Realize that it's not the *music* that's doing the iPod compatibility here. Real has their own DRM. What they do is to convert the music to be similar to Apple's DRM at the time that you transfer it to the iPod.
No, I didn't realize that. So I won't have to redownload anything from Real, but after I update my Real software, I will have to transfer my songs to the iPod again - so they can be re-DRM'ed to look like Apple's DRM. Still a pain.
And there's still uncertainty. Hypothetical scenario: next year Real decides it isn't going to make money off of its music store, shuts it down, and stops reverse-engineering Apple's DRM updates. The year after that, Apple releases firmware v5.2, which once again breaks Harmony, but also adds some wicked-cool feature I want. Now I've got to choose between my Real tunes and the new feature.
In other words, even if Real can always make their tunes compatible, that doesn't always mean they will.
Let's say I accept the assertion that Real can always work around any changes that Apple makes to the iPod's DRM software. That's not the end of the story. How often will this happen? With every firmware/itunes update, will I have to do "something" to my Real-supplied music to make it compatible again? How much mojo will I have to go through to accomplish this? Will I have to re-download every Real tune I own to make it compatible again?
I have a lot of uncertainty and doubt over how complicated this little dance will become - and thus a lot of fear of purchasing Real's music. FUD is not always a bad thing - sometimes it is justified and can keep you out of trouble. I like the fact that Real wants onto the iPod, but for now I'll just wait and see.
BTW, Apple keeps reciting this mantra that the purpose of the ITMS is to sell iPods, not to make money off of music. If this is the case, then why do they fear Real getting onto the iPod? If the net profit from selling music is so small, then they have little to lose, but much to gain in terms of more firmly establishing the iPod's dominance in the portable music market.
My hunch is that Apple does expect - one day - for the ITMS to be a cash cow, even if for now its main purpose is to promote the iPod. That's the only explanation I can see, aside from Jobs's pigheadedness, for wanting to keep the Reals of the world off the iPod.
Mum's computer doesn't have enough horsepower to run XP, but it does have enough horsepower to run all the viruses and spyware that she will accumulate? That sounds like false economy to me.
Anyway, I think your Mum's computer will run XP just fine with a few tweaks. Turn off all the visual effects, every one of them. And tell Mum not to turn them on again. Turn off unnecessary services (there are a bunch) and don't tell Mum how to turn them on again. Tweaking the services may take you a few hours (don't let Mum do it - do it for her), but in the end XP will run just fine. There are lots of XP-tuning sites out there that will give you loads of other advice - like turning of fast-user switching if Mum shares her computer - seek out those sites and heed their advice.
I have an old 433MHz PII-Celeron laptop with just 128MB of memory, and it runs XP just fine. It's not the fastest computer in the world, but for things like email, web browsing, and occasional Word processing, it does just fine. And it's far more stable than 98, which would crash daily even with just light usage.
Set Mum up with XP. She'll love it. And maybe she'll even bake you some cookies to munch on while you work.
Yup. PowerPC was derived from the POWER architecture; this page: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-po whist/ gives all the details. (My favorite: the PowerPC can run in either big-endian or little-endian mode - although every use I've heard of runs it in big-endian mode.)
Funny thing is... Slashdot was more reliable back in the days when they were handing out those 4-digit IDs. I don't think I've ever seen it is flaky as it's been the past couple of weeks... with the possible exception of the times they were hit by DoS attacks. I'd assume that this was another attack, except for that recent upgrade. New servers? New version of Slash? Sounds like good old-fashioned upgraditis to me.
My Sony Vaio Z1WA with Centrino gets great battery life so long as I don't set the display too bright. With the 802.11g enabled, and display set to minimum brightness, I probably get three to four hours. The problem is that minimum brightness is unreadably dim unless you're sitting in the dark. At a more readable level, like 50% brightness, battery life probably suffers by about an hour. Set it to full brightness, and you might get 1.5 to 2 hours. Not bad for a laptop that weighs just about five pounds.
Ever since that upgrade a couple of weeks ago, Slashdot has been reallllly flaky. Of course, there's the dreaded 503 error we've all (?) been seeing several times a day. Then there's this article, the one this comment is attached to: appeared on the home page, but for the first couple of minutes afterward, I got nothing but "Nothing to see here. Move along". What's the secret forum ID to see the discussion of what the @#$! is going on at Slashdot? Anybody got a clue?
Sontag: How long before we're declared losers can we expect a buyout offer?
Tibbits: Seventeen days.
McBride: Seventeen days? Look man, I don't wanna rain on your parade, but we're not gonna last seventeen hours! Those things are gonna come in here just like they did before. And they're gonna come in here...
Sontag: MCBRIDE!
McBride:...and they're gonna come in here AND THEY'RE GONNA KILL US!
Re:Pronounced with a short "I"
on
Primer
·
· Score: 1
And, taking a second look at the m-w.com listing, I think maybe I've interpreted their pronunciation guide backwards. It's not clear whether they mean "'pri-m&r, chiefly British" or "chiefly British: 'prI-m&r". Whatever. I'll take your word for it, mate.
Re:Pronounced with a short "I"
on
Primer
·
· Score: 1
Dunno where you got your info about the 'small I' from...
I thought that, for a book if introduction, the short 'i' was the universal pronunciation, but Merriam-Webster agrees with the original poster, that the short 'i' is the British pronunciation.
OT, but the actauly lyric is "In Birmingham, they love the Gov'ner - Blue, Blue..." Which was the nickname of the govener of Burmingham at the time. It caused quite a stir at the time as people also heard "Boo Boo" and were confused as Lynyrd Skynyrd was a supporter of said Gov.
Where to begin? Here are the facts:
Actually, it is "boo, boo, boo", as many written accounts of Ronnie Van Zant and the song have long established. I misquoted it the way I hear it - I guess my ears just don't register the "b", and although I "know" better, I still sing "hoo, hoo, hoo" when I hear it.
The line refers to George Wallace, who was governor of the state of Alabama, not of Birmingham. Birmingham is a city in Jefferson County, AL, and has a mayor not a governor.
George Wallace never had the nickname "Blue". I've read that early in his career he was called the Fighting Judge, or the Little Fighter, but never Blue.
Now my interpretation of the line about Birmingham loving the Gov'nor:
It was a sarcastic remark. Wallace was a racist and avowed segregationist. Birmingham had the largest black population in the state. Hence the sarcasm: in Birmingham they love the governor? Not damn likely. The "Boo! Boo! Boo!" part is Van Zant jeering the governor. Zan Zant and the band never supported George Wallace.
At the time Sweet Home Alabama was written, Wallace had never carried Jefferson County in an election. It was rumored that he punished Birmingham by, among other things, withholding federal highway money from the county, and sending it elsewhere in the state. As governor, Wallace got to direct how federal highway funds were spent, and it is a fact that I-65 through Birmingham was the last stretch of interstate highway to be built in Alabama, long after the rest of the state's interstates had been finished.
Wallace's cronies in Montgomery, the state capitol, might have loved him, but not the people of Birmingham. At least not until the "new and improved" George Wallace came along, but that's another story...
dobbsg@dot.state.al.us - George Dobbs, the Solitaire King
bowlinp@dot.state.al.us - Paul Bowlin, the head of the ROW Bureau, who thinks George's work ethic is above reproach.
aldotinfo@dot.state.al.us - E-mail address for ALDOT, apparently the only published address through which ALDOT director Joe McInnes (who signed the termination letter) can be reached.
governorbobriley@governor.state.al.us - "In Birmingham, they love the gov'nor - Hoo Hoo..."
Drop these folks a line, let 'em know what you think. "Now we all did what we could do..."
Factors that affect tides are the moon's distance from the earth, and its alignment relative to the sun. Tides are higher when the moon is at perigee (when its orbit brings it closest to the earth). Tides are also higher when the sun, moon, and earth align with the sun and moon on the same side of earth. The gravitational forces due to sun and moon add up to produce higher tides. The latter affect would occur at new moon; don't know if the former has any relationship to the lunar phases. Neither affect would have any relationship to "blue moons", which are an artifact of our calendar.
The lunar cycle is 29.5 days long on average, not 28. That gives about 12.4 full moons per year, on average.
I don't know how infoplease.com counted blue moons to get 17 in the next twenty years, unless it was counting both the 2nd-in-a-month and the 4th-in-a-season varieties. Ask this blue moon calculator to list the blue moons between 2004 and 2024, and it lists nine of them (of the 2nd-in-a-month kind).
I definitely wouldn't run the LaCie as a primary disk. It runs way too hot for my taste. As a backup, though, they're great. I do video editing, too, and for that I just set up an internal RAID-0 set of two 200GB SATA disks. (Seagates - I just bought 'em so I get the five-year warranty.) Because this array is "scratch" or working space, and contains no permanent data, I don't back it up. When I finish a DVD, though, I make several copies of the DVD.
Actually, that's exactly what this thread is talking about. Here's how it started: "Losing $100K of data through a hole in your backup strategy is a injury that will not be healed by the replacement of a $175 disk drive..." A backup strategy has to be about more than disk drives failing, because guess what, Sherlock, other bad things can happen to your data! Do you have a clue, yet, Sherlock, or have you still got your head stuck up my goat's ass?
My RAID-5 is not an impressive setup. Basically, it was a way to glue together a couple of 200GB drives with some older drives to get a little redundancy. It's not a high-performance array, but it doesn't need to be because I access it across the network, via NFS or Samba.
I have a 80GB drive and a 120GB drive in linear as a 200GB/dev/md0. That, plus a pair of 200GB drives form/dev/md1, a RAID-5 array - three "drives" for a total of 400GB. I haven't tried RAID0+1; I figure single redundancy is good enough.
The RAID-5 array hasn't been in use long enough for me to get a feel for whether I like it or not; I've only been using it a couple of weeks. I guess whether I like it is going to depend on how much trouble it gives me, aside from disk failures.
I back up onto a LaCie 500GB "BigDisk". Expensive, as compared to a pair of 250GB bare disk drives, but I like the portability. Every other month I make a full backup (which will be easier now that I have merged all my other disks into that RAID-5 array). Then I take the LaCie to work and lock it in my desk: offsite backup.
DVDs aren't an acceptable solution. It takes too many disks to back up a few hundred gigabytes. Backups should be quick and easy, so you're never tempted to skip one. Copying hundreds of gigs of data isn't fast even to hard drives, but at least with the LaCie it's easy, and there's no media to change.
Not all value is monetary. I make backups, and offsite backups of my six years of digital photos. They are priceless to me. I also have them on a RAID-5 array. I don't have enough offsite storage to back up all my data, so I pick and choose what goes to backup - and my digital photos are part of the backup. A RAID-5 array is wonderful, but it's not a complete backup strategy. I'm just saying "Don't kid yourself." Because some people will.
RAID is not a backup strategy. It's a tactic to protect against single-disk failures, but it's not a backup strategy. RAID won't protect you from an rm -rf * in the wrong directory. RAID won't save your data if a fire burns down your house or office. RAID won't help you if someone breaks in an steals all you computer equipment. RAID may be part of your strategy, but shouldn't be the whole thing. If your data is truly valuable, have a backup and have an offsite backup.
Some people say that a longer warranty indicates that the drive is better made, and will last longer. That's the optimistic point of view.
On the other hand, maybe Seagate believes that most people outgrow their disk drives (or the computers they're in) in just three years anyway. Then it wouldn't cost them much to extend the warranty to five years, and it gives them a new marketing ploy. That's the pragmatic point of view.
Or, as the article suggests, maybe Seagate knows they won't be around in five years anyway. That's the cynical point of view.
I just bought a pair of 200GB SATA drives, so I'll stick with the optimistic point of view. You choose yours.
As for the worth of the data vs the worth of the drive: absolutely. You must have a good backup strategy. And no, a RAID-5 array is not a backup strategy. Not a very good one anyway.
Seagate was already offering 3-year warranties on their disk drives. In fact, several different drive makers are offering 3-year warranties... don't recall which ones, but when I was shopping for a 200GB SATA drive just a week ago, they all had 3-year warranties.
I also verified my warranty by doing a serial-number -> warranty query at the Seagate web site after I had the drives in hand.
Five years? Great! (Especially since the Promise RAID-0 controller I'm using with Windoze doesn't spin down the disks when idle.) Looks like I picked the right disk drive at the right time.
Slashdot Mirror
Realize that it's not the *music* that's doing the iPod compatibility here. Real has their own DRM. What they do is to convert the music to be similar to Apple's DRM at the time that you transfer it to the iPod.
No, I didn't realize that. So I won't have to redownload anything from Real, but after I update my Real software, I will have to transfer my songs to the iPod again - so they can be re-DRM'ed to look like Apple's DRM. Still a pain.
And there's still uncertainty. Hypothetical scenario: next year Real decides it isn't going to make money off of its music store, shuts it down, and stops reverse-engineering Apple's DRM updates. The year after that, Apple releases firmware v5.2, which once again breaks Harmony, but also adds some wicked-cool feature I want. Now I've got to choose between my Real tunes and the new feature.
In other words, even if Real can always make their tunes compatible, that doesn't always mean they will.
Let's say I accept the assertion that Real can always work around any changes that Apple makes to the iPod's DRM software. That's not the end of the story. How often will this happen? With every firmware/itunes update, will I have to do "something" to my Real-supplied music to make it compatible again? How much mojo will I have to go through to accomplish this? Will I have to re-download every Real tune I own to make it compatible again?
I have a lot of uncertainty and doubt over how complicated this little dance will become - and thus a lot of fear of purchasing Real's music. FUD is not always a bad thing - sometimes it is justified and can keep you out of trouble. I like the fact that Real wants onto the iPod, but for now I'll just wait and see.
BTW, Apple keeps reciting this mantra that the purpose of the ITMS is to sell iPods, not to make money off of music. If this is the case, then why do they fear Real getting onto the iPod? If the net profit from selling music is so small, then they have little to lose, but much to gain in terms of more firmly establishing the iPod's dominance in the portable music market.
My hunch is that Apple does expect - one day - for the ITMS to be a cash cow, even if for now its main purpose is to promote the iPod. That's the only explanation I can see, aside from Jobs's pigheadedness, for wanting to keep the Reals of the world off the iPod.
Mum's computer doesn't have enough horsepower to run XP, but it does have enough horsepower to run all the viruses and spyware that she will accumulate? That sounds like false economy to me.
Anyway, I think your Mum's computer will run XP just fine with a few tweaks. Turn off all the visual effects, every one of them. And tell Mum not to turn them on again. Turn off unnecessary services (there are a bunch) and don't tell Mum how to turn them on again. Tweaking the services may take you a few hours (don't let Mum do it - do it for her), but in the end XP will run just fine. There are lots of XP-tuning sites out there that will give you loads of other advice - like turning of fast-user switching if Mum shares her computer - seek out those sites and heed their advice.
I have an old 433MHz PII-Celeron laptop with just 128MB of memory, and it runs XP just fine. It's not the fastest computer in the world, but for things like email, web browsing, and occasional Word processing, it does just fine. And it's far more stable than 98, which would crash daily even with just light usage.
Set Mum up with XP. She'll love it. And maybe she'll even bake you some cookies to munch on while you work.
Who on the world has 3GHz processor in his desktop computer? Certainly not me, not my friends or relatives, nor even my boss, who has 2.4GHz.
Perhaps they're looking down the road. When Dirac is deployed, a 3GHz processor might be the norm. (By then your boss will have a 4GHz processor.)
Yup. PowerPC was derived from the POWER architecture; this page: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-po whist/ gives all the details. (My favorite: the PowerPC can run in either big-endian or little-endian mode - although every use I've heard of runs it in big-endian mode.)
Funny thing is... Slashdot was more reliable back in the days when they were handing out those 4-digit IDs. I don't think I've ever seen it is flaky as it's been the past couple of weeks... with the possible exception of the times they were hit by DoS attacks. I'd assume that this was another attack, except for that recent upgrade. New servers? New version of Slash? Sounds like good old-fashioned upgraditis to me.
My Sony Vaio Z1WA with Centrino gets great battery life so long as I don't set the display too bright. With the 802.11g enabled, and display set to minimum brightness, I probably get three to four hours. The problem is that minimum brightness is unreadably dim unless you're sitting in the dark. At a more readable level, like 50% brightness, battery life probably suffers by about an hour. Set it to full brightness, and you might get 1.5 to 2 hours. Not bad for a laptop that weighs just about five pounds.
Ever since that upgrade a couple of weeks ago, Slashdot has been reallllly flaky. Of course, there's the dreaded 503 error we've all (?) been seeing several times a day. Then there's this article, the one this comment is attached to: appeared on the home page, but for the first couple of minutes afterward, I got nothing but "Nothing to see here. Move along". What's the secret forum ID to see the discussion of what the @#$! is going on at Slashdot? Anybody got a clue?
Sontag: How long before we're declared losers can we expect a buyout offer?
...and they're gonna come in here AND THEY'RE GONNA KILL US!
Tibbits: Seventeen days.
McBride: Seventeen days? Look man, I don't wanna rain on your parade, but we're not gonna last seventeen hours! Those things are gonna come in here just like they did before. And they're gonna come in here...
Sontag: MCBRIDE!
McBride:
And, taking a second look at the m-w.com listing, I think maybe I've interpreted their pronunciation guide backwards. It's not clear whether they mean "'pri-m&r, chiefly British" or "chiefly British: 'prI-m&r". Whatever. I'll take your word for it, mate.
Dunno where you got your info about the 'small I' from...
I thought that, for a book if introduction, the short 'i' was the universal pronunciation, but Merriam-Webster agrees with the original poster, that the short 'i' is the British pronunciation.
OT, but the actauly lyric is "In Birmingham, they love the Gov'ner - Blue, Blue..." Which was the nickname of the govener of Burmingham at the time. It caused quite a stir at the time as people also heard "Boo Boo" and were confused as Lynyrd Skynyrd was a supporter of said Gov.
Where to begin? Here are the facts:
Actually, it is "boo, boo, boo", as many written accounts of Ronnie Van Zant and the song have long established. I misquoted it the way I hear it - I guess my ears just don't register the "b", and although I "know" better, I still sing "hoo, hoo, hoo" when I hear it.
The line refers to George Wallace, who was governor of the state of Alabama, not of Birmingham. Birmingham is a city in Jefferson County, AL, and has a mayor not a governor.
George Wallace never had the nickname "Blue". I've read that early in his career he was called the Fighting Judge, or the Little Fighter, but never Blue.
Now my interpretation of the line about Birmingham loving the Gov'nor:
It was a sarcastic remark. Wallace was a racist and avowed segregationist. Birmingham had the largest black population in the state. Hence the sarcasm: in Birmingham they love the governor? Not damn likely. The "Boo! Boo! Boo!" part is Van Zant jeering the governor. Zan Zant and the band never supported George Wallace.
At the time Sweet Home Alabama was written, Wallace had never carried Jefferson County in an election. It was rumored that he punished Birmingham by, among other things, withholding federal highway money from the county, and sending it elsewhere in the state. As governor, Wallace got to direct how federal highway funds were spent, and it is a fact that I-65 through Birmingham was the last stretch of interstate highway to be built in Alabama, long after the rest of the state's interstates had been finished.
Wallace's cronies in Montgomery, the state capitol, might have loved him, but not the people of Birmingham. At least not until the "new and improved" George Wallace came along, but that's another story...
It's also got some good e-mail addresses:
dobbsg@dot.state.al.us - George Dobbs, the Solitaire King
bowlinp@dot.state.al.us - Paul Bowlin, the head of the ROW Bureau, who thinks George's work ethic is above reproach.
aldotinfo@dot.state.al.us - E-mail address for ALDOT, apparently the only published address through which ALDOT director Joe McInnes (who signed the termination letter) can be reached.
governorbobriley@governor.state.al.us - "In Birmingham, they love the gov'nor - Hoo Hoo..."
Drop these folks a line, let 'em know what you think. "Now we all did what we could do..."
Factors that affect tides are the moon's distance from the earth, and its alignment relative to the sun. Tides are higher when the moon is at perigee (when its orbit brings it closest to the earth). Tides are also higher when the sun, moon, and earth align with the sun and moon on the same side of earth. The gravitational forces due to sun and moon add up to produce higher tides. The latter affect would occur at new moon; don't know if the former has any relationship to the lunar phases. Neither affect would have any relationship to "blue moons", which are an artifact of our calendar.
We see a full moon every 28 days.
We see a full moon every 29.5 days on average. See this page for the computation and exact value of the synodic period.
The lunar cycle is 29.5 days long on average, not 28. That gives about 12.4 full moons per year, on average.
I don't know how infoplease.com counted blue moons to get 17 in the next twenty years, unless it was counting both the 2nd-in-a-month and the 4th-in-a-season varieties. Ask this blue moon calculator to list the blue moons between 2004 and 2024, and it lists nine of them (of the 2nd-in-a-month kind).
That's about every 2.2 years.
I definitely wouldn't run the LaCie as a primary disk. It runs way too hot for my taste. As a backup, though, they're great. I do video editing, too, and for that I just set up an internal RAID-0 set of two 200GB SATA disks. (Seagates - I just bought 'em so I get the five-year warranty.) Because this array is "scratch" or working space, and contains no permanent data, I don't back it up. When I finish a DVD, though, I make several copies of the DVD.
Two drives at once? I would suspect something else - a controller, a motherboard, or something like that.
Nobody is talking about backups...
Actually, that's exactly what this thread is talking about. Here's how it started: "Losing $100K of data through a hole in your backup strategy is a injury that will not be healed by the replacement of a $175 disk drive..." A backup strategy has to be about more than disk drives failing, because guess what, Sherlock, other bad things can happen to your data! Do you have a clue, yet, Sherlock, or have you still got your head stuck up my goat's ass?
My RAID-5 is not an impressive setup. Basically, it was a way to glue together a couple of 200GB drives with some older drives to get a little redundancy. It's not a high-performance array, but it doesn't need to be because I access it across the network, via NFS or Samba.
/dev/md0. That, plus a pair of 200GB drives form /dev/md1, a RAID-5 array - three "drives" for a total of 400GB. I haven't tried RAID0+1; I figure single redundancy is good enough.
I have a 80GB drive and a 120GB drive in linear as a 200GB
The RAID-5 array hasn't been in use long enough for me to get a feel for whether I like it or not; I've only been using it a couple of weeks. I guess whether I like it is going to depend on how much trouble it gives me, aside from disk failures.
I back up onto a LaCie 500GB "BigDisk". Expensive, as compared to a pair of 250GB bare disk drives, but I like the portability. Every other month I make a full backup (which will be easier now that I have merged all my other disks into that RAID-5 array). Then I take the LaCie to work and lock it in my desk: offsite backup.
DVDs aren't an acceptable solution. It takes too many disks to back up a few hundred gigabytes. Backups should be quick and easy, so you're never tempted to skip one. Copying hundreds of gigs of data isn't fast even to hard drives, but at least with the LaCie it's easy, and there's no media to change.
Not all value is monetary. I make backups, and offsite backups of my six years of digital photos. They are priceless to me. I also have them on a RAID-5 array. I don't have enough offsite storage to back up all my data, so I pick and choose what goes to backup - and my digital photos are part of the backup. A RAID-5 array is wonderful, but it's not a complete backup strategy. I'm just saying "Don't kid yourself." Because some people will.
What he said was "Backups, if you can".
What I'm saying is "Backups: you must".
See the diff? Good, 'cause now I got to go rope me some goats.
RAID is not a backup strategy. It's a tactic to protect against single-disk failures, but it's not a backup strategy. RAID won't protect you from an rm -rf * in the wrong directory. RAID won't save your data if a fire burns down your house or office. RAID won't help you if someone breaks in an steals all you computer equipment. RAID may be part of your strategy, but shouldn't be the whole thing. If your data is truly valuable, have a backup and have an offsite backup.
Who cares about the warranty anyways?
Some people say that a longer warranty indicates that the drive is better made, and will last longer. That's the optimistic point of view.
On the other hand, maybe Seagate believes that most people outgrow their disk drives (or the computers they're in) in just three years anyway. Then it wouldn't cost them much to extend the warranty to five years, and it gives them a new marketing ploy. That's the pragmatic point of view.
Or, as the article suggests, maybe Seagate knows they won't be around in five years anyway. That's the cynical point of view.
I just bought a pair of 200GB SATA drives, so I'll stick with the optimistic point of view. You choose yours.
As for the worth of the data vs the worth of the drive: absolutely. You must have a good backup strategy. And no, a RAID-5 array is not a backup strategy. Not a very good one anyway.
3 years sounds more reasonable to me.
Seagate was already offering 3-year warranties on their disk drives. In fact, several different drive makers are offering 3-year warranties... don't recall which ones, but when I was shopping for a 200GB SATA drive just a week ago, they all had 3-year warranties.
I also verified my warranty by doing a serial-number -> warranty query at the Seagate web site after I had the drives in hand.
Five years? Great! (Especially since the Promise RAID-0 controller I'm using with Windoze doesn't spin down the disks when idle.) Looks like I picked the right disk drive at the right time.