November, 2008

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Seagate enforcing religious views in forum:

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

I posted this below on the Seagate forum (after a mod edited my post) and now they have deleted my post. >>>>

I had a post in this thread ‘edited’ by an over zelous moderator for using the letters o. m and g together…..

I wrote back to him and asked why this was offensive enough for a moderator to censor it and got the following reply today:

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Hi Rachel:

I am sure you know what those letters refer to, and it is offensive. Please remember that there are many different people and kinds of people, with different convictions, who participate in this forum. Speaking personally, it is also offensive to me, and part of my job is to make this forum a welcome place for all comers.

At any rate, such is not tolerate. We do not tolerate explicit profanity nor obvious euphemisms for it.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best Regards,

AlanM
Moderator
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My reply to AlanM below

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Alan

I dont know what you think o m g means but here (and in the rest of the english speaking world) it means oh my gosh and is an expression of frustration and/or surprise. The reason it is commonly written as a three letter acronym is that it can be taken to mean ‘oh my gosh’ or ‘oh my god’. In this manner it it the reader who chooses to take offence at an innocent comment if thy misinterpret it as being against religious beliefs. I, however, do not find ‘Oh My Gosh’ to be offensive and personally think anyone censoring this to have an alterior motive.

It certainly does not come under the term ‘explicit profanity nor obvious euphemis’

Please can you refer me to the part of your forum rules where it states that moderators acting for Seagate are mandated to prevent free speech and enforce their own religious convictions by interpreting users comments?

I find this blatant disregard form my right to free speach insulting and degrading.

I would like an apology for your outrageous treatment of my comments.

Rachel (AKA AngryBunny)
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I am thinking this is appalling behaviour. It is rare for me to ever comment on a moderator, and worse have to post t. I feel very strongly about this and am so utterly disgusted with the Seagate levels of customer support.

Now I am going to post this and slashdot it.

Posted in Computing, Ranting | No Responses »

Seagate 1.5TB ST31500341AS Lemons

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

I purchased five Seagate ST31500341AS disks to replace the four Hitachi 1TB units in my Synology NAS as it is near full.

Well problems galore with the ST31500341AS. THey seem to have a problem when flushing their write cache causing freezes of 20-30 seconds. This (at best) causes streaming files to stall and (at worst) causes some arrays to believe the disk has failed and eject it from the array. (Drobo units seem to suffer most).

After many heated conversations with Seagate US and many emails and forum posts - they have finally owned up that these ST31500341AS series disks with SD17 (and 15/16 I think) firmware do have a problem. Some users have SD35 and are reporting no evidence of the freezing problems.

My main concerns are that 1) Seagate denied the existence of any firmware other than SD17 on the telephone to me (despite my emailing them screenshots of SD35) and that b) and much worse they are trying to state that these disks are not suited to RAID5. They say ‘Desktop RAID’ is the only RAID these are supported in!!! What a load of baloney.

At least they have acknowledged the issue and have promised a firware patch.

To add insult to injury - Seagate have migrated their support system and have managed to lock (or possibly lose) my account. The guys on telsupport tried to help but they cannot trace my account in their new system

I do hope this isnt a sign that Seagate is losing the plot…….

Posted in Computing | No Responses »

OpenSolaris 2008.11

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Well I decided to try Open Solaris (build 11).

WOW is all I have to say. I only wanted to mess around with zfs (am thinking of building a new dedicated file server).

The install is flawless (on the old test box - Intel Allendale 2.13GHz, 2GB Ram NV7300 on a 160GB Seagate).

I have been playing with zfs using four seagate 7200.11 1.5TB Drives on the mobo controller (booting the 160 off a Sil3114), and its so simple. Building and rebuilding Raid-z (like RAID5) arrays is a piece of cake. so quick and none of the annoying continuity checks.

Read performance via nfs is topping out at 95MB/s and seems to average 85MB/s (with 350MB+ files). Write speed seems constant at 35MB/s (but I think it will do better as my Mac seems to perform poorly with nfs writes).

The zpool and zfs tools are lovely (simple yet powerful) and I love the hierachal pool system.

I reccomend trying Open Solaris if you are looking for a server OS (or a workstation as its using gnome now thankfully saying goodbye to the old window manager which I hated).

Link to OpenSolaris Homepage