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

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.

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…….

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

“Fresh from its ad featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld eating churros and discussing shoes, Microsoft has introduced a new advertisement in which the aging former CEO and comedian take up residence with a family, causing infighting and malicious plots by the family members. Although the ad does not mention Microsoft’s operating system directly, it does mirror the real world experience of the company’s products — appearing where not wanted, hard to remove, causing administration headaches, and finally being forced out in hopes of getting one’s living space back.”

What the hell is Microsoft trying to do? They are not sending any good message at all.

The first ad only works for those people who can see the subtlety (and those are more likely to be using Macs anyways). This second one is utter rubbish in my book. The poster above says it all.

Come on Bill if you wanna have clicky ads - dump Seinfeld!

Advert 1
Advert 2

They are offering a course in JEDI! I hope the examiner has a strong mind (unsuspecting to Jedi mind tricks)!

LINK

Anandtech have managed to perform a basic review on the new architecture with samples. Read up on this here.

How will this affect the Mac lineup? Who knows - I for one am not a tradtional Mac Rumor-monger, butI will say that interesting times are ahead.

As for AMD? well they really need to pull there engineering socks up if they are to remain competetive in the comming years.

Photos

There are a lot of pics and the ones I have put up are in their original form (no cropping or adjustments).

The wedding was fantastic. They even played the Godfather love theme at the reception and with my brothers and cousins in their suits it felt totally authentic.

Heres to Sophie and Taher - many years of happy times ahead.. I love you guys

Its a good feeling using open source software. I think that Open Office is now mature enough to be a direct replacement for the M$ Office suite.

On another note I have also got Ubuntu running happily on the Mac Book air. The Wifi was the only headache here, but once that was done its all good. I am using Beryl for a window managerand it performs well on the intergrated X3100 chipset.

Download Open Office org beta here

Watch this space for more news……….

At 6 weeks old she is tiny and cute. Custard does not share that view however. He has given her several slaps already and as the week goes on I am sure she will get thumped a few more times before he accepts her.

Here is a piccy;