SMART is not the whole story

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jgreco

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I had a commodore VIC-20 and a commodore 64, moved to a 80286 with 1 MB of RAM and later installed a 20287 math coprocessor. The huge upgrade was going from ega to vga graphics in that 286... ah the good ol' days.

At work I still have an original and functioning IBM XT.

In many ways I'm so sad that I gave up the Commodore SuperPET 9000.
 

maglin

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I had a commodore VIC-20 and a commodore 64, moved to a 80286 with 1 MB of RAM and later installed a 20287 math coprocessor. The huge upgrade was going from ega to vga graphics in that 286... ah the good ol' days.

At work I still have an original and functioning IBM XT.
I went to a super poor high school that was still using IBM XTs for their WordPerfect lab. Man I miss those quality mechanical keyboards. This was around 1994. I just remember thinking that 5.25" floppys was something I was using in the 3rd grade.

And this thread is way off topic. I've left behind most of my really old hardware through my moves in the military. So no pics from me. Just memories.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Ericloewe

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Man I miss those quality mechanical keyboards.
No need to miss them, there are several manufacturers of proper keyboard switches these days and a huge amount of keyboards that use them.
 

joeschmuck

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Since we are all measuring how old we are... I remember when I was working on breaking the German code on basically the original computer, the code breaker. All kinds of dials and relays, enough to make a person go mad! Oh wait, my mind is getting old, I think that was a movie I watched last year. Seems so real!

Getting back to the first posting... Do you think it worth while to adjust the Hard Drive Troubleshooting Guide to include some read/write speed testing? It seams like something good to me since it is true, SMART will not catch a problem like that until it fails hard. If there is a link to it, I could point to it. If it should be rewritten then we could include it. Also, while I do know of tests which are Windoze based, is there something that can be booted right on the FreeNAS machine to test a drive out, preferably like the Ubuntu Live CD that could run the tests or similar? I could do the research myself but I have very little time for today. I should be free tomorrow once the sky opens up with rain for the next 2 days. Doing all our BBQ today (YUM).
 

joeschmuck

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Mechanical keyboards use to be really good. I purchased one about 7 months ago and am using it right now. It's okay and I like the weight of it but it's not much better than my cheap keyboard. I had to buy o-rings to quiet down the keys slapping into the metal base. If I wanted noisy keys then I would have purchased noisy clicking keys. I have reinstalled my Windows OS and I will see if the Num Lock starts playing better. Nothing I hate more is to expect Num Lock to be on when I start typing on the keypad and it's not on.
$224.oo for it... ugh... :p
That is too much money. 19 year old can pay for a toy like that with a job. Okay, I shouldn't speak, I spoil my kids too and my youngest daughter is 19 and I still pay for her cell phone bill. Once she's out of college though, it's another story.
 

Mirfster

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That is too much money. 19 year old can pay for a toy like that with a job.
Totally agree, but overruled by the wife. IMHO, once you turn 18 I have successfully completed my mission. Anything/everything from then forward is considered "optional"... B-Days, Holidays, etc... ;)
 

BigDave

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IMHO, once you turn 18 I have successfully completed my mission.
Here's some news for you, your mission is over when your Wife says it's over :D:D:D:D:D:D:D
 

joeschmuck

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Here's some news for you, your mission is over when your Wife says it's over :D:D:D:D:D:D:D
Ding Ding Ding, give that man a silver dollar for being 100% correct.

Off topic (I do this all the time) but remember when a dollar piece was made of silver? Times have changed.
 

gpsguy

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As I recall, a base IBM XT with a 10MB hard disk cost $4995 in it's day.

I bought the 5 slot IBM PC with 64k on the motherboard in '83/'84 and tricked it out with hard disks, memory upgrades, etc. That machine cost me a lot of money in the day, but in the end it was well worth the expenditure.

I went to a super poor high school that was still using IBM XTs for their WordPerfect lab.

Prior to my IBM PC, I bought a Radio Shack Model 4P (about the size of a portable sewing machine). I owned a few Radio Shack titles running on their TRS-DOS, but had been holding out CP/M. CP/M kept getting delayed, so I finally got rid of that computer.
 

jgreco

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Getting back to the first posting... Do you think it worth while to adjust the Hard Drive Troubleshooting Guide to include some read/write speed testing? It seams like something good to me since it is true, SMART will not catch a problem like that until it fails hard. If there is a link to it, I could point to it.

FWIW: The solnet-array-test automatically tests the drives in your array and reports unusual drives. Found in Resources.
 

jgreco

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Wow! Did you do some mainframe coding from home with that?!?

Huh that's right they used to call it the micro mainframe. I forgot all about that. It was pretty cool. It had two different CPU's and ran a half dozen different languages on the second one, plus it had this big monster display on it that made PET's look like crap. At the time I was more of a 6502 assembly guy and I didn't actually end up doing as much with that as I should have, damn it.
 

joeschmuck

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So I found on Ubuntu Live Disc (or USB) that you can run the Benchmark test. The discerning part was the Write Test seems to be destructive but the only mention is the fact that you should backup your data if you perform the write test. There is no popup warning which is a poor implementation in my book.

FWIW: The solnet-array-test automatically tests the drives in your array and reports unusual drives. Found in Resources.
But this is read-only, right? I thought the goal was to also identify drives with poor write performance which is what the first posting I thought said and that read performance was fine. However I do like the summary of "SLOW" and "FAST".
 

gpsguy

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I still own and use a couple of IBM Model M's.

And, jgreco and I both use the Unicomp replacements. I'm about to buy a new Unicomp 103 or 104 keyboard for work (on my dime). My current IBM and Unicomp keyboards only have 101 keys.

Man I miss those quality mechanical keyboards.
 

jgreco

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So I found on Ubuntu Live Disc (or USB) that you can run the Benchmark test. The discerning part was the Write Test seems to be destructive but the only mention is the fact that you should backup your data if you perform the write test. There is no popup warning which is a poor implementation in my book.


But this is read-only, right? I thought the goal was to also identify drives with poor write performance which is what the first posting I thought said and that read performance was fine. However I do like the summary of "SLOW" and "FAST".

Yeah, I could and probably should throw a few more stanzas in there from the previous script. It can easily do the same thing for writes but I was kinda throwing something out there for discussion, and then never got back to being more thorough about it. The nice thing is that I can easily make it a command line flag like "yes-please-overwrite-my-disks"
 

Spearfoot

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I still own and use a couple of IBM Model M's.

And, jgreco and I both use the Unicomp replacements. I'm about to buy a new Unicomp 103 or 104 keyboard for work (on my dime). My current IBM and Unicomp keyboards only have 101 keys.
I wore out a couple of Northgate Omnikey keboards over the years. Now I use a Unicomp, and have a spare stored away, too.
 

jgreco

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I still own and use a couple of IBM Model M's.

And, jgreco and I both use the Unicomp replacements. I'm about to buy a new Unicomp 103 or 104 keyboard for work (on my dime). My current IBM and Unicomp keyboards only have 101 keys.

So I'm not the only person who kinda hates Windows keys?

I'm actually contemplating getting one of the 103 or 104's and seeing if I can replace the "Windows" keycaps with Apple keycaps, because I have a backup workstation here that's an OS X box. The lack of Apple keys is sometimes annoying.
 
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