuitry will notice and stop charging the empty hole, and the whole box will run cooler. ‘Course, you don’t get the benefit of a built-in UPS, but life’s full of trade-offs.
Finally, a safety tip. LiIon chemistry is inherently quite unstable. Without the active circuitry within the battery itself it’s prone to problems like thermal runaway – a nice term for explosions or catching fire. If you drop one, best to stand there looking dopey watching it for a few minutes. Look for signs of stress – heat, bulging, etc. – before putting it away. Is a dropped phone going to explode every time? Not by a long shot. But you never know. Sony, HP, Dell, virtually all of the big players have had massive battery recalls. There’s been plenty of property damage and injuries, but only the most spectacular ones make the news.
I haven’t actually timed it, but it seems awfully, awfully short.
Conserve. Use the power-saving power profile. Dim the screen’s backlight. Use a simple blank screen saver. Set short sleep and hibernate trigger times. Routinely sleep or hibernate the box when taking phone calls, hitting the can, making coffee, etc. Run fewer simultaneous applications and trim background processes. Save processor-intensive work for when you’ve got AC. You can probably double your runtime, with practice. Most people can.
Finally, keep the system’s monitoring and charging subsystems ‘in tune’ by calibrating according to the manufacturer’s guidelines, taking your usage patterns into consideration. Usually, calibration amounts to using the battery until it’s depleted followed by giving it a full, uninterrupted charge. That way the system has a better idea of the battery’s condition at any given time and can more effectively manage the charging circuitry. It’s that internal resistance increasing over time thing again.
Last year, in the midst of migrating the VM farm from VMware to VirtualBox, I had a Seagate drive go tits up. Luckily it was part of a RAID so I just substituted another drive and that was that. It was still under warranty so I figured that one day I would clear out the confidential data and RMA the thing. No rush.
Every so often, as time permitted, I would haul the thing out and play with it a little. This morning was one of those times.
Since I’ve been rather unsuccessful with the thing so far I figured to try swapping logic boards on the drive. I’ve got a spare, of sorts; it’s on a drive that’s part of the RAID mirror in my primary desktop. Software RAID, that is, on a Windows 7 system.
It’d be a simple matter to pull the drive, failing the RAID. Then the plan was to install the known-good logic board onto the failed drive, cable it up to the ESATA port and (possibly) do the wipe. Recovery would be just as easy. Replace the logic board and re-install the RAID drive. Then recover/resync the mirror and that would be that.
Before I got started I figured a backup would be prudent. The RAID mirror is where I do all my work. The better part of a terabyte was soon copied to a spare drive.
The drive pull took but a moment. Gotta love those big, roomy cases! I booted to find that the array had NOT failed; instead it went missing altogether! Oops. No concern, though, right?Microsoft documentation says that breaking a mirror results in two drives containing the data, just no more mirror. My exercise should have merely simulated a drive failure. When I re-installed the drive it should be fine.
Okay, so I did the logic board swap and futzed with that a bit, still feeling a bit uneasy about the mirror. Didn’t get anywhere for my trouble. It looks like the failed drive is just that – a failed drive. (More about that later.)
I put the known-good logic board back on the mirror drive, shoved it into the case, cabled it up and booted. Uh oh. Still no mirror. One of the two formerly mirrored drives appeared uninitialized while the other was foreign. I imported the foreign disk, which then got its old drive letter back.The data appeared to be intact but (I guess) since the companion volume remained uninitialized it still reported itself as having “failed redundancy.” I couldn’t break the mirror, nor could I remove the mirror. It looked like it was in some kind of limbo. I tried to reactivate the volume and had a nice little “WTF” moment: “the plex is missing” mocked the resulting error message.
I’m running out of time, there’s stuff I need to be doing and it’s certainly not this.
I initialized the uninitialized drive, made it dynamic and formatted it. Then I copied the data from the drive whose plex – whatever the hell that is – was missing onto the newly formatted volume. Continuing, I wiped the plex-less drive. Would it now offer itself up as a candidate to accept a mirror? Yes, it would. So I did just that and it took a while – longer than all the file copying – to resync.
Now, I’ve had good luck with Windows’ software RAID mirrors before but this exercise worried me a little. Should I have broken the mirror instead of simply yanking the drive? What if it had failed electrically? Or if I knocked a cable loose doing some unrelated maintenance? Or someone stole the drive? What happens when a drive fails under certain circumstances? Have I just been lucky all along, where the failures I’ve experienced have just been the right kind of failures that were recoverable? Ponder, ponder.
I guess I need to set up a testbed VM and experiment. Meanwhile, I have my panic copy and the same mirror arrangement I had this morning, no lossage.
Oh, and the old drive that I was trying to wipe? Glad you asked. It’s still on the shelf. There’s confidential data on there, if one were to recover it. I haven’t been able to get to it in order to properly cleanse it. I don’t trust Seagate; not that Seagate’s evil or anything. It’s just that, well, the responsibility’s mine and I don’t take that lightly. Terabyte drives are only worth about $75 retail these days and I got a couple of good years out of the thing.
What would YOU do with a drive full of confidential but unreachable data? Can you suggest any tools that I might use to get at the drive to wipe it without needing to access it with Windows or Linux, the two predominant OSs we run here?
I love it when I have the opportunity to talk about companies that do things right. Here’s one: Will Powered Products.
Will Powered Products is a small company out of Dingman’s Ferry, PA that produces a limited line of high quality motorcycle parts. Hand grips, foot pegs, cable clamps – stuff like that. Simple stuff. But made from serious metal, cast and machined with quality and workmanship that you just know will last forever.
I first ran into Barry Will at a swap meet a couple of years back. I had gone through several sets of Harley-branded hand grips on my Dyna and I was sort of idly looking for something better. Funny thing, the Harley-branded grips start out looking and feeling great but they just don’t hold up over time. The Will Powered Products grips are machined from solid aluminum. They’re kind of expensive at nearly three times the cost of Harley-Davidson grips but they felt like they’d outlast the bike. I mulled it over as I wandered the show floor and ended up buying them on the way out. Today they look and feel just as good as the day I installed ‘em.
Solid aluminum clutch cable clamp from Will Powered Products. Click for larger image.
I saw Barry again at the Jersey Giant show/swap meet last April. This time it was his polished cable clamps that looked interesting. Ever see the stock Harley-Davidson cable stays? Cheap, plastic-coated slivers of spring steel, they’re functional but kinda ugly. Anyway, I needed two clamps but there was only one on hand. Barry promised to ship another right away so I paid for both and took one, handing off a business card with my shipping address. As I walked away from the table – sans receipt for the cash purchase – Pam gave me a questioning look. “I don’t think I need a receipt, he’ll do the right thing,” I said. “It’ll be worth the price to find out if my judgment’s still good.”
This is where things got interesting. After the weekend Barry emailed that he had sent the camp. And a few days later he emailed again saying that it had come back for insufficient
Keychain as jewelry, Damian's idea. He's thinking it needs something in the center, hasn't figured out what yet. I'm wondering what the center is made from, just in case I need to put it on the drill press.
postage – and that another would go right out. A few days later it arrived. Bummer, though, it turned out to be the wrong size for my needs. I emailed Barry, sent it back the next day and left for some travel. When I returned from St. Louis the correct-sized clamp was waiting. But that’s not all. Also in the package were two key chains styled after their dipsticks, AND three bucks – cash – presumably to cover my return shipping.
There are a few basic principles at work in this story. The principles are proven – they work in business and in life. Do what you say you will do. Will Powered Products did exactly that every step of the way, from shipping to keeping me informed. When something goes wrong, assume responsibility and do what’s necessary to fix it. Don’t make excuses. Mistakes happen. There were a few in this story but each were always handled as well as could be expected. Barry even mentioned that they took the extra step to ensure that their stock was correctly identified for size in order to reduce the possibility of future errors. Delight your customer. Throughout this extended transaction I always felt like I knew where things stood, so there was no anxiety or tension. Then Barry stepped up with unexpected extras in the end.
So, two thumbs up to Barry and Will Powered Products! Check out their Web site and if you’ve got a need for that kind of stuff for your bike then don’t hesitate to do business with them. They’re an American company making high-quality products that are absolutely worth the cost. You’ll know that the moment you hold one of their parts in your hand.
As for me, maybe some of those spiky footpegs are in my future…
Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t have any interest in Will Powered Products other than that of a satisfied customer.
There’s too much not-necessary-for-driving stuff that you can do with cars these days, and few of ‘em are any good. At best, many new features serve to distract you from the task at hand: driving the thing competently.
Even stealing cars isn’t what it used to be. With the demise of discrete wiring in favor of networks, in some cases all you need to do is access the network. Used to be you needed to break off a mirror to gain physical access. Jack in with your laptop and command the doors to open, the engine to start…
But now? Make a “phone call” from your laptop.
How long before we see car-botnets controlled from IRC? Or maybe viruses to cause an accelerator to stick? Or brakes to stop braking? Or, more subtly, stability controls to destabilize? Hmmm, cause your ex to seem like s/he’s driving drunk? For a price, of course, cash, please.
Here’s a NY Times article that ought to shake you up. (But I’ll bet it won’t.)
I’ve got a Fender Stratocaster, one of the infamous “Splatter Stats“. Purely stock except for the strings, it’s always had a couple of quirks that I’ve wanted to address. It’s time.
I use Ernie Ball Super Slinky strings and the G string in particular has always sounded a bit on the dull side. It’s because of the way the string passes through the nut. One can brighten up the open string by dampening it a little between the nut and the tuning peg (but it’s inconvenient to play that way). I keep the tremolo bridge free-floating, which makes tuning somewhat more challenging. I don’t use the whammy bar but I sometimes ‘wobble’ the sound with my palm on the bridge. Once in tune it tends to stay in tune but lots of bendy work will tend to detune the bendy string. I chalk that one up to string friction.
Graph Tech makes what they call a Supercharger Kit that seemed like just the ticket. The kit includes a set of saddles, a replacement nut and nut blank, and string trees. The kit also includes an Allen key for setting string height, emery paper for nut shaping plus instructions. Oh, yeah, and a pick. You can read about their claimed benefits on their Web site.
The Graph Tech parts that contact strings are made of a material that promises to self-lubricate, leading to less string breakage according to their literature. I was hoping that by reducing friction, bends would return to original tune more consistently. Finally, others on the net had mentioned my preferred strings when discussing the Graph Tech nut. My shop isn’t equipped for cutting new nuts. I don’t want to invest in a set of seldom-used nut files so the closer I get to a stock nut the better.
The work is easy, but quite a bit of setup is necessary after swapping the parts around. If you’re not comfortable setting string heights and intonation then you’ll be better off having your tech do the work instead. If the setup is incorrect your instrument will sound bad. Very bad.
Here’s my Strat on the floor ready for supercharging, using the kit of parts shown. You can click these images for a better look.
The stock saddles have been removed and the Graph Tech parts are ready for installation. The instructions tell you to remove the strings but I wanted to keep them a little longer; I only changed them a week ago. Since they were all loose, though, this was an excellent opportunity to clean the fretboard and other areas that aren’t often so fully exposed. (When I change strings I change them one at a time in order to keep the neck tension reasonably constant.) So these won’t be seated right and I expect setup will be harder that it would be with new strings. So it goes.
Graph Tech saddles installed, though obviously not adjusted. Some say the black parts don’t look as good as the stock chrome but I disagree.
The stock nut removed. I was ready for battle but mine literally fell out with a little bit of thumb pressure. Normally you’ll want to score the lacquer around the nut with a sharp Xacto blade so it doesn’t crack. This could explain why I’ve always felt the nut was just a tad low; the shop may have modified it before selling it. (Or, maybe what was sold as new was actually a return that had been set up?) According to the serial number, the guitar I bought August 14, 2004 was built in the Ensenada, Mexico plant in 2003-2004.
Here are the stock and Graph Tech nuts. Note the tab on the Graph Tech – some Strats have a receiver for that tab and some don’t, I’m told. The string slots are not as deep. The new nut is a little longer than stock; I needed to remove the tab and shorten it a little, removing equal amounts of material from each side. It was easy do do using the emery included in the kit.
In the shop, a Dremel tool held by the rubber-jawed vise next to the lathe made the work of removing the tab easy. After the tab was removed, the thickness of the nut was reduced by hand to make for a snug fit in the nut slot. Then the bottom of the nut was reduced – by hand, a little bit at a time, tuning to pitch in between – to set the nut height. The supplied instructions give a good starting point but I set it a little on the high side. I’m conservative that way, figuring I can always lower the nut in the future. Raising the nut means ordering a new one and starting again.
The nut’s in place and you can see the new string trees as well. Yes, now there are two string trees! What’s not evident in the photo (my bad) is that the trees are different heights. The bottom one’s shorter and guides the high E and B strings – exactly like the stock tree. Graph Tech supplies a second, taller tree in the kit. I thought about it for a long time before placing it as I did. The additional tree guides the G string but isn’t low enough to touch the B string at all. I didn’t want the tree to touch the D string because I felt it would make the nut-to-tree angle too severe. I’m not sure how the extra tree will hold up long term, guiding only one string, but we’ll see. I drilled the pilot hole for the new screw with a 0.058-inch bit chucked in a hand drill.
Here’s the finished product. You can see the black replacement parts and the extra string tree. The setup and intonation are roughed in, good enough to start playing. I know me – it’ll a period of time of adjusting to get it just the way I like it – and I may need to further lower the nut – but so far it looks like a huge success!
The instrument tunes easier and stays in tune better despite long bends. The G string now rings true! The overall sound is decidedly different. The unamplified sound is louder and brighter. Amplified, you immediately notice the increased sustain.
Some music is timeless. My son – he’s 17 now – likes the Beatles. No matter that the band broke up when I was in middle school! Well, as it turns out we’ve got quite a few Beatles LPs (er, vinyl records, those plastic things with the grooves that played music for us old farts) in our collection down in the basement. It was time to do some conversion and put this stuff on his iPod.
I started to research those USB turntables that promise to quickly and easily turn LPs into MP3s and found them lacking. Well, at least those in the range I was willing to spend. Frankly, the hardware I was finding sported specs that kinda sucked, mostly because of the included cartridge.
My basement LP digitizing workstation, Ethernet cable dangling from the floor joists above. That's the back of my furnace in the background and the handle of a 1 KW floodlight leaning against the desk. Also visible is a Discwasher kit to the left of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour LP. Bought new for 99 cents during the summer between grammar school and middle school, that was the very first record I ever bought.
I still have an old (but still kinda nice) turntable. Sony, Decent magnetic cartridge, linear-tracking, not too bad. I even have an Onkyo receiver that has a built-in phono pre-amp. That’s a bit of a rarity in receivers nowadays, as the need for one has pretty much gone away. I hauled out the gear and did some testing as I pondered the reality that was sinking into my head…
Analog music – turntables and vinyl records – have all but gone away. Some DJs still use them for mixing stuff but even that’s largely going away, leaving only the quote-audiophiles-unquote. And it’s a given that whenever a market targets a group labeled with some word that ends in phile you can add a zero or two to the price on any related gear. Wow.
I found my old audio gear to be in perfect working order, a testament to decent care while in storage. On to the computer. From parts, I thew together something to handle the digitizing chore: A 1 GHz Celeron box; all of 256 MB RAM; a 250 GB hard drive; Soundblaster PCI 512 card; Windows XP; an ancient program, CDWAV, I think it came with an ancient version of Cakewalk Pyro. Yeah, that ought to do it.
The setup makes uncompressed WAV files: PCM, 2 16-bit channels, sampled at 44,100 Hz. I pull the files up to my desktop and use Nero to correct out the clicks and pops, separate the tracks and burn a standard audio CD. Then use iTunes to import the CD to MP3. The intermediate CD saves the analog-to-digital and cleanup work, the most labor-intensive part of the process. The CDs, BTW, are in most cases good enough to allow iTunes (Gracenote, actually) to figure out the album/song titles.
My digital library is now experiencing steady growth.
In this day where consumer-class terabyte drives approach the fifty buck price point, this Corvus ad from April 1981 seemed worthy of sharing.
Five million bytes at the newly-lowered price of $3750. That’s thirty seven hundred and fifty dollars, not a typo.
Ad from Corvus Systems circa 1981: a 5 MB hard disk for the newly reduced price of $3750.00. (click to enlarge)
Just last week I was in an email discussion with a friend and he lamented the “good old days.” I’m not so sure that the old days were all that good. Did you have four large burning a hole in your pocket for storage back in 1981? I sure didn’t.
I wrote a while back about the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive, which purports to combine the advantages of a solid state drive with the low cost of a conventional drive. It works very well!
I decided to take the next step to see if I could wring a little bit more performance out of the thing. Since last fall’s build as a single-drive system, the desktop had become storage-rich. Besides the recently added Momentus XT there’s the original 750 GB Western Digital and a Seagate 1 TB, the latter used, well, for not much of anything. Relocating the data from the Momentus XT should allow Seagate’s algorithm to place OS and application files on the XT’s flash for lightning-fast reads.
There was only several hundred GB of data to move but it took a few days of here-and-there time to get the job done safely and completely. The system is used for real work. There were backup routines to change (and test!), path dependencies to chase down, stuff like that. But eventually it was done – with the bonus of some much-needed cleanup and organization.
So, what was the result? Windows 7 Professional boot times – BIOS to desktop – are on the order of 25 seconds. Ambitious application loads, full Photoshop for example, are down to just a few seconds. The system is powered down within 15 seconds of clicking Shutdown. I’m thinking these may even improve over time.
A few weeks back I read of Seagate‘s Momentus XT hybrid hard drive. What’s a hybrid? It combines a conventional hard drive with a small SSD in one standard-size, standard interface package. The idea is that the conventional hard drive provides useful capacity while the SSD provides a significant performance boost. To the Operating System, the drive simply appears as any other drive. There’s no special OS support or drivers needed either; for instance, no need for TRIM support. Seagate has developed a special algorithm – they call it “Adaptive Memory Technology” – which purports to analyze use patterns and optimize the use of the SSD portion of the drive. What you use most often is stored in flash for best performance. The end result is supposed to be a drive that delivers much of the performance of an SSD at a cost that won’t break the bank.
The Seagate Web site might not be the best place to find objective comparisons, but check out the video (scroll down to the headline Compare solid state hybrid drives to SSD and HDD.) to see some impressive performance.
When I built my last desktop I (briefly) considered a pure SSD for the boot drive but decided against it. The cost was crazy high and the capacity was crazy low. When I read of the Momentus XT it didn’t take much to convince me to give one a try.
I decided on the ST95005620AS as a replacement boot drive. This is the 500 GB unit and, other than the built-in 4 GB SLC NAND SSD, it has some fairly conventional specifications – not at all unlike the Western Digital WD7501AALS it replaced. These drives are new, so it was a couple of weeks to wait for stock. I’m fortunate in that Newegg has a local distribution facility; once a drive was available it arrived the next day.
My desktop case (a Cooler Master HAF 932 #RC-932-KKN1-GP) doesn’t provide mounts for 2.5-inch drives so I picked up some adapter rails, too. These rails will hold two 2.5-inch drives but there are a couple of quirks. They use some odd-sized screws (supplied) and the holes were too small for my no-tool drive mounts. I mounted the hybrid in one of the front-accessible bays with the supplied screws. I may eventually drill and tap the rails for standard screws and relocate it to the drive cage for a cleaner cable layout.
I have a few applications for cloning boot drives. I don’t like any of them so I decided to try Seagate’s DiscWizard tool (made by Acronis), free for the download. Installation was quick and painless. But the clone process failed every time! Shame on me for believing you could do a low-level task like that from inside Windows. Fortunately DiscWizard provides a tool to build bootable utility media. I used it to configure a USB drive, booted from it and in short order I had my clone. In my case the target drive was smaller than the multiply partitioned source drive, but the DiscWizard handled it perfectly.
Now, cloning a boot drive is faster and worlds more convenient than doing an IPL from scratch, but it’s not without problems. Sometimes, if you use run application software that requires activation, it may notice that the hardware’s changed and void your activation. I had several of those but all were resolved in short order. It’s just something to be aware of. Check your application load and have your necessary licensing information at the ready if you need to contact your vendors.
Okay, so how’s the Momentus XT work? Very well! What’s more, it seems to be getting even better over time. It’s weird.
Boot time is about half what it was with the old drive. It’s dead quiet, too, where the Western Digital is one noisy unit when it seeks, at least in my cavernous case. For the applications I use all the time, first-use loads are near instantaneous. Under Windows 7, the drive part of the Experience Index remained unchanged from my earlier drive but that didn’t surprise me because the specifications are virtually identical. The real difference is first-use of applications and data. There the performance boost is definitely not something you need to try to notice; it’s that obvious.
The jury’s still out on long-term reliability. I only buy Seagate and Western Digital drives, and I’ve had more Seagate failures over the years. To be fair, warranty service from both vendors is always as quick and easy as you can expect.
This isn’t a pure SSD, but Seagate appears to deliver on its promise with the Momentus XT: much of the bang of an SSD with significantly less cost, reasonable capacity and transparent Operating System support. Performance increases are right where you notice it most, on the stuff you use most often. The Momentus XT is positioned as a laptop drive but with these specs it works equally well for desktop applications.
Go and get yourself one of these, you won’t be disappointed.
When I stuffed those terabyte Seagate drives into the VM server I just knew that configuring for RAID would be a good idea. After all – that’s a healthy amount of storage and the likelihood that something would go tits-up eventually was too great. At first I simply used the RAID controller on the motherboard but I grew uncomfortable with the software drivers required. They were proprietary, of course. So I opted for a dedicated controller from Silicon Image.
Recently those decisions paid me back.
I never noticed anything amiss. The problem was revealed by a log entry noticed as part of regular maintenance. The RAID configuration console subsequently reported that one drive had become ill and gone offline. This array was configured as a simple mirror, so now the volume was flying without a net.
These are common drives and the local Best Buy has ‘em in stock for under $90. Off I went, in horrible rain and cold, and soon I had the spare.
Swapping it in took almost as long as the short trip. The latest machine builds have been in mid- or full-tower cases but this server, nope, tight quarters in the mini-ATX case. But soon it was done. I restarted all the VMs and set the array to rebuilding.
It took a while – a couple of days. Yes, that’s excessive, I couldn’t agree more. But all things considered… It’s not a particularly powerful box; it’s busy, no less than a half-dozen VMs dedicated to their individual tasks, plus the host OS; the spare drive was added right out of the box – unpartitioned, unformatted. A sector-by-sector block-by-block reconstruction, so it’s no small wonder it took a while. I certainly could have helped it along.
Meanwhile, I’ve been running some tests on the failed drive. Yup, it’s failed alright. It’s also under warranty.
So just as soon as I scrub the data it’s going back to Seagate for replacement.
A happy ending, must be the Spirit of Christmas. There’s a lesson here, too. As we approach 2010, if you don’t already, resolve to apply some discipline to your data protection practices. Make maintenance and recovery plans. Use appropriate technology. Review your logs.
Happy New Year!
Added 1-Jan-2010…
Wouldn’t you know it? Following the secure deletion of all data from the failed disk I decided to run the Seagate diagnostics. It passed all tests.
I’ve repartitioned the thing and it’s formatting now. I’ll use it as scratch workspace for video and other big projects and with luck it’ll fail again soon. Something bothers me about using it for anything important.
About a month and a half ago my main personal computer, an (ancient) HP zd8000 laptop, began dropping keystrokes. I traced the problem back to the battery. No longer taking a charge, the interrupts generated as the charging circuitry tried, failed and tried again were interfering with the keyboard interrupt. My typing is bad enough; I pulled the offending battery, scanned the ‘net and ordered a new battery from overstock.com based on – what else? – price.
That was September 3rd, and the replacement battery arrived some days later. Unfortunately it was the wrong one! The order showed the correct number as did the packing list, but the thing that sat on my desk clearly showed a different number. The plastic bag it came in was already open (uh oh, could mean trouble) so I took the opportunity to stick it into the laptop, thinking perhaps it was a substitute. Nope, the computer refused it.
I used the online chat on Overstock’s Web site and explained the situation. The rep thought it best to escalate to a tech person so she told me to expect their call, which came some hours later. I hadn’t expected his call so quick. The tech generated the RMA and return shipping label and said he’d overnight another replacement.
Meanwhile I did a little checking. HP has an excellent online parts lookup tool, and I used it to check the two part numbers in question. They were markedly different. I looked them both up on the Overstock site and found the descriptions to be remarkably similar. Maybe this was the problem?
As it turned out, the next few weeks proved frustrating – for both me and Overstock – as we shipped the same incorrect battery back an forth across the country three times. In the end they said that they didn’t have the correct item. They’d process my refund and I was free to keep the incorrect battery. I sent it back anyway; there’s no sense in recycling a perfectly good battery I couldn’t use.
But that’s not the end of the story. Last Friday evening I took a call from Thomas at Overstock. He explained that my case had made it up to the executive level and that they had spent some time analyzing what went wrong. There were a few things, including a mis-SKUed warehouse bin (aha!) and lapses in communication. The analysis had resulted in some process improvements and Thomas called to tell me about them. We talked for a while about things like quality and customer service. Full disclosure: Thomas offered – and I accepted – compensation for my frustration and understanding: a correct battery and some store credit. He left his email and direct phone number.
(The correct battery arrived this afternoon, shipped overnight from Overstock’s supplier. The number fits several applications; the plastic cover trim isn’t right for my particular laptop, but I have spares from previous replacements so it’s no big deal. Overstock, if you’re reading this, don’t panic – I’m good, and I appreciate all you’ve done. You might want to follow-up with the warehouse, though.)
In my experience, the larger a company becomes the less likely is becomes that a minor customer problem actually results in action. Sure, refunds and credits are common enough, but not the continuous improvement part. To do that, and more importantly, to take the additional step of reaching out to the customer after the transaction is complete is exceptional. More should follow Overstock’s example. I’ll use them again.
