Author: Dave Farquhar

What brand of hard drive should I buy?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

LinuxWorld posted an article today on how to install another hard disk in Linux. The guide’s pretty good from the software side.
The advice is slightly questionable from the hardware side. Author Joe Barr states that it doesn’t matter which connector on the cable you use, as long as one drive is jumpered master and one drive is slave. For years that was true, but you’re actually supposed to put the master on the end and the slave in the middle. Usually it doesn’t matter. But the newer your drive is, and the newer your controller is, and the longer your cable is, the more likely it is to matter. You also shouldn’t attach a drive to the middle and leave the top connector hanging. Again, you can usually get away with it–and people have gotten away with it for more than a decade–but the likelihood of not getting away with it increases with every passing day, as hard drives get faster and faster, and thus more and more touchy.

What happens when you do it wrong? Usually it works anyway. Sometimes it’ll be flaky. And sometimes it won’t work at all. Don’t you love predictability? So it’s really best to follow the rules unless the layout of your case makes that impossible.

But the main reason I’m writing is because the usual expected flamewar erupted in the discussion thread. Barr bought a Western Digital drive. Predictably, someone responded that Western Digitals are junk. Then someone responded to the response and said Maxtors are junk but Seagates are good. Then someone responded to the response to the response and said Seagates used to be junk. Before you knew it, every brand of hard drive on the market–IBM, Samsung, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital–had been trashed. Curiously, except for Fujitsu. But Fujitsu recently had a big scandal with a failure rate on one particular model of drive higher than 90 percent. (Meanwhile, my own experience tells me Fujitsu SCSI drives are fantastic.) And lately, Samsung drives have been getting praise all over the place. So what gives?

The problem with these statements is there’s a degree of truth to all of them. There was a time when Maxtor hard drives were the worst thing you could buy. Ever heard this joke? Fast, reliable, and cheap: Pick two. Well, in the early to mid-’90s, Maxtors weren’t fast, they weren’t reliable, and they weren’t consistently any cheaper than any other brand. The only reason to buy them was because the familiar red boxes were everywhere. The only place you couldn’t buy them was the corner gas station. Well, in St. Louis at least.

During the same time frame, Seagate had similar troubles. Their drives were expensive, but they weren’t fast. I didn’t see enough of them to get any kind of handle on reliability because I was so turned off by their price and underachieving performance that I wouldn’t go near them, and neither would anyone else I knew.

In the mid to late ’90s, it was Western Digital’s turn to go 0 for 3 on fast, reliable, and cheap. From 1997 to about 2000, I saw more dead Western Digitals than every other brand, combined. And I saw a lot of drives come across my desk.

With its GXP series a couple of years ago, IBM had the fastest drives on the market, and they were also among the cheapest. But they were exceedingly touchy, and became notorious for premature failure.

I bought a handful of Samsung drives over the years, never willingly, because of their terrible reputation. They’ve been reliable. And when you look at reviews of their recent drives, they run cool and they’re reasonably fast. They’re not necessarily the fastest on the market at any given time, but they may very well be the best combination of fast, reliable, and cheap right now.

I’ve been around long enough and seen enough that every time I see unqualified statements like “Western Digital drives are junk,” or “Maxtor drives are junk,” or “Seagate and Maxtor drives are the best,” whether it’s from some end user in a discussion forum or a professional hardware reviewer, I get suspicious. The end user is probably basing those conclusions on a too-small sample size, and the professional reviewer probably isn’t doing the necessary homework.

Let me tell you why.

We know how to build a completely reliable hard drive, one that will run for 10 years and never have problems. But it would cost too much money, its capacity would be too small, and it would be too slow. The technology in hard drives changes with each generation, and the company with the best technology is generally the one that produces the most reliable drives. But the most advanced technology isn’t always the best technology, as IBM found out with its GXPs. The GXPs were too far ahead of their time.

It should come as no surprise that when Maxtor was producing junk drives, they weren’t in very good shape financially. There wasn’t much money for R&D. When Maxtor’s financial situation improved, its R&D improved, and its drives became faster and more reliable.

There was a time when someone could ask me what hard drive to buy and I could give them a brand and model number that would give them the best combination of fast, reliable and cheap. But my newest computer at home was built in the summer of 2001 and I very rarely work on desktop systems anymore–I’m a server guy these days, and I have been for the past 18 months. If I’m honest with myself and with the person asking the question, a lot can change in 18 months. In 2001, as far as I could tell, the best drive to buy was a Maxtor and the worst to buy was a Western Digital.

I can go with my old prejudices and continue to dispense that advice indefinitely. But there was a time when that was reversed. And what about Samsung? They’re quiet and they run cool, which is a good sign, they’re very affordable, and while they’re almost never the fastest, they never get blown out of the water by benchmarks.

The best thing to do is to talk with someone who actually works with the equipment on a regular basis, and in large volumes. I want the opinions of someone who speaks from recent knowledge and experience, not someone speaking from old prejudices or a gravy train of free hardware. That means I’d call up a couple of former coworkers who still do some desktop support, or who at least handle the RMAs for subordinates who do desktop support. I’d ask them whose drives have been failing the most lately, and if they notice much performance difference between brands. Benchmarks are more precise, but they can also be fooled. If you can’t notice the difference in the real world I really don’t care about it. If you do notice the difference, I don’t care much about percentages. It’s subjective, but as long as I trust the people whose opinions I’m soliciting, that doesn’t matter much to me.

And after talking to a couple of people who actually handle a few drives a week, I’d go plunk down my cash.

Linux gets more attractive on the Xbox

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , ,

There’s been another milestone in getting Linux running on Microsoft’s Xbox game console. It’s now possible to get it going if you bridge a couple of solder points on the motherboard to enable flashing the unit’s BIOS, then you use the James Bond 007 game and a save game that exploits a buffer overflow, and with a few more tricks, you can unlock the hard drive, put it in a Linux PC, install Linux, then move the drive back to the Xbox and turn it into a cheap Linux box.

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This is a so-you-know-I’m-alive post

Dave Farquhar Baseball, Saving money , , , , , ,

I don’t expect my daily doings to be interesting to anyone. I mean, c’mon. Who wants to read ordinary? But since I haven’t posted in forever, I’ll post what I’ve got, which is this.I’m getting a lawnmower today. That’s good because I can’t get anyone to mow my itsy-bitsy yard for less than $25. For that kind of money, I’ll do it myself.

A friend is coming over this afternoon to help me install a programmable thermostat. That’s good because my utility bills are out of control. If I’d done it in December, I’d be about $400 richer right now. I’m also looking at some other creative ways to knock utility costs down, like compact fluorescent light bulbs, which use about 1/5 the wattage of a standard bulb and have about 10 times the life expectancy. They claim to save you about $30 in energy costs over their life expectancy. Multiply that by the 20 or so bulbs around the house that they’d be suitable replacements for, and you’re talking some real money.

My DSL connection has been sporadic the last couple of days. It seems to finally be stable. I’d get better reliability by upgrading to a static IP, but that won’t happen before summer. I’m still dealing with those unexpected expenses that creep up on new homeowners, and, well, I’m young. I don’t have the kind of resources someone 10 years older than me would have.

If I can find a steady writing gig, that’ll help.

I’ve got a couple of tape backup issues to look at for work. And that’s pretty much my day.

I wrote what I thought was a decent piece on bleeding-edge hardware. But somehow I managed not to save it. I may get time to rewrite it tomorrow, depending on how productive I am today.

Oh, and, tee hee hee, my Royals are 8-0. The last team that started the season 8-0 won the World Series. It was the 1990 Cincinnati Reds, who beat an awfully good Oakland Athletics team. And there’s reason for hope: The Royals have been doing it without Carlos Beltran (leg injury), and yesterday they won in spite of half the team battling the flu. Beltran and Mike Sweeney are the Royals’ only star players.

But the 1990 Reds only had two bona fide stars too, in Eric Davis and Barry Larkin.

Do I really think my Royals will win the World Series? Not yet. But I think this is going to be a fun year.

What needs to happen for Linux to make it on the desktop

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , ,

I saw an editorial at Freshmeat that argued that there’s actually too much software for Linux. And you know what? It has a point.
I’m sure some people will be taken aback by that. The number of titles that run under Windows must number into six digits, and it’s hard to walk into a computer store and buy Linux software.

But I agree with his argument, or at least most of it. Back in my Amiga days, the first thing people used to ask me was, “What, do you not like software?” Then I asked why they felt the need to have their choice of 10 different word processors, especially when they’d just buy pirate Microsoft Word or WordPerfect anyway. (Let’s face it: Large numbers of people chose PCs in the early 90s over superior architectures was because they could pirate software from work. Not everyone. Maybe not even the majority. But a lot.) I argued that one competent software title in each category I needed was all I wanted or needed. And for the most part, the Amiga had that, and the software was usually cheaper than the Mac or PC equivalent.

Linux is the new Amiga. Mozilla is a far better Web browser than IE, and OpenOffice provides most of the functionality of Microsoft Office XP–it provides more functionality than most people use, and while it doesn’t always load the most complex MS Office documents correctly, it does a much better job of opening slightly corrupt documents and most people don’t create very complex documents anyway. But let’s face it: Its biggest problem is it takes an eternity to load no matter how fast your computer is. If it would load faster, people would be very happy with it.

But there is nothing that provides an equivalent to a simple database like Access or Filemaker. I know, they’re toys, and MySQL is far more powerful. But end users like dumb, brain-dead databases with clicky GUI interfaces on them that they can migrate to once they realize a spreadsheet isn’t intended to do what they’re trying to do with it. Everyone’s first spreadsheet is Excel. Then someday they realize Excel wasn’t intended to do what they’re using it for. But you don’t instantly dive into Oracle. You need something in between, and Linux doesn’t really have anything for that niche.

People are constantly asking me about a WYSIWYG HTML editor for Linux as well. I stumbled across one. Its name is GINF. Yes, another stupid recursive-acronym name. GINF stands for “GINF is not Frontpage.” How helpful. What’s wrong with a descriptive name like Webpage-edit?

More importantly, what was the first non-game application that caught your fancy? For most people I know, it was Print Shop, or one of the many knockoffs of Print Shop. People love to give and receive greeting cards, and when they can pick their own fonts and graphics and write their own messages, they love it even more. Not having to drive to the store and fork over $3.95 is just a bonus. Most IT professionals have no use for Print Shop, but Linux’s lack of alternatives in that department is hurting it.

Take a computer with a CPU on the brink of obsolesence, a so-so video chipset, 128 megs of RAM and the smallest hard drive on the market, preload Linux on it along with a fast word processor that works (AbiWord, or OpenOffice Writer, except it’s not fast), a nice e-mail client/PIM (Evolution), a nice Web browser (Mozilla), and a Print Shop equivalent (bzzzt!), and a couple of card games (check Freshmeat) and you’d have a computer for the masses.

The masses do not need 385 text editors. Sysadmin types will war over vi and emacs until the end of time; one or two simple text-mode editors as alternatives will suffice, and one or two equivalents of Notepad for X will suffice.

Linux’s day will eventually arrive regardless, if only because Microsoft is learning what every monopolist eventually learns: Predatory pricing stops working once you corner the market. Then you have to raise prices or find new markets. Eventually you run out of worthwhile markets. So in order to sustain growth, you have to raise prices. Microsoft is running out of markets, so it’s going to have to raise prices. Then it will be vulnerable again, just like Apple and CP/M were vulnerable to Microsoft because their offerings cost more than Microsoft was willing to charge. And, as Microsoft showed Netscape, you can’t undercut free.

But that day will arrive sooner if it doesn’t take a week to figure out the name of the Linux equivalent of Notepad because there are 385 icons that vaguely resemble a notepad and most of them have meaningless names.

A RAID array of floppies?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh ,

Dan Bowman sent me a link to instructions on setting up FDD RAID on OS X. That’s FDD, not HDD. Floppies.
This most definitely falls into the because-you-can category, if not the for-when-you’re-really-bored category. But it looks like somebody’s finally found a way to make floppies reasonably fast and reliable. So now who’s going to try it with Zips?

So far, 2003 looks like 1984, only better

Dave Farquhar Baseball

It’s supposed to be a rebuilding year. The Royals start their season with four young, inexperienced pitchers in their starting rotation and a neo-veteran lefty who’s languished for several years, brought in for a variety of reasons, none of which would do for most teams: He’s left-handed, he can throw some innings, he’s more experienced than the rest of the rotation, and there’s a slight chance this is the first time he’s gotten a fair shake. And they’ve started the season without their star center fielder.
Yep, that’s the Royals today.

Only it isn’t. I just described the 1984 Royals. Against all odds, they won their division and went on to the playoffs that year. They were steamrolled by the Detroit Tigers, but considering they were just hoping to finish the year at .500 and hit the next level in a year or two, just getting to the playoffs was an achievement.

While 2003 sounds eerily familiar, the 1984 Royals didn’t start their season 4-0.

I want to believe. I really do.

An irreverent look at April 4 in history

Dave Farquhar General

On this day in 1581, Sir Francis Drake finished his journey around the world. For his efforts, Queen Elizabeth received a message from the Spanish government, saying Drake was nothing more than a pirate who ought to be hanged. She didn’t take them up on the suggestion.
On this day in 1814, Napoleon abdicated his emperorship of France for the first time, defeated at the hand of an alliance between Great Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria. He was then made emperor of the island of Elba. Dissatisfied with the size of his new 120-square-mile empire, he was back in France by March 1, 1815. Napoleon’s enemies sent armies to stop him, but instead, those armies made him their leader, giving him 340,000 troops with which to return to Paris and set up rule again. His second reign was slightly less impressive than his first, lasting 100 days.

But the length of Napoleon’s second reign was impressive compared to that of William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison, the 9th president of the United States, who died on this day in 1841. His inauguration was a month earlier, and March 4, 1841 was a cold day. Harrison, against the advice of your mother and mine, refused to wear a coat and proceeded to give the longest inaugural address in American history, prattling on for two hours. His lack of brevity came at a high price, for he caught pneumonia and became the first American president to die in office. He also claimed the record for the shortest term ever served by an elected president.

If those aren’t the answers to enough trivia questions for you, Tippecanoe was also the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, forming the only grandfather-grandson combination to be president.

And on a somber note, it was on this day in 1968 that The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

An irreverent look at this day in history, April 3

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

In 1882, my fellow Missourian Jesse James was shot in the back of the head and killed by a man he’d recruited to help him rob a bank in Platte City. Rumors persist to this day that James faked his death, even though 1995 DNA analysis of the body buried in Kearney, Missouri under a headstone reading “Jesse James” proved 99.7% conclusive. A man named Frank Dalton died in Granbury, Texas at the age of 104 in 1951 and he claimed to his dying day that he was Jesse James. Dalton’s body was to be exhumed in 2000 for DNA analysis and the story was a media sensation that you might remember. You probably don’t remember the results, because a mismarked gravestone caused the body of a one-armed man who died in 1927 to be exhumed instead, and the body buried as “Jesse James, supposedly killed in 1882” has yet to be tested. Despite the 1995 tests, citizens of Gransbury and citizens of Kearney still argue over which of them has the real Jesse James.
In other news, Adolf Hitler, FDR, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis were last spotted playing cards together in Argentina.

In 1826, Boss Tweed was born. Tweed was the political boss of the Tammany Hall machine in New York City. Their motto: Vote early and often. Tweed’s downfall came when one of his own men felt he got shortchanged when the embezzled money was split up, so he ratted to the New York Times. Tweed was imprisoned twice, on criminal and then on civil charges. He escaped and fled to Spain in December 1875, only to be recognized (supposedly a series of famous political cartoons gave him away) and he was returned to New York, where he died in prison in 1878.

In 1783, Washington Irving was born. I’m sure you’ve read his Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow or seen at least one of the many movies or Scooby Doo episodes based on it.

In 1942 and 1944, singers Wayne Newton and Tony Orlando, respectively, were born. Branson, Missouri would never be the same.

Maintaining a healthy distance

Dave Farquhar Personal

Yesterday we managed to back up our 40 or so NT servers without incident for the first time in years. OK, months. It seemed like years. It wasn’t that long ago that I nearly woke up my neighbors after receiving my fourth 2-am backup failure phone call that week. As I walked through the hallway to fire up the laptop and log in, I pounded the wall in frustration and screamed, “Just once, let me sleep through the night without bothering me. Just once!”
Microsoft is my least favorite software company and has been for years. But once I had to deal with Backup Exec on a daily–who am I kidding?–nightly basis, Veritas quickly rocketed past Network Associates and Adobe to get the #2 spot.

To anyone else struggling with Backup Exec, I offer this bit of advice: Tell the first PHB who comes around that you’d be working on it if you weren’t busy talking to him or her, then take your phone off the hook and deal with the problem one backup job at a time. Better yet, narrow it down to one directory at a time. Keep in mind that Backup Exec seems to subscribe to the domino theory–one failure causes eight. OK, two or three. And if Backup Exec is flagging jobs as failures because it can’t back up the DHCP database, then exclude the DHCP database. If you have to do a restore and that file’s gone, the OS will regenerate it. It’s easier to explain that to the PHBs than it is repeated failures. If they insist on 100% identical hot backups, tell them they’re going to have to swallow hard and buy you a SAN with snapshot capability. If they don’t have $50,000 laying around, I can come up with creative ways to get it–eliminating a layer or two of management would probably pay for several SANs–but I don’t know of a tactful way to say that.

If I seem a bit disconnected these days, I am. A few weeks ago I realized I was letting a Microsoft lackey from Utah with all the class of that thing you find behind a horse’s tail set my agenda. And I decided I wouldn’t let him set my agenda, or anyone else, for that matter. And I quit looking at my site statistics. And I haven’t even looked at comments since Saturday.

Daily hits are nice, and they’re great for the ego. But prime time for writing used to start around 9 pm. That also happens to be the time when my girlfriend can call me for free. So guess what budged? I’ll adjust eventually, but that’s not all that’s changed. A year ago, I’d ask myself several times a week what I was going to write about the next day. I never ask myself that question anymore. Nowadays I sit down and write when I’ve found something interesting, or I do what I’m doing now–force myself to sit down and write something, anything.

And of course, on the nights when she comes over or we go out, I don’t write anything.

So I’m not writing my best-ever content these days, but it’s because I have other priorities. That includes keeping the girlfriend happy, but truth be told, I’m at least as happy writing a Wikipedia entry as I’ve ever been writing stuff here. So a lot of energy that would normally go here goes elsewhere. Cracking the upper ranks of Technorati or another blogging community just isn’t high on my priority list anymore, if it ever was.

But I’m still in my 20s, and I’m still just as moody as I’ve ever been. Everything’s subject to change with as little notice as St. Louis weather patterns.

I know this will be interpreted as me saying I quit, so let me make one thing clear: I don’t quit. I may or may not write something tomorrow (I probably will). But if I don’t, I’ll be back later in the week. And I might even read comments that time.

Good thing: It’s baseball season. Better thing: My Royals won

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , ,

Every time I turn on the radio or go online, I hear about how the Bush Dictatorship has plunged us into another Vietnam or how I’m a redneck just like everyone else who ever voted Republican. And at work, I’m buried in Backup Exec problems, a program so bad that it continues to make me think its main purpose for being written was industrial sabotage.
Am I glad it’s baseball season? You betcha. I need a distraction. Take your pick: baseball or booze. I’ll take baseball. It’s cheaper and healthier.

So we’re 12 days into this war and it’s another Vietnam. People seem to have forgotten it took us 6 weeks to drive the madman out of Kuwait. Did we really expect him to roll over and play dead when we hit his mother country?

And for some reason people seem to think appeasement is the way to go. A little over 60 years ago, people said the same thing about a guy named Adolf Hitler. You might have heard of him. Neither man had any qualms about overrunning their neighbors or killing their own people. Fortunately for us, they have comparable technology.

But I’m either preaching to the choir or a redneck. So I don’t think I wanna talk about it.

The Royals, on the other hand, I’ll talk about. They shut out the Chicago White Sox 3-0. That doesn’t happen often. Shutouts are rare in Kansas City anymore, especially against pennant contenders. And on opening day. Nice. New rookie closer Mike MacDougal got the save. That’s a good sign, because for the past four years or so, a three-run lead has been an adventure. You couldn’t count on Roberto Hernandez or Ricky Bottalico to hold that lead. There was a time when you could count on Jeff Montgomery, but not in his final season. So it’s been 1998 since a three-run lead in the 9th was a given.

And they did it in front of a sellout crowd at home. And visions of 1985 danced in Dave’s head. I know it’s too early to believe. But I think I’m gonna anyway. When it comes to baseball, I’m hopeless. I’ll grasp at anything that looks like you can hold onto it.