Computer Geeking

Dual quad-core Xeon E5410 @ 2.33Ghz! 12GB RAM... 64-bit OS. 2TB RAID 5. 74 GB VelociRaptor. 256GB SSD (RAID 0) for virtual machines.

Death of a Fan

Not quite as ominous as the subject would make it appear. This morning, the workstation had a temperature of 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Not that high, but higher than normal. I opened up the side panel to find that the 120mm case fan was not spinning. Actually, I should have realized that earlier by looking at the FanSpeed tray icon (a great little utility, by the way). I then embarked on a journey to replace the fan. More on that later. But now the machine is running at 99 degrees again. Phew!!

Blu-Ray

Now that the high-definition war is over, I've finally decided that it was time to explore Blu-ray. I've seen both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. I never thought that one was technically better than the other. Then again, technical excellence has never the deciding factor for which technology wins. It has always been about marketing. Remember VHS versus Beta? Of course, very few people remember about Betamax now. This time Sony wins big with its high definition format.

So I got a Blu-ray drive for my computer. My laptop had the HD-DVD, but I never got any movies in that format because I've never found a good movie player that worked well. So I gave up on it awhile ago. This time I figured there must have been tremendous progress made. I remember reading about this article (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001197.html). So I tried the AnyDVD program. Sure enough, I was able to rip a Blu-ray disk to my computer. I even got venturous and tried to rip a HD-DVD from my laptop. I then purchased a copy of WinDVD HD. I got a copy of PowerDVD along with the Blu-ray drive, but it doesn't support HD-DVD. The other problem I had was that I was using Daemon Tools to try to mount the blu-ray ISOs. Doesn't work with the latest version because it was reporting to Windows that the ISO is an HD-DVD. Weird. So I went to SlySoft and found that they also had a virtual driver. This one reports all ISOs as Blu-ray discs even HD-DVD ISOs...

The solution I ended up with is that I have to use both ISO emulators, one for Blu-ray and the other for HD-DVD. I don't mind switching and remembering which is which. The picture quality is absolutely amazing! I remember this feeling when we first got HD cable. That was 1080i. This is 1080p!

Oh, did I mention that the HD-DVD ISO were about 25Gigs in size? Or that the Blu-ray ones are 50GB?

Moon

Servers

A while ago when I worked at Salesforce.com (2002), I bought a new custom computer. This computer was really cool in one respect: it was truly a server. I've converted consumer computers into servers, but this was the first that was built using server components. For example, the motherboard is a Supermicro X6DAL-G. I had dual Xeon 3.2Ghz processors installed. It came with 4GB and I had a SCSI drive installed for its speed, recall that this is 2002. Anyway, this machine was meant to be used as my new web server. I got Windows 2000 Advanced Server installed on it.

For a while, it was a good machine, but one thing that bugged the heck out of me was the fan noise. It was LOUD! It was loud and I talked to the guys who built the machine and they said that it was the cpu's heat that required the fans to do so much work. I lived with the fan noise for a while, but it became obvious that it wouldn't work in a home setting. This computer was meant to be in a server room and supposed to be drowned out by other noise, like an air conditioner. So I brought it into Bill.com.

Now I find myself with the computer back at home. The computer has been upgraded recently: 10GB of RAM and a new video card. When I turned it on for the first time at home in a while, the noise was very loud. I knew it had to be the fans, and I traced it to the CPU fans. I had disabled every other fan except for the power supply's and it was still noisy. I didn't want to deal with the CPU fans, so I took it into our neighborhood computer store. Turned out to be a great thing because in addition to the fans, the problem was also the video card's fan. Now the computer sits quietly under my desk.

But not before some more surgery. The old C drive was 74GB SCSI not nearly big enough these days for all the programs I use. Besides, performance-wise, there's very little difference between SATA drives and SCSI drives now. And I need more disk space than reliability currently. With Ian's help, we swapped the drive for a 200GB SATA drive. This should last me for a while. Because my Dell died, I have 4 250GB drives on hand. I was able to create a RAID 10 array. This combined with a 300GB RAID 1 should last me a long time. I did some timing on these arrays and found that I was able to get 200MB/s transfer rate!