The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

Mine is just a cheap Seagate 4TB - I'd expect WD to be better. Since the drive never gets "ejected", I've always wondered how the router manages it to avoid errors - I could never find any documentation on that. Especially since mine gets written to every day, and rudely shut down every night when I turn off the power bar it and the router are plugged into.

I got the Best Buy BF deal on a Nighthawk AC2400 for $80 but haven't gotten around to setting it up yet - I'll be interested to see how well it works with the USB drive.

Mine belongs to Spectrum. The Router not the drive. I never turn off my internet so that was one thing the drive was always going. It didn't sleep like it does when connected to a desktop. I have to wonder if Windows 10 isn't to blame for the permissions error it threw though the error seemed to be from the Router. NetGear Forum is full of people who have also lost data using Readyshare and had I known that I would not have used it. I'm just relieved it's all fixed and now you know if ever happens CHKDSK is the first step not data recovery software which couldn't find it.

[cc_in_oh]

BTW if you're not going to use the drive on the router, you may want to disable the obsolete SMB1. Unfortunately I think the R6300 is too old to get the SMB2 update...

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

BTW if you're not going to use the drive on the router, you may want to disable the obsolete SMB1. Unfortunately I think the R6300 is too old to get the SMB2 update...

On the router? I use SMB1 to communicate with between computers and mobile devices. My Desktop is Vista, it's that old. Two Windows 10 laptops, XP Netbook and multiple Android devices.

I'm considering installing Ubuntu or something like Chrome OS on the Netbook. I can't find a browser that works with XP.

I have a couple of externals on the desktop. I would love a real NAS setup that can be trusted as much as a desktop. I would also love 6TB or 8TB drive. Ah I can dream......

[cc_in_oh]

Originally Posted by Blossom

On the router? I use SMB1 to communicate with between computers and mobile devices. My Desktop is Vista, it's that old. Two Windows 10 laptops, XP Netbook and multiple Android devices.

I'm considering installing Ubuntu or something like Chrome OS on the Netbook. I can't find a browser that works with XP.

I have a couple of externals on the desktop. I would love a real NAS setup that can be trusted as much as a desktop. I would also love 6TB or 8TB drive. Ah I can dream......

No I meant in Windows, but it sounds like you may need it for other apps. Just be aware of its security vulnerabilities. I have just the client component enabled to access the readyshare drive on the r6300 but I'm hoping the newer Nighthawk model will have the SMB2 update...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

Mine is just a cheap Seagate 4TB - I'd expect WD to be better.

Likely not.

Hard drives are commodities these days, and generally similar. Given the same specs, it normally doesn't matter whose name is on the box, and competition is on price. Once upon a time, there were something like 30 drive manufacturers. No longer. How many folks remember Miniscribe, Quantum, Micropolis or Connor Peripherals? (The last was a company set up by a former Seagate executive targeting the laptop market.) I had all of those in systems at one time or another.

These days, I believe the main suppliers are Seagate, WD, Hitachi, and Toshiba.

And WD began life as a manufacturer of drive controllers, in the days when the controller for hard drives was a separate card plugging into the motherboard. These days, drives include controllers as part of the drive itself. WD morphed into a full drive manufacturer to stay in business (if memory serves, by buying an existing drive manufacturer.)

Since the drive never gets "ejected", I've always wondered how the router manages it to avoid errors - I could never find any documentation on that. Especially since mine gets written to every day, and rudely shut down every night when I turn off the power bar it and the router are plugged into.

Current drives are a lot more robust than they once were. Power going away doesn't normally corrupt file systems, and recovery is fairly simple. (Current file systems tend to be journaling and capable of being restored to the last known good state.) The last time I had a major problem, it was bad luck - a directory happened to reside on a block that had gone bad. The underlying data the directory pointed to was all there and unharmed, but the pointers to it were gone.

Recovery recreated the pointers and assigned them to a directory created by the recovery process to hold them, which then got re-named and put in the right place in the hierarchy. (This was under NTFS on Windows. A FAT file system would have been a much harder problem.)

I do tend to specifically Eject a plug-in USB drive as a "belt-and-suspenders" move, but I've never seen a problem from neglecting to do so.

But I'm curious - why power off every night? The router here is always on because things can occur in the wee hours.
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Dennis

[cc_in_oh]

Purely anecdotal - I've had multiple Seagate failures but no WD's yet. But I still buy whichever is cheapest. The last 2 are Seagate Hub drives that are very handy on my ancient PC with only 2 USB3 ports.

I shut down everything at night - PC's, router, bridge, switches, drives, printer, echo devices, media player, even STB (not modem only because I'd lose phone service). I just never had any reason to leave it all on generating heat and risking storm damage...

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Likely not.

Hard drives are commodities these days, and generally similar. Given the same specs, it normally doesn't matter whose name is on the box, and competition is on price. Once upon a time, there were something like 30 drive manufacturers. No longer. How many folks remember Miniscribe, Quantum, Micropolis or Connor Peripherals? (The last was a company set up by a former Seagate executive targeting the laptop market.) I had all of those in systems at one time or another.

These days, I believe the main suppliers are Seagate, WD, Hitachi, and Toshiba.

And WD began life as a manufacturer of drive controllers, in the days when the controller for hard drives was a separate card plugging into the motherboard. These days, drives include controllers as part of the drive itself. WD morphed into a full drive manufacturer to stay in business (if memory serves, by buying an existing drive manufacturer.)


Current drives are a lot more robust than they once were. Power going away doesn't normally corrupt file systems, and recovery is fairly simple. (Current file systems tend to be journaling and capable of being restored to the last known good state.) The last time I had a major problem, it was bad luck - a directory happened to reside on a block that had gone bad. The underlying data the directory pointed to was all there and unharmed, but the pointers to it were gone.

Recovery recreated the pointers and assigned them to a directory created by the recovery process to hold them, which then got re-named and put in the right place in the hierarchy. (This was under NTFS on Windows. A FAT file system would have been a much harder problem.)

I do tend to specifically Eject a plug-in USB drive as a "belt-and-suspenders" move, but I've never seen a problem from neglecting to do so.

But I'm curious - why power off every night? The router here is always on because things can occur in the wee hours.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

Purely anecdotal - I've had multiple Seagate failures but no WD's yet. But I still buy whichever is cheapest. The last 2 are Seagate Hub drives that are very handy on my ancient PC with only 2 USB3 ports.

Buying what's cheapest is pretty much standard practice. And the nature of semi-conductor electronics is that things get steadily cheaper. It's a classic capital intensive industry.

The single biggest cost of making something like hard drives is the cost of building the factory to do it. You probably don't have the money lying around to do that (because if you're smart, your cash is invested in stuff that will generate revenue), so you take on debt to finance it. An allocated fraction of the debt becomes the largest part of the cost of the product. As the debt is paid down, the share of the price allocated to debt service drops, and so do prices. I see multi-terabyte drives these days that are at "impulse purchase" prices (like under $50).

This trend is accelerating as SSDs get cheaper. I just got a budget brand 120GB SSD for $30 at my preferred retailer. It will go into a pass-along Dell All-in-One that decided it could not boot from the installed SATA HD. I could pop that drive into a drive enclosure and access it just fine, but the Dell refused to boot from it. The All-in-One will get the SSD with Linux installed, and will live stuck sideways into the shelf under my computer desk and be accessed over my network.

My current desktop is a refurb ex-corporate desktop machine. It only had USB2 on the motherboard. A recent upgrade was a PCI-e USB3 card that would go in an unused mini-PCI-e slot. I added a USB3 hub, and it supports a USB3 drive enclosure and several USB3 flash drives. (And I'm seeing those at prices I used to get charged for USB2 models,)

A contact elsewhere spoke of migrating a database server he administered to SSD, replacing 16TB of SATA HDs with 16TB of 2TB Samsung SSDs. He got an order of magnitude performance increase. The box screamed through database queries and updates.

What struck me was the SSDs had gotten cheap enough that it was an affordable upgrade. Historically, a lot of stuff didn't happen not because it wasn't possible, but because it was too expensive. Those barriers are dropping, and we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg of that happening.

I shut down everything at night - PC's, router, bridge, switches, drives, printer, echo devices, media player, even STB (not modem only because I'd lose phone service). I just never had any reason to leave it all on generating heat and risking storm damage...

Heat generation isn't a concern here, nor is storm damage. I'm in NYC, and the last storm that disrupted things here was Hurricane Sandy.

If you're someplace where storm damage is a concern, shutting down at night makes sense.
______
Dennis

[cc_in_oh]

I think I paid around $70 for my 240GB SSD a year or 2 ago. I was pricing new PC's last month and wondering why anyone would bother with Optane memory when SSD prices are where they are these days. They must have made enormous strides in reliability recently If they can hold up to the kind of rewrite activity you get on a large database sever - it hasn't been that long since they were recommended only for relatively static storage...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

I think I paid around $70 for my 240GB SSD a year or 2 ago. I was pricing new PC's last month and wondering why anyone would bother with Optane memory when SSD prices are where they are these days. They must have made enormous strides in reliability recently If they can hold up to the kind of rewrite activity you get on a large database sever - it hasn't been that long since they were recommended only for relatively static storage...

Back when I began looking at them, the techs I hang out with (sysadmins, network engineers and the like) tended to say "You buy the high priced spread and get Intel. It costs more but it's less likely to fail."

These days, things are a lot more reliable. Online posts of torture tests had even budget line SSDs requiring petabytes of writes before they failed.

There are about five companies that make the actual NAND flash used in SSDs. Everyone else sources from them and puts their name on the label.

The flash media itself is quite reliable these days. An area of advance has been firmware. The firmware on SSDs tries to distribute writes evenly across the entire drive. (Because any part of the SSD can be accessed in the same amount of time, you aren't concerned with fragmentation or just where something is stored, only that you can reach it and read or write it.)

SSDs are organized as cells, and I believe the sort of flash used in current consumer SSDs has a limit of about 10,000 writes before a cell reaches the limit and becomes unusable. They are over provisioned, with spare cells to substitute if any reach the limit. The firmware tries to track that and migrate data to a spare cell and mark the one about to fail as bad.

Degradation will be graceful, and show as decreasing storage as cells reach the limit and get marked unusable and the drive has run out of spares.

How long do you think it will take any individual cell in an SSD to get written to 10,000 times? For consumer SSDs, which are read from far more than written to, you are likely to replace the machine the SSD is in long before you notice drive wear.

It won't be a lot worse for a database server, as read only look ups will happen a lot more than updates that require writes. (And a database server will be backed up regularly in any case.)

I got a 240GB Crucial SSD for my previous desktop, and it cost about $100. The price has dropped since. When the prior desktop had a power supply failure, and the Small Form Factor design meant I couldn't just replace the PS, I got a new desktop and repurposed the Crucial SSD. It's been working fine.

I've looked at Optane, and it's neat, but I don't have use cases that justify what it costs.

What does interest me is that the distinctions between RAM and flash storage are fading. Flash is getting fast enough that a machine down the road might have only flash that will be both nonvolatile storage and system memory that is used like RAM.
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Dennis

[FizzyWater]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

Purely anecdotal - I've had multiple Seagate failures but no WD's yet. But I still buy whichever is cheapest. The last 2 are Seagate Hub drives that are very handy on my ancient PC with only 2 USB3 ports.

I have to say this fits my experience as well. I also had 4 Toshiba drives that never worked consistently. Although for those, I think part of the problem was that the cables that came with them required 2 of my computer's USB spots - it could be my negative memories have more to do with them taking up too many of my USB ports. As a laptop user, there never seem to be "enough" of those.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

I have to say this fits my experience as well. I also had 4 Toshiba drives that never worked consistently. Although for those, I think part of the problem was that the cables that came with them required 2 of my computer's USB spots - it could be my negative memories have more to do with them taking up too many of my USB ports. As a laptop user, there never seem to be "enough" of those.

The cables required two USB ports? I don't recall seeing drives attached via USB that had that requirement. One issue I have seen attempting to attach external drives is whether the device provides sufficient power to the external drive through the USB port. I've had cases where it didn't, and if I didn't plug the drive into a powered hub, it would appear on the host device and then disappear because the device couldn't power the drive.

But insufficient USB ports is what USB hubs are for. I have a 7 port USB2 and 4 port USB3 hub plugged into my desktop (and the 7 port is fully occupied by USB2 flash drives.) It proved simplest to connect the USB2 hub to the USB3 hub. That had a fringe benefit - when the USB2 hub was connected to the motherboard, flash drives connected to it showed in the UEFI display and I had fun figuring out what they represented. Plugged in through the USB3 hub, that does not occur.

I have a 10" Android tablet that has a full sized USB port. That was a boon, as it gets used with a Logitech Portable USB keyboard, which can plug in without an OTG adapter. For that matter, I can plug in a tiny 4 port USB hub and use both keyboard and mouse.

But the tablet doesn't recognize a USB thumb drive if I plug one into the full sized port. That requires connecting it to a USB hub plugged in via OTG adapter to the microUSB port.
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Dennis

[FizzyWater]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The cables required two USB ports? I don't recall seeing drives attached via USB that had that requirement. One issue I have seen attempting to attach external drives is whether the device provides sufficient power to the external drive through the USB port. I've had cases where it didn't, and if I didn't plug the drive into a powered hub, it would appear on the host device and then disappear because the device couldn't power the drive.
Dennis

Hi, yes, it was specifically for powering the drive. And I have also had problems with multiple attached drives where attaching a new one causes an old one (or two) to disconnect.

The cable looked something like this:

https://www.neweggbusiness.com/Produ...E&gclsrc=aw.ds

And it was quite some time ago....they might have been 500MB drives. The experience was bad enough that I never wanted to risk buying another Toshiba drive. And I had been partial to Toshiba because I had such good luck with Toshiba laptops (when I could find them).

I recently bought another powered HUB because my old one is USB 2. My laptop (a Windows 7 laptop that I pray lives a good long time) only has one USB 3 port. I'm tired of losing the speed benefits of the USB3 port when doing backups of the drives.

[cc_in_oh]

As portable drives got bigger, some early PC's weren't providing sufficient power, especially when attached to one of those cheap unpowered hubs.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Hi, yes, it was specifically for powering the drive. And I have also had problems with multiple attached drives where attaching a new one causes an old one (or two) to disconnect.

The last time I had a problem like that was on my old 32bit desktop. I used to build systems from components, but I've been cured of that bad habit.

The desktop had a motherboard failure, and I got an emergency replacement from a local retailer. The new mobo had a limit of four IDE drives. I had a couple of IDE cards providing additional IDE connectors that I had used successfully (and at one point, had ten hard drives in the tower case with the old mobo.)

They worked when the machine was first booted up, but at some point, drives attached via the IDE cards instead of motherboard IDE ports would disappear from the system. I dual booted WinXP and Ubuntu Linux. I had the drive Ubuntu was installed on disappear while I was booted into Ubuntu. Ubuntu tries to do everything in RAM, so I didn't know the drive it was on had gone walkabout until updates to Ubuntu and applications failed to install because the file system they were being written to was no longer there.

I could only imagine what would have happened had it been the Windows drive when I was booted into XP...

And it was quite some time ago....they might have been 500MB drives. The experience was bad enough that I never wanted to risk buying another Toshiba drive. And I had been partial to Toshiba because I had such good luck with Toshiba laptops (when I could find them).

I wouldn't have blamed the drive for those problems. They likely would have behaved fine elsewhere.

And I haven't Looked Stuff Up lately, but I believe current drives require less power. I still have old IDE drives in large form factors in a parts drawer. The newer 3.5" and 2.5" SATA drives are much smaller and simply need less power to operate.

I recently bought another powered HUB because my old one is USB 2. My laptop (a Windows 7 laptop that I pray lives a good long time) only has one USB 3 port. I'm tired of losing the speed benefits of the USB3 port when doing backups of the drives.

That's what hubs are for, and I'd d the same.
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Dennis

[cc_in_oh]

Speaking of SSDs, Amazon has a lightning deal on a no-name 480GB SSD for $48. Obviously not fast or reliable enough for database servers, but at $100/TB you could build in a LOT of redundancy...