Originally posted by shaff:

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http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-011-HO
http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-010-HO

what does everyone think about these two monitors, both a hell alot cheaper than the dell equivelent

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Originally posted by omegaman7:

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He says that he tried the computer on 2 other screens. I'm at a loss. I really don't like making house calls either...

Hey guys, my buddy asked me about a new game, that is like sim city? Simulation towns and what not. Any ideas what that might be?

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Originally posted by DXR:

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Sims are a dime a dozen so i haven't the slightest.

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Originally posted by Sam:

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Cities XL?

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Originally posted by harvrdguy:

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Originally posted by DXR:

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Sims are a dime a dozen so i haven't the slightest.

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Are we to take it, DXR, that you are not quite as interested as Kevin?

Originally posted by Sam:

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Cities XL?

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At least Sam tries to help out. LOL

For another topic you guys won't be interested in, I have to take you back to our discussion of August - August 2009 to be exact, page 179 of this forum - that's right!

RAID!!!


Back then Sam had was known to have said "Raid 6 eats Raid 5 for lunch!"

Sam had a buddy with Raid 6, eight 1.5 terrabyte Seagate 7200 drives regular non-enterprise desktop drives, which gave him 8-2 = 6 X 1.5 = 9 terrabytes of data - BIG!

Isn't that right, Sam. Is that Raid still working out for your friend? Which controller card is he using if you know?

Raid has come up again, not for me personally, but for a family member who is quite involved in gaming, and who was nice enough to let me "borrow" what is now my current gaming rig, the 9450 with 8800gtx, which is helping me play all my games at 4xAA 2560x1600 (except Far Cry 2 and Crysis and Warhead which are still sitting on the shelf.)

I got an urgent email from him, saying "Help!"

He explained, "My photo and video family server with my child's stuff, won't boot up, and worse, synch toy erased recent backup when it couldn't find the files on the non-booting server, right after I had deleted 20,000 files on the laptop. I deleted thinking I had the stuff backed up twice!"

I told him that "synch toy" sounded more like "synch monster."





Never did any video game that he helped create ever cause him so much anxiety and stress than that event!! Fortunately, in a non-stop project that spanned the next several days, he undeleted almost all of the 25000 files from the laptop, including many duplicates, with the help of undelete and duplicate-find freeware from Cnet. (The laptop had been only very lightly used after his major deletion, so not much was lost.) Whew!!! Poor guy! The last birthday party, they brought Alice in Wonderland in to entertain the little kids and do face-painting for them - all those photos had almost been wiped out! Talk about stress!!!


(His artistic talents are in another dimension - I can just barely draw stick figures. But I'm a little bit more tech savvy. He wants me to get his XP server working again, the way I got his broken 9450 rig going. I might have to find some registry hives using Recovery Console or whatever, if registry is the problem, or just re-install xp, or maybe windows 7, if the bootup disk is bad. His data, that he has mostly now recovered, is on the non-bootup D drive, and he hopes it is intact.

I am SOOO used to XP registry problems lately, for me and other family on laptops that crashed due to virus invasions (before we picked up spyware doctor - highly recommended.) But just the other day, in my game tools folder, I rediscovered a program that I had found years ago called ERUNT, emergency recovery utility for NT, written by Lars Hegland, recommended by Tweak Guides, that allows you to backup the xp registry hives into a dated folder, then replace them later with an executable while xp is running, or with a batch file in Recovery Console, if you can't start xp at all. I had to mess with the 5 registry hives recently, default, sam, security, software, and system, and now I wish I hadn't forgotten about this program, and that I had been using it all along. Duhhh. It is way better than relying on System Restore, which is problematic - we had to undo several restores after things got messed up - and which of course doesn't help if xp won't run.


Anyway, so I said, "Yeah I'll come up and fix it."

Then I said "Put Raid 6 in your server." "Raid 6" he asked? "Yes - for you, one terrabyte is a lot of space, since you only add about 20-30 gigs worth of new stuff a year. So get a four-port Raid 6 hardware controller card, expand to four drives instead of two, at only $55 a drive, in fact I have two brand new ones I can give you so that will make four, and at 500 gigs a drive, your server will provide 1 terrabyte of data capacity, with backup, and double fault tolerance operation capable of losing half your drives, with no loss of data!"

"Then, every three months or so, back up the whole array onto a $100 one terrabyte 2.5" external hard drive, that you keep turned off in a cabinet drawer somewhere." I was thinking about the Costco drive one of my brothers had just told me about that he picked up for his video collection.

What does anybody think of that?

From the picture up above, here's one of them.




The battery backup for the 256MB (expandable to 1 gig) write cache, is $129 more. The write cache solves the slowdown with Raid 6 on write, giving lightning fast write response - but for full raid safety, the battery will keep the cache powered and shut down the drives in case of computer power loss.


By the way, if you guys think this is all overkill, his wife spends several hours every day going through photos, editing them, going through videos, editing them also. That is a big hobby of hers. So his database server needs to be up every day taking care of business.

Sure, I know people will say - oh come on, just some kind of simple manual backup. But what about the advantages of a Raid 6 for dramatically increasing speed speed and availability? She'll have four drive heads working for her, not just one. He was thinking, himself, of just the manual backup idea. He is of course going to junk synch toy and keep his main external backup turned off all the time.

But to develop a systematic backup plan, mess with it, spend time on implementing it, plan the backups, take the server off-line, blah blah blah. My thought is - "For crying out loud - don't be so cheap. Look what just happened!! Thank god you didn't lose all that irreplaceable data! Spend the money one time on a decent hardware controller, and you'll be set for the next 10 years until the kid is in college!" Do you guys agree with me, or not?

Or like DXR will probably say, "Raid controllers are a dime a dozen so who gives a sh*t!"

Hahahahahaha

Rich

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