Yes, I know that there are some useful groups, but with the low traffic that those get, they could esily be moved to web forums. The only real advantage of a usenet forum is that the bandwidth is distributed, so that you do not have one "host" being stuck with the bill.
Web forums SUCK for discussions.
1) There's no way to download the content and review it while disconnected. (Back in the CompuServe days, c1990, a lot of users spent money on programes like TAPCIS, RECON and a few other programs which gave us this flexibility.)
2) You can't quietly compose a response without being connected (and you're at the mercy of the timeout setting on the web forum).
3) You are at the mercy of whoever designed the UI / color schemes. What you learn about the UI on one site may not apply to another site.
4) You can't setup filters, rules, scoring parameters to help manage the message flow. You can't choose to use a different client then the rest of the world because you value certain features more/less then other people.
5) 101 usernames and passwords to remember.
6) Putting up with inane avatars, signatures and other clutter until you find the switch to turn it off in your profile.
That's not to say that nntp is perfect, far from it. But it places a lot of power into the hands of the user rather then some sysadmin. There is some decent web message board software out there, I just wish they would provide an nntp feed for users who want an alternative.
E-Mail is not dead, dying, or in need of replacement (that's not to say it couldn't stand to be improved slightly). The core problem is that everyone looked at e-mail and went "Oooh Shiny!" and proceeded to use it for everything they could think of.
Fortunately, most companies have woken up and realized that you need a variety of electronic communication tools rather then just using e-mail for everything. This means things like:
- An internal, secure, encrypted IM system. Useful for ad-hoc chats / conferences where you need the back and forth on a near real-time basis. It often replaces a phone call or conference call, but also makes for a very good supplemental channel to a voice chat. (No need to say AITCH TEE TEE PEA COLON SLASH SLASH... when you can simply drop the link into the chat window.)
- Intranet home page (using blog software to publish news items to a page that your users have set as their home page). Ditch the printed newsletter and simply put it on the intranet. You'll get a better idea of what your userbase *really* thinks of the content rather then seeing all that paper used to line birdcages.
- Wikis / Blogs for gathering information or collaboration. Requires a lot of user and corporate commitment though. Probably only for the more technical companies. CMS or CRM software probably fits in here as well as shared network folders or version control systems for sharing files.
An internal IM system for us has been a big saver. We have numerous off-site workers and it cuts down on long-distance bills quite a bit. We train our users to treat e-mail as something that they only check every hour rather then being a slave to the "you've got mail" notifications. If it's urgent, call or use the IM system, otherwise drop it in e-mail and let the other person get to it when they can.
I'd just like to be able to store 'personal' or 'private' information on a 1GB encrypted flash drive.
I'm assuming that you're talking about things like passwords, bank accounts, or other textual information.
My solution is low-tech. I have a GPG/PGP key with a decent length passphrase (and a 2-year expiration date). The private keys and the passphrase get kept in the safe-deposit box downtown as a backup. (Key management is generally the "hard" part and usually where things get screwed up.)
For every website that I create a user / password for, I create a separate text file. Then I encrypt the content of the text file by copying the plaintext to the clipboard, encrypting it with PGP/GNUPG, then pasting it back into the text file. So when you look at my directory, I have dozens of simple text files, each with a block of encrypted text inside.
This has a few advantages:
1) I can easily backup my text files without worrying about the security of the backup media. I could even e-mail them to my gmail account or post them on a newsgroup / website (if I was feeling brave).
2) If a single text file gets deleted / corrupted, I only lose a single user/password pair. Which I can probably restore from the latest backup.
3) It's platform agnostic.
Now, for things like Quicken files... I keep those in a PGPDisk container with a strong passphrase. I'll periodically archive the data then encrypt it with GNUPG/PGP. Plus I periodically burn the container file to CD-R.
I work for a small non-profit that refurbishes used computers for re-use, and we wipe every hard drive with an 11-pass system. (Probably overkill, DoD specifies just 7). Every volunteer who works on the computers is trained in how to do it, and in the importance of doing so. It doesn't take much person-time: Hook up the hard drive to a computer, boot from the Knoppix CD, and enter the command. A couple of hours later you have a clean safe hard drive with no trace of the original data.
My Tecra9100 does moderately well with Standby/Hibernate. But I always manually put it into Standby rather then relying on a "close the lid" method.
The usual problem upon resume is that Mozilla can't seem to deal with changing network addresses as I move from network to network. Seems like they're hard-caching IP addresses inside the code instead of talking to the Windows TCP/IP stack. (i.e. a "ipconfig/flushdns" does not fix the issue, you have to manually exit and restart Mozilla)
I can't help but to think (and practice) that regular wipe-and-reinstall-the-OS strategies are the only way to optimally run windows.
A smart admin learns to appreciate the value of disk images. (Acronis TrueImage, Norton Ghost, Knoppix+NTFSClone.)
Setup the machine *once*, then image it. No need to ever go back through the entire re-install process. If the machine changes software frequently, you may want to re-image every few months. Our standard for rebuilding a user's machine is to verify the data backups, restore the last good image, then restore the user's data.
And lately I've been taking all data off my external and backup drives, slow formatting them on a regular basis, and then dropping the files back in. Oye, but it makes a hell of a difference.
That doesn't make much sense to me. A defrag using the built-in utility would do the same thing. Or using the CHKDSK / Disk Check tool to scan for bad sectors. (And on modern HDs, once you start seeing bad sectors getting past the SMART sector-remapping, it's time to replace the drive.)
many of them tell me how they close the lid of their laptop to put it to sleep
I've never found this to be a good method of putting the system into sleep mode. What if you're simply closing the lid to walk across the office? In fact, the main reason that I don't configure any specific action when the user closes the lid is that it encourages them to walk across the office with the laptop half-open so that it doesn't go to sleep. (Which means a greater chance of breakage if they drop it.)
So if a user wants to go to sleep/standby, they have to manually choose that option before closing the lid. That gives Windows a chance to pop an error if there are apps open that will prevent sleep/standby. Alternately, if they're running on battery, we have standby configured to kick in after a certain amount of inactivity (usually 10 minutes).
I recently implemented a new CAPTCHA system using Flash as "secure container" on my guestbook. The spam immediately and completely stopped. You can see it here [rahdick.at].
I also wrote an article about using Flash together with CAPTCHAs to achieve 100% security, which can be found here:
1) There's no such thing as 100% security. Your solution simply isn't popular enough to be worth attacking (yet). The lesson here is that a *custom* roll-your-own CAPTCHA system might be better then a pre-rolled system. Or at least, you should use a system that is heavily customized for your particular implementation.
2) Due to constant abuse by advertisers / spammers / fraudsters, a lot of us have installed flash blockers.
Ideally what I'd like is a true bayesian comment spam filter plugin for wordpress, but so far I haven't been able to find one. Such filters have done wonders for me in Thunderbird for my email spam, with something like a 99.99% sucess rate and no false positives. Clearly the situation is quite different with comment spam, but all the same it would be nice to have one.
At first glance, I think that's a decent idea.
Apply spam-scoring techniques to comments. The blog software should then allow you to approve them by "bin" (definite ham, unsure, definite spam). Most of the time, you can simply approve ham and ignore the definite spam. You just have to spend time checking the unsures (and training the filter to recognize things better).
The advantage of a bayesian engine is that it trains itself to match the content and the user's view of what is spam/ham. Which means that even if spammers figure out how to slip through one bayesian filter, there's no guarantee that their message will slip through a different one.
(The thought that comes to mind is that bayesian-type filtering is what we do automatically in real-life when presented with input. A trivial case would be recognition of advertising, while a more complex case would be whether we consider a random stranger to be more/less trustworthy.)
Yeah, I sorta figured the 128kbps number would be controversial (which is why I documented it as 128kbps). Personally, I rip to FLAC but use 192/256kbps MP3 for day-to-day use. The FLACs get stored on DVD in case I ever have the desire to re-convert the collection to another format.
(One reason that I use 192/256Kbps MP3 instead of, say, 320Kbps MP3 is that portable CD/MP3 players have limited buffer space. So the higher bitrate tracks result in more skips if you're actively moving. The 192/256Kbps MP3s strike a balance between quality / size / skip resistance. Dunno if the skip issue applies to HD-based players and I made that choice a few years ago before flash-based players entered the multi-gigabyte range.)
While not the original poster, I can think of an example or two.
When I first joined my current company back in 2000, we had nothing more then a 56k line (and a few dial-up users). We upgraded that to a T1 pretty quick in order to provide better support to our remote workers.
Over the years, we've added more remote workers. Plus, remote workers tend to be connecting via multi-megabit DSL/Cable connections instead of the sub-megabit speeds of 5 years ago. Combine that with more and more internet use, using VOIP to save on toll calls, etc. and that T1 starts to look a little overused.
Most sizes show a ~$0.05/GB price drop in just a few weeks. Probably not unusual when a new, larger sized drive hits the market.
They probably could've charged a higher premium for those 750GB drives and they'd still sell. Price trend graphs are still pretty flat (PATA and SATA).
For Linux... Software RAID. Use any controller that you want, you can even mix/match them to fill available slots. No worries about drivers, compatibility, or having to buy (3) RAID controllers to protect against failure. (One for a hot-spare, the 2nd in an off-site location... both on the off-chance that you can't buy an exact replacement three years from now when the RAID controller dies.)
My current "monster" box is an (8) drive Antec p160 running Gentoo (AMD64, 4GB RAM, 2 300GB RAID1 arrays, 1 200GB JBOD scratch drive, 1 600GB RAID5 array). Four drives below and 4 drives above (taking up 3 5.25" bays using this 4:3 bay cooler). Or I could've ditched the optical drive and used a pair of 3:2 bay coolers to pack (6) drives into the 5.25" bay area. I run PostgreSQL, Apache, SubVersion, rsync backups, Samba, DNS and DHCP services on this box. The RAID5 array is basically a big backup drive for my network (and yes I wish it was larger).
My next home server will probably be based on the Antec p180b case, which I can cram 10 or 12 drives into. Based on the schematics, airflow looks better then the old p160 case. I may even upgrade the existing p160 server to a p180b case.
VIA EPIA. You can get them fanless (600MHz for sure, maybe the next step up now). I have an old 600MHz C3 1GB RAM with a pair of 300GB 5400rpm HDs in a SFF sized case. Limited expandability, the CPU is a bit slow, and you pay a bit more for the hardware. Plus, the SFF case that I used uses 40mm fans in the back which make more noise then the rest of the system. It makes for a nice music server (running Gentoo) but is still a bit of a white elephant. Probably pretty power efficient though.
Build your own. Antec p180 / Sonata / p160 cases combined with a low-end Athlon64 motherboard / CPU / RAM bundle from MWave. I have a p160 case with (8) hard drives, a single-core Athlon64 and 4GB of RAM. It runs Samba, PostgreSQL, SubVersion, Apache plus DNS/DHCP service for my home LAN. I have multiple arrays setup (300GB RAID1, 300GB RAID1, 700GB RAID5, 200GB JBOD) which gives me a lot of flexibility.
I've never put the kill-a-watt meter on the large p160 server, but I'd imagine that it doesn't do too bad (other then having 8 HDs inside). But if you want to save power, the first rule of thumb is to minimize components (i.e. one server instead of two, one high desnity drive instead of multiple low density drives).
I think I owned one of those once... I was not impressed with it (dog slow, at everything). The Promise SX6000 was better, but still a bit pokey so now I simply run Software RAID on my linux servers.
Most Software RAID implementations will rebuild at the rate of the hard drives, rather then the limit of the controller. (Even a 300-400Mhz CPU is enough.)
A good tool to use on Linux is "atop" which allows you to see which hard drives are 100% utilized during a rebuild.
For a while they were, seemed like every manuf' was moving towards 1 year warranties on anything except their premium SCSI drives. Some of that may also have been the free-fall pricing due to hard drive sizes doubling every 12-15 months.
But lately, it's been getting easier to get 3/5 year warranty drives. (Again, possibly because drive size increases have stagnated over the past few years.) There's not much of a price differential either between 1/3/5 year warranty drives, which makes it worthwhile to go ahead and look for a 5 year warranty.
That's the main reason that I'm looking at the samples now. I have a 120ppi laptop display (Tecra 14" 1400x1050") so I run WinXP with large fonts and have Mozilla 1.7 configured with some minimum font sizes.
My default font sizes are Serif (18 px), Courier New (16 px), with a minimum font size setting of 14 px.
Between the 120ppi dot density on the display and the minimum font setting in Mozilla, I run into a lot of websites that are sub-par. So I was moderately surprised that the new design looks okay on my system. Some of the gaps between elements and inside elements look a little large though.
I'm ambivalent on the 3-panel design detail. I run my browser at a width of around 900-1000px.
Hmm... at that point you're looking at server-level cases, which are about 12-15" wide (usually 5u or 8u cases which are either rack or tower mountable). Sometimes called pedestal cases. I'd guesss that SuperMicro, Lian Li or Antec carry them, but prices for server-level cases are typically $200-$500.
Unfortunately, I don't have any way to back up 150GB (actual usable space) and if I lose one drive, I lose everything...
Why not? Prices on 200-300GB drives are well below $100 now. Even if you factor in the cost of an external USB case for those drives you can still backup for fairly cheap.
Some of the drives are now as low as $0.32/GB (the sweet spot is the 250GB drives).
I've gotten (8) drives into an Antec p160 case. Four below and four above (in a 4:3 CoolerMaster stacker unit that lets me put 4 drives into 3 5.25" bays with a 120mm cooling fan). I even had room to use the 4th 5.25" bay for the optical drive. The only unused bay in the unit is the 2nd 3.5" external bay.
I think with the newer p180/p180b case I could probably cram (10) drives into the unit.
With the amount of media stored on my server I can already justify a disk this size. The only downside is of course that you're going to need two of these for your mirror:(
Plus a 3rd for near-line backup... and a 4th for a hot-spare...
Yeah, they start at over $100. But if I had the cash to throw away, I swear I'd replace every case in my house with a Li-Lian after experiencing just one of them.
Having dealt with many a cheap case over the years, I don't consider paying $100 for a good quality Lian Li or Antec case to be throwing money away. In fact, I'd consider it a good investment because the case will last me probably 10+ years and survive multiple replacements of the innards.
(That is... as much of an investment as buying any PC tech could be considered.)
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm... I've been looking at TrueCrypt today and it allows you to use something called keyfiles.
Yes, I know that there are some useful groups, but with the low traffic that those get, they could esily be moved to web forums. The only real advantage of a usenet forum is that the bandwidth is distributed, so that you do not have one "host" being stuck with the bill.
Web forums SUCK for discussions.
1) There's no way to download the content and review it while disconnected. (Back in the CompuServe days, c1990, a lot of users spent money on programes like TAPCIS, RECON and a few other programs which gave us this flexibility.)
2) You can't quietly compose a response without being connected (and you're at the mercy of the timeout setting on the web forum).
3) You are at the mercy of whoever designed the UI / color schemes. What you learn about the UI on one site may not apply to another site.
4) You can't setup filters, rules, scoring parameters to help manage the message flow. You can't choose to use a different client then the rest of the world because you value certain features more/less then other people.
5) 101 usernames and passwords to remember.
6) Putting up with inane avatars, signatures and other clutter until you find the switch to turn it off in your profile.
That's not to say that nntp is perfect, far from it. But it places a lot of power into the hands of the user rather then some sysadmin. There is some decent web message board software out there, I just wish they would provide an nntp feed for users who want an alternative.
I agree with Tony.
E-Mail is not dead, dying, or in need of replacement (that's not to say it couldn't stand to be improved slightly). The core problem is that everyone looked at e-mail and went "Oooh Shiny!" and proceeded to use it for everything they could think of.
Fortunately, most companies have woken up and realized that you need a variety of electronic communication tools rather then just using e-mail for everything. This means things like:
- An internal, secure, encrypted IM system. Useful for ad-hoc chats / conferences where you need the back and forth on a near real-time basis. It often replaces a phone call or conference call, but also makes for a very good supplemental channel to a voice chat. (No need to say AITCH TEE TEE PEA COLON SLASH SLASH... when you can simply drop the link into the chat window.)
- Intranet home page (using blog software to publish news items to a page that your users have set as their home page). Ditch the printed newsletter and simply put it on the intranet. You'll get a better idea of what your userbase *really* thinks of the content rather then seeing all that paper used to line birdcages.
- Wikis / Blogs for gathering information or collaboration. Requires a lot of user and corporate commitment though. Probably only for the more technical companies. CMS or CRM software probably fits in here as well as shared network folders or version control systems for sharing files.
An internal IM system for us has been a big saver. We have numerous off-site workers and it cuts down on long-distance bills quite a bit. We train our users to treat e-mail as something that they only check every hour rather then being a slave to the "you've got mail" notifications. If it's urgent, call or use the IM system, otherwise drop it in e-mail and let the other person get to it when they can.
I'd just like to be able to store 'personal' or 'private' information on a 1GB encrypted flash drive.
I'm assuming that you're talking about things like passwords, bank accounts, or other textual information.
My solution is low-tech. I have a GPG/PGP key with a decent length passphrase (and a 2-year expiration date). The private keys and the passphrase get kept in the safe-deposit box downtown as a backup. (Key management is generally the "hard" part and usually where things get screwed up.)
For every website that I create a user / password for, I create a separate text file. Then I encrypt the content of the text file by copying the plaintext to the clipboard, encrypting it with PGP/GNUPG, then pasting it back into the text file. So when you look at my directory, I have dozens of simple text files, each with a block of encrypted text inside.
This has a few advantages:
1) I can easily backup my text files without worrying about the security of the backup media. I could even e-mail them to my gmail account or post them on a newsgroup / website (if I was feeling brave).
2) If a single text file gets deleted / corrupted, I only lose a single user/password pair. Which I can probably restore from the latest backup.
3) It's platform agnostic.
Now, for things like Quicken files... I keep those in a PGPDisk container with a strong passphrase. I'll periodically archive the data then encrypt it with GNUPG/PGP. Plus I periodically burn the container file to CD-R.
I work for a small non-profit that refurbishes used computers for re-use, and we wipe every hard drive with an 11-pass system. (Probably overkill, DoD specifies just 7). Every volunteer who works on the computers is trained in how to do it, and in the importance of doing so. It doesn't take much person-time: Hook up the hard drive to a computer, boot from the Knoppix CD, and enter the command. A couple of hours later you have a clean safe hard drive with no trace of the original data.
Hmmm... Knoppix is probably overkill. Try DBaN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) instead.
My Tecra9100 does moderately well with Standby/Hibernate. But I always manually put it into Standby rather then relying on a "close the lid" method.
/flushdns" does not fix the issue, you have to manually exit and restart Mozilla)
The usual problem upon resume is that Mozilla can't seem to deal with changing network addresses as I move from network to network. Seems like they're hard-caching IP addresses inside the code instead of talking to the Windows TCP/IP stack. (i.e. a "ipconfig
I can't help but to think (and practice) that regular wipe-and-reinstall-the-OS strategies are the only way to optimally run windows.
A smart admin learns to appreciate the value of disk images. (Acronis TrueImage, Norton Ghost, Knoppix+NTFSClone.)
Setup the machine *once*, then image it. No need to ever go back through the entire re-install process. If the machine changes software frequently, you may want to re-image every few months. Our standard for rebuilding a user's machine is to verify the data backups, restore the last good image, then restore the user's data.
And lately I've been taking all data off my external and backup drives, slow formatting them on a regular basis, and then dropping the files back in. Oye, but it makes a hell of a difference.
That doesn't make much sense to me. A defrag using the built-in utility would do the same thing. Or using the CHKDSK / Disk Check tool to scan for bad sectors. (And on modern HDs, once you start seeing bad sectors getting past the SMART sector-remapping, it's time to replace the drive.)
many of them tell me how they close the lid of their laptop to put it to sleep
I've never found this to be a good method of putting the system into sleep mode. What if you're simply closing the lid to walk across the office? In fact, the main reason that I don't configure any specific action when the user closes the lid is that it encourages them to walk across the office with the laptop half-open so that it doesn't go to sleep. (Which means a greater chance of breakage if they drop it.)
So if a user wants to go to sleep/standby, they have to manually choose that option before closing the lid. That gives Windows a chance to pop an error if there are apps open that will prevent sleep/standby. Alternately, if they're running on battery, we have standby configured to kick in after a certain amount of inactivity (usually 10 minutes).
I recently implemented a new CAPTCHA system using Flash as "secure container" on my guestbook. The spam immediately and completely stopped. You can see it here [rahdick.at].
I also wrote an article about using Flash together with CAPTCHAs to achieve 100% security, which can be found here:
1) There's no such thing as 100% security. Your solution simply isn't popular enough to be worth attacking (yet). The lesson here is that a *custom* roll-your-own CAPTCHA system might be better then a pre-rolled system. Or at least, you should use a system that is heavily customized for your particular implementation.
2) Due to constant abuse by advertisers / spammers / fraudsters, a lot of us have installed flash blockers.
Ideally what I'd like is a true bayesian comment spam filter plugin for wordpress, but so far I haven't been able to find one. Such filters have done wonders for me in Thunderbird for my email spam, with something like a 99.99% sucess rate and no false positives. Clearly the situation is quite different with comment spam, but all the same it would be nice to have one.
At first glance, I think that's a decent idea.
Apply spam-scoring techniques to comments. The blog software should then allow you to approve them by "bin" (definite ham, unsure, definite spam). Most of the time, you can simply approve ham and ignore the definite spam. You just have to spend time checking the unsures (and training the filter to recognize things better).
The advantage of a bayesian engine is that it trains itself to match the content and the user's view of what is spam/ham. Which means that even if spammers figure out how to slip through one bayesian filter, there's no guarantee that their message will slip through a different one.
(The thought that comes to mind is that bayesian-type filtering is what we do automatically in real-life when presented with input. A trivial case would be recognition of advertising, while a more complex case would be whether we consider a random stranger to be more/less trustworthy.)
Yeah, I sorta figured the 128kbps number would be controversial (which is why I documented it as 128kbps). Personally, I rip to FLAC but use 192/256kbps MP3 for day-to-day use. The FLACs get stored on DVD in case I ever have the desire to re-convert the collection to another format.
(One reason that I use 192/256Kbps MP3 instead of, say, 320Kbps MP3 is that portable CD/MP3 players have limited buffer space. So the higher bitrate tracks result in more skips if you're actively moving. The 192/256Kbps MP3s strike a balance between quality / size / skip resistance. Dunno if the skip issue applies to HD-based players and I made that choice a few years ago before flash-based players entered the multi-gigabyte range.)
While not the original poster, I can think of an example or two.
When I first joined my current company back in 2000, we had nothing more then a 56k line (and a few dial-up users). We upgraded that to a T1 pretty quick in order to provide better support to our remote workers.
Over the years, we've added more remote workers. Plus, remote workers tend to be connecting via multi-megabit DSL/Cable connections instead of the sub-megabit speeds of 5 years ago. Combine that with more and more internet use, using VOIP to save on toll calls, etc. and that T1 starts to look a little overused.
I dug up my prices from May 9th's check:
IDE/PATA
200GB $85 - $0.42/GB
250GB $95 - $0.38/GB
300GB $120 - $0.40/GB
400GB $220 - $0.55/GB
500GB $290 - $0.58/GB
750GB $495 - $0.66/GB
SATA
200GB $85 - $0.42/GB
250GB $95 - $0.38/GB
300GB $120 - $0.40/GB
400GB $180 - $0.45/GB
500GB $275 - $0.55/GB
750GB $480 - $0.64/GB
Most sizes show a ~$0.05/GB price drop in just a few weeks. Probably not unusual when a new, larger sized drive hits the market.
They probably could've charged a higher premium for those 750GB drives and they'd still sell. Price trend graphs are still pretty flat (PATA and SATA).
For Linux... Software RAID. Use any controller that you want, you can even mix/match them to fill available slots. No worries about drivers, compatibility, or having to buy (3) RAID controllers to protect against failure. (One for a hot-spare, the 2nd in an off-site location... both on the off-chance that you can't buy an exact replacement three years from now when the RAID controller dies.)
My current "monster" box is an (8) drive Antec p160 running Gentoo (AMD64, 4GB RAM, 2 300GB RAID1 arrays, 1 200GB JBOD scratch drive, 1 600GB RAID5 array). Four drives below and 4 drives above (taking up 3 5.25" bays using this 4:3 bay cooler). Or I could've ditched the optical drive and used a pair of 3:2 bay coolers to pack (6) drives into the 5.25" bay area. I run PostgreSQL, Apache, SubVersion, rsync backups, Samba, DNS and DHCP services on this box. The RAID5 array is basically a big backup drive for my network (and yes I wish it was larger).
My next home server will probably be based on the Antec p180b case, which I can cram 10 or 12 drives into. Based on the schematics, airflow looks better then the old p160 case. I may even upgrade the existing p160 server to a p180b case.
Well, there's a few options...
VIA EPIA. You can get them fanless (600MHz for sure, maybe the next step up now). I have an old 600MHz C3 1GB RAM with a pair of 300GB 5400rpm HDs in a SFF sized case. Limited expandability, the CPU is a bit slow, and you pay a bit more for the hardware. Plus, the SFF case that I used uses 40mm fans in the back which make more noise then the rest of the system. It makes for a nice music server (running Gentoo) but is still a bit of a white elephant. Probably pretty power efficient though.
Build your own. Antec p180 / Sonata / p160 cases combined with a low-end Athlon64 motherboard / CPU / RAM bundle from MWave. I have a p160 case with (8) hard drives, a single-core Athlon64 and 4GB of RAM. It runs Samba, PostgreSQL, SubVersion, Apache plus DNS/DHCP service for my home LAN. I have multiple arrays setup (300GB RAID1, 300GB RAID1, 700GB RAID5, 200GB JBOD) which gives me a lot of flexibility.
I've never put the kill-a-watt meter on the large p160 server, but I'd imagine that it doesn't do too bad (other then having 8 HDs inside). But if you want to save power, the first rule of thumb is to minimize components (i.e. one server instead of two, one high desnity drive instead of multiple low density drives).
Adaptec 2400 card (ATA)
I think I owned one of those once... I was not impressed with it (dog slow, at everything). The Promise SX6000 was better, but still a bit pokey so now I simply run Software RAID on my linux servers.
Most Software RAID implementations will rebuild at the rate of the hard drives, rather then the limit of the controller. (Even a 300-400Mhz CPU is enough.)
A good tool to use on Linux is "atop" which allows you to see which hard drives are 100% utilized during a rebuild.
For a while they were, seemed like every manuf' was moving towards 1 year warranties on anything except their premium SCSI drives. Some of that may also have been the free-fall pricing due to hard drive sizes doubling every 12-15 months.
But lately, it's been getting easier to get 3/5 year warranty drives. (Again, possibly because drive size increases have stagnated over the past few years.) There's not much of a price differential either between 1/3/5 year warranty drives, which makes it worthwhile to go ahead and look for a 5 year warranty.
I use largish fonts...
That's the main reason that I'm looking at the samples now. I have a 120ppi laptop display (Tecra 14" 1400x1050") so I run WinXP with large fonts and have Mozilla 1.7 configured with some minimum font sizes.
My default font sizes are Serif (18 px), Courier New (16 px), with a minimum font size setting of 14 px.
Between the 120ppi dot density on the display and the minimum font setting in Mozilla, I run into a lot of websites that are sub-par. So I was moderately surprised that the new design looks okay on my system. Some of the gaps between elements and inside elements look a little large though.
I'm ambivalent on the 3-panel design detail. I run my browser at a width of around 900-1000px.
Hmm... at that point you're looking at server-level cases, which are about 12-15" wide (usually 5u or 8u cases which are either rack or tower mountable). Sometimes called pedestal cases. I'd guesss that SuperMicro, Lian Li or Antec carry them, but prices for server-level cases are typically $200-$500.
Unfortunately, I don't have any way to back up 150GB (actual usable space) and if I lose one drive, I lose everything...
Why not? Prices on 200-300GB drives are well below $100 now. Even if you factor in the cost of an external USB case for those drives you can still backup for fairly cheap.
Some of the drives are now as low as $0.32/GB (the sweet spot is the 250GB drives).
$413 sounds pricey until, as you noted, you do the math for the $/GB amount. For being a leading-edge drive, the price per GB is rather competitive.
The following prices are estimates based on www.pricescan.com. There could be as much as +/- 10% variation in prices.
PATA drive prices
120GB $64 - $0.53/GB
160GB $70 - $0.44/GB
200GB $75 - $0.38/GB
250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
400GB $195 - $0.49/GB
500GB $260 - $0.52/GB
750GB $490 - $0.65/GB
SATA Drive prices ($/GB)
120GB $68 - $0.57/GB
160GB $65 - $0.41/GB
200GB $76 - $0.38/GB
250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
400GB $175 - $0.44/GB
500GB $250 - $0.50/GB
750GB $434 - $0.58/GB
Define "many"?
I've gotten (8) drives into an Antec p160 case. Four below and four above (in a 4:3 CoolerMaster stacker unit that lets me put 4 drives into 3 5.25" bays with a 120mm cooling fan). I even had room to use the 4th 5.25" bay for the optical drive. The only unused bay in the unit is the 2nd 3.5" external bay.
I think with the newer p180/p180b case I could probably cram (10) drives into the unit.
Well... 750GB (let's say 700GB once we remove the overhead) holds:
200 DVD movies (3.5GB each) or 100 DVD9 movies
500 days of music (128kbps)
1400 TV episodes (44 min, MPEG4)
500 HDTV episodes (MPEG4, 1.4GB/show)
So yes, we're probably getting past that point with music, but not with video yet.
And, IIRC, Project Gutenberg has something like 300-400GB of text files in their library.
With the amount of media stored on my server I can already justify a disk this size. The only downside is of course that you're going to need two of these for your mirror :(
Plus a 3rd for near-line backup... and a 4th for a hot-spare...
=)
Yeah, they start at over $100. But if I had the cash to throw away, I swear I'd replace every case in my house with a Li-Lian after experiencing just one of them.
Having dealt with many a cheap case over the years, I don't consider paying $100 for a good quality Lian Li or Antec case to be throwing money away. In fact, I'd consider it a good investment because the case will last me probably 10+ years and survive multiple replacements of the innards.
(That is... as much of an investment as buying any PC tech could be considered.)