Limited Posting

by Bryan

35 comments

1 Kryten42 { 09.19.13 at 5:08 pm }

Aha! 😀 Good luck m8. Have some fun. 🙂

I’ve been busy. I found a box that had some old archived CD’s (most from ’97-2001). So I decided to see if they were still readable, and copy them to my NAS (to eventually burn the whole lot onto a single BluRay! 😆 We’ve come a long way. 🙂

Amongst some of the data I found, were some documents I’d either forgotten about or thought were long lost. I found my old parts list for my brand new (back then) Pentium III (750 mHz) PC! It had 3 30 GiB IBM Deskstar 75GXP HD’s in it (and they worked for 3 years without trouble. The “Deathstar”nickname came primarily from the 45 GiB drive). I tried several drives over the next couple years from Seagate, Quantum, WD, Samsung… And the 75GXP was always the highest performing drive. Funny… Back then (1990’s) there were several HDD manufacturers, now there’s just a few. Let’s see if I remember: Conner (taken over by Seagate), Seagate, Quantum (taken over by Maxtor), Maxtor (taken over by Seagate), JVC (one of the worst drive makers ever! Though the “Worst drive” award has to go to the garbage Kalok Octagon! They went out of business in ’94 I think, and deservedly so!), Samsung, IBM, Western Digital (in the early days, they didn’t actually make HDD’s, just the control boards. The drives were made by Tandon and eventually WD just bought them out), Fuji, Fujitsu, NEC, Miniscribe (taken over by Maxtor)… Hmmm. Not sure if Alps Electric were still making HDD’s in the 90’s, maybe early 90’s anyway. They were *weird* and a real PITA! 😀

There were even more HDD makers in the 80’s. I remember saving for and buying my most prized HDD, a Microscience 1050 (or HH1050, something like that). It was 42 MiB, and cost over $600! But it was THE best HDD made! Period! It worked non-stop for 5 years (and I actually still have it, and it probably would still work, if I could find a controller for it), and I’ve heard of them working for 10-15 years!! If that happened today, it would be a major Miracle (yes, with a capital ‘M’)! Isn’t it funny? Now you can get a 4 TiB for AU$209! And people complain about the price! But if it last’s 2 years, I’d be amazed! LOL Most people today have no idea.

I also found my old stash of jokes, funnies and various bit’s of trivia I enjoyed collecting back then. 😀 Here’s an example someone may find interesting (or amusing). It was for a forum post where I was an Admin at the time. 🙂

Ever wondered where those old sayings come from?

Here are some facts about the 16th Century:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June.
However, they were starting to get a bit odorous so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children-last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it-hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” (No wonder infant mortality was so high!)

Houses had thatched roofs – thick straw – piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs etc.) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof hence the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs”.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying “dirt poor.” The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way – hence, a “thresh hold.”

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while – hence the rhyme, “peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.”

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man “could bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat”.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so,tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale bread which was so old and hard that they could be used for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood and old bread. After eating off wormy, moldy trenchers, one would get “trench mouth”.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or “upper crust.”

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up – hence the custom of holding a “wake.”

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a “bone-house” and reuse the grave. When re-opening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive.
So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the “graveyard shift”) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be “saved by the bell” or was considered a “dead ringer”.

And that’s the truth… (whoever said History was boring?!)

There ya go! A bit of history for a change! 😉 😆

2 Kryten42 { 09.19.13 at 5:36 pm }

Oh! I forgot one Manufacturer, and not sure why! They were memorable for making what was at the time the most expensive (and possibly the fastest) IDE HDD available! 😆 Micropolis, they made the first GiB IDE HDD (1.76 GiB actually), and it cost over $2,000! I remember because I had to buy a dozen for the corporate client I was PM for when I was with HP in ’94. 🙂 Sadly, Micropolis went bankrupt mid 90’s. They were renowned in the 80’s for reliability and performance, but you paid for it! And they just couldn’t compete on price, and reliability became less and less important for companies. Why have an IDE drive that would last more than 7 years, when you’re going to replace your drives every 3-5 years anyway? At that time, server’s were all SCSI. Only workstations or desktop’s used IDE. *shrug*

Oh! And the VESA controller card for the Micropolis was another $800! 😉

Heh… That reminds me of something else. 😀 Some of us on that project had to carry data either back to the office, or home to work on, sometimes a lot of data! I discovered a portable HDD called a “Backpack” (by Microsol or Microsolutions). It was basically a well designed sturdy plastic box with an IDE HDD in it, that connected to the PC’s parallel printer port! And was simple to use. Needed a single line entry into the config.sys file, and used only 5 KiB of precious RAM! 😀 The first one we got was 80 MiB, and had a Connor HDD inside. It worked very well. 🙂

3 Bryan { 09.20.13 at 12:32 am }

I paid $800 for my 10MB, then the 20MB, the 40MB, and the 80MB. It wasn’t until the 80MB started getting flaky that I saw the real decline in pricing. I paid at least 50% more for my IBM-PC with dual diskette drives, than my current system with dual 1TB hard drives cost.

People don’t appreciate how cheap hardware is these days.

I remember Micropolis as they made bigger drives 250 to 500 MB in the ’80s and and a couple of my customers used them for huge data bases in machines that had 9-track tapes attached. You could do that in MS-DOS with the right mix of software and a lot of lies in the config.sys file. MS-DOS couldn’t handle the truth, so you went with lies. They just worked in a 24/7 environment preparing massive print jobs for obscenely expensive high-speed Xerox page printers putting out things like utility bills.

The ‘good old days’ of getting calls in the middle of the night, usually because someone tripped over a cable and didn’t tell anyone.

4 Kryten42 { 09.20.13 at 3:55 pm }

One of the more reliable HDD manufacturer’s of the last decade was Samsung (the F1 drives were quite good). I got one of their new F3 series in 2012 (2 TB) and it died in 6 mths. Got a replacement, and it started developing bad sectors in 4 months. Though the drives are still sold under the ‘Samsung’ brand name, they are in fact manufactured by Seagate who bought out the Samsung HDD division in 2011. So they are just mediocre now.

There were about 200 HDD manufacturers over the past 40 years or so. Now there are only 3. Acquisitions:

Seagate: Control Data Corp/Imprimis (1989), Maxtor (acquired Miniscribe (1990), Quantum (who absorbed Plus, an independent subsidiary in 1992 and acquired DEC HDD division 1994) (2000)) (2006), Conner (1996), Samsung (2011) and LaCie (2012).

Western Digital: Tandon (1988), Hitachi (2.5″& SSD drives only, all 3.5″manufacturing was solt to Toshiba. Hitachi acquired IBM HDD division in 2001) (2012)

Toshiba: Fujitsu (2009), Hitachi (3.5″ HDD’s including IBM, 2012).

Up until the 80’s, pretty much all the Computer manufacturer’s produced their own HDD’s. Even Apple designed & manufactured the proprietary bus 20 MiB ‘Widget’ drive for the Lisa (1984-1986). 🙂

An interesting one was Rodime (founded in Scotland 1979). they designed (and patented most of the tech) the first 3.5″ HDD (or ‘rigid drive’ as it was called then). They shut down the manufacturing business in 1991, but continued to license the patents until 2003 (they became more of a patent litigation company really. They regularly sued Quantum and Seagate for infringements). 🙂 Seagate have always been notorious for it’s “don’t give a damn” attitude and not playing by rules.

October 2002 was when things changed for the worse. three of the (then) five major storage manufacturers announced that they were slashing hard drive warranty from the industry standard three years to just one year. Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital all acted together but (incredibly) denied any collusion (rather blandly at that!) IBM/Hitachi followed suit a short time afterwards. Of the five main manufacturers, only Samsung continued to stand behind its products with a three year guarantee. The other manufacturers stridently denied that the warranty cuts had anything to do with reliability problems but that was demonstrably untrue. It was no coincidence that the one compay still offering three year warranty was also the one company with significantly lower in-service failure rates. Not only did many companies buy Samsung drives, many stopped even considering any other manufacturer (I certainly did).

With drive sales declining, in 2004 (two years after the decision to slash warranties), Seagate was the first to restore a decent warranty policy. But for many, the damage had been done and they didn’t care. A decade later, Seagate acquired Samsung Storage and essentially gutted it. Though Samsung branded drives are being marketed, they are manufactured in Seagates plant’s. They plan to stop production soon (if they haven’t already).

hmmmm. I seem to be in a reminiscing mood! 😆 I just received an eMail offer from one of my suppliers for a Seagate Barracuda 4 TiB HDD for AU$179! And it got me thinking and digging through the cache of documents I recovered from CD’s. 🙂

5 Bryan { 09.20.13 at 5:06 pm }

One of the reasons I went with the WD Black drives was the 5 year warranty, as that is the realistic life of a harddrive. They were more expensive, but you get what you pay for and I wasn’t interested in saving a few bucks and having to swap drives in a year or so, even if they were still under warranty.

I was talking today about some of the things I played with in the 1980s that were great equipment, but they were outrageously expensive and they wouldn’t run the standard software of the time, so they were for niche markets that wouldn’t generate sufficient volume to support the companies that were producing them. Unfortunately the market is for stuff that is ‘good enough’ and cheap, not for the best, and expensive. [See BetaMax].

6 Badtux { 09.21.13 at 3:02 am }

We use the WD RE (enterprise class) drives for much the same reason you went with the WD Black drives. The difference between the two is that the RE have RAID-type TLER error recovery while the Black drives will spend 60 seconds or more trying to do error recovery before giving up, which in turn will cause SAS bus resets and cause the RAID array to go offline. RAID arrays can rebuild a bad block from the checksums so if a disk says it can’t read a block, it’s better for RAID purposes for it to say so quickly, so that the RAID array can simply rebuild the block and rewrite it for the drive to spare the original bad block.

That said, I’ve noticed a weird failure mode for the RE drives. They start growing pending uncorrectable errors in their SMART data. If you leave it alone, eventually it dies altogether. Luckily I get SMART alerts long before that happens and swap the drive out and do a rebuild and all is well, but (shrug). So it goes. Out of the 48 drives in my disk array, over the past six months 5 have gone bad that way. Not reassuring, eh? Oh well, at least we can send the drives back and get new — err, reconditioned — ones back in return.

7 Kryten42 { 09.21.13 at 7:55 am }

Yeah, I have a WD Caviar Black 2 TiB HDD (WD2001FASS-00U0B0). The *BIG* problem with them is they get damned hot! And they *will* die unless you cool them down, or turn on the power management (actually, the Black doesn’t have “power management”. It has “Acoustic Management” (basically, this controls the spindle speed)). You will extend the life of the drive, but the performance will suffer. If you set it to around 50% (C0h – Balanced Performance & Volume) *BEFORE* you get temp alert’s, you can adjust as you please. If you wait for a temp warning, the drive will automatically set it to the lowest *sound* (ie. performance) level (80h) and won’t let you adjust it after. Your random seek’s will dive to 45-50ms or worse because the controller will strive to keep the drive’s temps below 45C (I think it will slow the spindle RPM’s slow enough that you will get about 60ms seek at worst case (and that’s slower than HDD’s from the 90’s, even 80’s!)! My avg seek time before this all happened was around 6.5ms. So much for an expensive supposedly *high-performance* HDD! *shrug*

I’d actually forgotten all about that problem, until I got a strident SMART warning about the temp! It was @ 98C! The fan on the case HDD rack had failed and I didn’t know.

I also have 2 Segate Barracuda’s, and I must say that their controller (or firmware) are much smarter than WD’s! One of them began to get hot, and the firmware throttled the spindle speed BEFORE the damned drive tried to meltdown, unlike the WD! Something else I like about the Segate’s (even though I do dislike the company generally), is that their drives have basic and advanced self-test modes (the consumer WD’s don’t). And you can get free s/w (or use something like Hard Disk Sentinel) to run the drives internal diagnostics.

I just checked (with the excellent and recommended) Hard Disk Sentinel (I use the Pro & Linux versions, they even still have a DOS version). Even with AM enabled on all three HDD’s (WD Black & 2 Segate’s), the 2 Seagate Temp’s are 32C (AM off) & 30C (AM on), but the black with AM on max is at 42C even though they are all in the same case & drive bay (the WD is at the bottom of the stack too) and have a very good 140mm fan blowing air on them (ambient is 20C). During my time designing and testing components for these high-end gaming systems the past couple years, I have tested many fans. I have a pair of Anemometers, General DAF 3010B (for outer readings) and a Dwyer Model MW-1 (for inner readings) to measure airflow in a 1m x 150mm PVC pipe in a frame to mount the fan’s and filters (to simulate restricted vs unrestricted airflow).

Very few fans have the same airflow at the center vs the outer edge. Most are rated (those that are accurately rated anyway) by their outer edge airflow. Even expensive fans vary quite a bit. A typical example was the popular Aero Cool Shark 14cm. Aiflow was measured (averaged over 5 tests) at: Inner: 133 CFM, Outer: 274 CFM. This is a wide variance, and even though the CFM readings seem pretty good, in practice (because of turbulence it causes and other reasons to do with law’s of Physics) it’s not! In practice, I achieved the lowest temp’s with the SilverStone AP-141 (perfect 177 CFM from center to outer unrestricted (and it’s restricted airflow was the best of the lot, 126 to 136 CFM, and low noise (28 dBA)) and the Cooljag Everflow FB14025SL (a perfect 295 CFM center to outer, but loud (35 dBA)!) In real world use, this represents (at full load, high performance HDD temp of 56C), Silverstone temp drop of 12C, Cooljag a drop of 14.5C. I used the SilverStone on the drive bay. 🙂

And I’ve seen that problem with the black’s before. I’ve had two die over the past 3 years (actually, this one is a replacement for the one that died late last year, so I expect it to die soon!) It was why WD originally came out with the Green drives (they were actually Blacks with speed reduced to 5400 RPM and power management added and always on).

The main problem (looking at the HDS reports) I had with the Black’s was “Reallocated Sector Count” (SMART 5) errors. This is the count of sectors moved to the spare area and indicates a problem with the disk surface or the read/write heads. It’s a “Critical Attribute”. Another error I see in the report is “Current Pending Sector Count” (SMART 197). This is a count of unstable sectors which may be remapped to the spare area. It is also a “Critical Attribute”. (I have seen this on one of the Segates also).

One of the best reasons to check SMART on different manufacturer’s HDD”s, is to see which of the attributes they monitor! They don’t monitor all the SMART attributes, and the ones they don’t may indicate that it is a known potential problem. 😉 There are 52 SMART attributes. The WD’s monitor & report 17 of them, Seagate monitor and report 25. Now, many of these are purely statistical in nature, but 9 are deemed “Critical” and are supposed (only by convention however) to be monitored by every drive. To be fair to WD, they monitor all but 1 Critical Attribute (SMART 8, Seek Time Performance), whilst Seagate monitor all but 2 ( SMART 8 & 196, Reallocation Event Count).

However, I believe there is one attribute that SHOULD be Critical and that neither maker monitors, SMART 205 “Thermal Asperity Rate”. This reports on the total number of problems caused by high temperature.

Oh well. “In a perfect World…” 😉 Yeah. *shrug*

Ahem… Is your head aching yet? 😉 😆

8 Bryan { 09.21.13 at 3:09 pm }

I assumed that the drives were going to run hot, so they are well spaced in the cage and the cables kept out of the air stream. It is so nice not to have to deal with the circulation blocking ribbon cables of the old systems. It has to be an extremely hot day for my secondary fans to even start, and then it is only for a few seconds. Most of time all I hear are the intake fans because they are always on. There are advantages to a large case with not much in it and a lot of RAM. Disk activity is minimal except on file movements.

WD is straight forward on not recommending Blacks for RAID applications and the easiest way of dealing with Windows is to duplicate the disk at least once a month. Linux back-ups work, Windows back-ups have minimal value if there’s a crash.

Of course the floods in Thailand had a lot to do with my HD choice, as well as the warranty. The Blacks were available when I needed them and the alternatives weren’t. If I hadn’t been staying within a budget, they would have been back-up only with SSDs as the main drives, but I couldn’t justify the cost to myself.

The guys who designed the disk cage must sell drives on the side because there isn’t nearly enough space between the slots for good air flow.

9 Badtux { 09.21.13 at 6:23 pm }

My WD RE’s are in a 12-disk RAID chassis with four internal fans and two power supply fans (redundant power supplies) sucking air over them through the grates on the fronts of the drive trays. The ones on the outside edges are the most poorly cooled but according to smartctl they never get over 38C. It’s not the temperature that’s killing them. I think it was vibration, actually, because they got jostled pretty good getting from the old place to the new place, while the 24 drives in the original engineering infrastructure, which got lovingly transported in the passenger seat of my Jeep, are completely fine.

Hmm, so that’s 72 WD RE’s altogether, of which 5 have pre-failed in the past six months with a “Current Pending Sector Count” SMART alert. That’s a 7% failure rate, hmm. The first two drives, I pulled them out, zeroed them out on another system to spare the bad sectors, and added them back into the array. They errored again shortly thereafter. The next three drives I didn’t bother with the process, just pulled them and handed them to our drive qual guy for thorough torture testing (he has some tests where, if a drive is even slightly marginal, the drive *will* fail, which saves us a lot of time attempting to reuse marginal drives). I never got them back so I presume they failed.

This sounds bad but we pulled a bunch of 1Tb Hitachi drives out of storage to sell off, and they had similar issues. I think the liquidators simply weren’t interested in kind handling of hardware when they moved all this gear from the old company’s building to their warehouse for liquidation…

10 Bryan { 09.21.13 at 11:25 pm }

I lost my 80GB on I-12 when I came back to Florida from California. I hit a pothole hard, and the drive had problems as soon as I spun it up. If they dropped them, there is no way they weren’t affected. That’s why most companies move their own stuff to trade shows or use one the specialist movers who know how to avoid pranging the equipment. Even in the foam padded aluminum cases you can damage a hard drive if the baggage handlers throw it into the hold of an aircraft.

11 Badtux { 09.21.13 at 11:38 pm }

Modern hard drives are a bit tougher than that, especially the laptop drives. Still, I saw them load those servers full of drives onto carts to haul them to the warehouse and while not being ridiculously rough, they weren’t being kind either. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the servers that I hand-carried came through fine while these other servers that went over on the carts have had 10% of their drives fail.

12 Bryan { 09.22.13 at 12:23 am }

They are attached rigidly to the metal frames so shocks are transferred. On the minis most of the large drives [14-inch platters] were on rubber dampeners to reduce vibration. ‘Head crash’ wasn’t a metaphor on those drives, you heard the metal squealing when it happened.

The new drives are a lot better, but jarring them is still a risky thing because the tolerances have gotten so small.

13 Kryten42 { 09.22.13 at 9:24 am }

The best commercial (ie. non-Military) shock resistant hard drives, are those designed for the automotive industry. Many people might be surprised that their new car (except those at the low-end of the market) have a HDD in it. Toshiba has recently launched the largest capacity automotive HDD @ 320 GB (they are all 2.5″drives). They operate at a temperature range of -35C to +85C, and are designed tolerate shock’s up to 3G while operating. Oh, and they can operate at altitudes from -300m to +5,650m. 😉

I think that of the three HDD makers, Toshiba is the one to watch. 🙂 They are a massive and diverse company. The Toshiba Storage Division decided to partner with the best-in-their-field companies to design and manufacture their HDD’s. TDK designed the R/W head systems, and SDK (Showa Denko) design’s and manufactures the platters. They announced in 2011 a new technology called “heat-assisted magnetic recording technology” (HAMR) that allowed an areal density of 1.5 TiB per inch, which means that on a 3.5″HDD, they can achieve 2 TiB per platter, so a 4 platter HDD with have 8 TiB (and 10 TiB on the new 5 platter HDD’s). And with 1.5 TiB per platter on a 2.5″ HDD, a 2 platter HDD will have 3 TiB.

For anyone interested (but not so much in the high-tech mumbo jumbo) 😉 Toshiba have a pretty decent plain-English illustrated blog about it (from Dec. 2012):

A̶r̶i̶a̶l̶,̶ ̶A̶r̶i̶a̶l̶,̶ ̶A̶e̶r̶i̶a̶l, Areal Density

Forbes have (I think) a good overview on why Toshiba are worth watching:
Toshiba Makes Strategic Partnerships In Order to Compete in Hard Disk Drives

One point they make (and that I’ve made) is that when Seagate & WD went merger mad, Toshiba’s sales increased significantly, and continue to do so. People (especially Corporates heavily invested in Storage Systems, fear a two-horse supply chain (a duopoly), and with good reason! Also, Toshiba is Japanese, WD & Seagate are US. Another reason for many (especially outside the USA) to choose Toshiba.

Another (more techy) article on HAMR that I like because it hints that HAMR HDD’s may not happen at all (Toshiba/TDK/SDK have been working on may ideas, and may have found a other solutions), but it is still on the table. 😉

Toshiba: Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording Technologies Are Still Under Consideration

Also, like Samsung, Toshiba will be announcing newer SSD technologies, and also like Samsung, they manufacture everything needed themselves.

It really is getting interesting. 😉 😀

14 Kryten42 { 09.22.13 at 9:42 am }

Oh!! I meant to mention Badtux… Prometeus (iwStack) are opening a Datacenter in the USA (Dallas apparently). Here’s the email I received:

As you know already, we launched IaaS services with all the bells and whistles (HA, fail-over, load-balancing, pay by the hour, etc) in our datacenter in Milano, Italy (www.iwstack.com).

This offers flexible virtualization for almost all possible scenarios, from cheap low end VPS to large scale deployments for professionals, but there is one thing that lacks and this is the choice of locations. We heard you and now we are heading to America!

We plan to extend our IaaS cloud over there, but only after we find the perfect location. This will need a few field tests with real load and this is where we need your feedback to help decide.

That is right, we are opening services in Dallas (TX), with two of our best selling OVZ plans with SSD in order to test the reliability of the location and the quality of the network all over the world.

Note that these services will stay in place, we do not plan to discontinue OVZ even if we choose not to deploy IWStack over there.

Plans available for now in Dallas are here:
https://www.prometeus.net/billing/cart.php?gid=18

for the DALLASZ3 plan customers with active services in good standing can use one of the following one time off discount code depending on the billing cycle of choice:

DALLAS1 for monthly billing cycle: 100% off one time
DALLAS2 for quarterly billing cycle: 50% off one time
DALLAS3 for semi-annual billing cycle: 33% off one time
DALLAS4 for annual billing cycle: 20% off one time

This mean that if you like to pay monthly you can get the first month free, with quarterly payments you get 1.5 free months and so on.

Orders will be provisioned and approved manually and provisioned in 24-48 hours max.

Thank you for your collaboration, any feedback will be appreciated.
Best regards
Salvatore

15 Bryan { 09.22.13 at 9:49 pm }

Toshiba can make some solid stuff. I have no complaints about my Satellite laptop. It was a great price and does everything I want. It isn’t blazingly fast, but it has a 15+ inch screen and a dual core AMD processor, so it was a good deal for $250 when the XP box died.

They did get into trouble when they helped the Soviet Union start producing balanced propellers for their nuclear subs, but they are a corporation, so what do you expect?

16 Kryten42 { 09.23.13 at 5:01 am }

LOL Yeah. 1987… I laughed! 😆 Really! 😀

In 1987, Tocibai Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba, was accused of illegally selling CNC milling machines used to produce very quiet submarine propellers to the Soviet Union in violation of the CoCom agreement, an international embargo on certain countries to COMECON countries. The Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal involved a subsidiary of Toshiba and the Norwegian company Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk. The incident strained relations between the United States and Japan, and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two senior executives, as well as the imposition of sanctions on the company by both countries.[6] Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania said “What Toshiba and Kongsberg did was ransom the security of the United States for $517 million.”

The USA really hates it when someone does what they have no problem doing. (There are many examples, but one major example: IBM + Many US Companies + Prescott Bush –> Nazi’s).

In the 1920s many big American corporations enjoyed sizeable investments in Germany. IBM established a German subsidiary, Dehomag, before World War I; in the 1920s General Motors took over Germany’s largest car manufacturer, Adam Opel AG; and Ford founded a branch plant, later known as the Ford-Werke, in Cologne. Other US firms contracted strategic partnerships with German companies. Standard Oil of New Jersey — today’s Exxon — developed intimate links with the German trust IG Farben. By the early 1930s, an élite of about twenty of the largest American corporations had a German connection including Du Pont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, General Electric, Gilette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, IBM, and ITT. Finally, many American law firms, investment companies, and banks were deeply involved in America’s investment offensive in Germany, among them the renowned Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and the banks J. P. Morgan and Dillon, Read and Company, as well as the Union Bank of New York, owned by Brown Brothers & Harriman. The Union Bank was intimately linked with the financial and industrial empire of German steel magnate Thyssen, whose financial support enabled Hitler to come to power. This bank was managed by Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Prescott Bush was allegedly also an eager supporter of Hitler, funnelled money to him via Thyssen, and in return made considerable profits by doing business with Nazi Germany; with the profits he launched his son, the later president, in the oil business.
…
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.

Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.’s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland “ Bunny ” Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush.

George Bush – The Unauthorized Biography : Chapter 2 – The Hitler Project

And a good deal of research here:
Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitlers

Nice to know that American’s can elect two Presidents who’s family had strong ties to (and even helped to actually enable) Hitler and genocide. Morals? Ethic’s? Wat dat??! 👿

Speaking of IBM, did you know that Toshiba acquired the IBM POS (erm, “Point-of-Sale”, not the *other* meaning for that acronym) last year? It makes Toshiba the largest Global POS vendor! 😉 😆

17 Kryten42 { 09.23.13 at 5:14 am }

Hmmmm. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it… Possibly the WORST offender and Traitorous Corporation (if a corporation can be considered a traitor!) would be ITT!

ITT continued to supply Germany with advanced communication systems after Pearl Harbor, to the detriment of the Americans themselves, whose diplomatic code was broken by the Nazis with the help of such equipment. Until the very end of the war, ITT’s production facilities in Germany as well as in neutral countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain provided the German armed forces with state-of-the-art martial toys. Charles Higham offers specifics:

After Pearl Harbor the German army, navy, and air force contracted with ITT for the manufacture of switchboards, telephones, alarm gongs, buoys, air raid warning devices, radar equipment, and thirty thousand fuses per month for artillery shells … This was to increase to fifty thousand per month by 1944. In addition, ITT supplied ingredients for the rocket bombs that fell on London, selenium cells for dry rectifiers, high-frequency radio equipment, and fortification and field communication sets. Without this supply of crucial materials it would have been impossible for the German air force to kill American and British troops, for the German army to fight the Allies, for England to have been bombed, or for Allied ships to have been attacked at sea.

And that pattern has been repeated over and over. The USA is quite frankly, it’s own worst enemy! If the USA really wants a “War on Terror”(tm) They really need to buy some mirrors! Because ALL of the problems the USA has today, the USA created! 😈

18 Bryan { 09.23.13 at 10:18 pm }

Putin’s job when he worked in East Germany was primarily as a liaison between the Soviet government and the East German Office of IBM Germany. I facilitated the transfer of IBM products from East Germany to the Soviet Union. IBM maintained its status as a German corporation and could operate rather freely in all sectors of the country. This was all part of the dream of re-unification of the West German government.

The propeller thing was a real PITA for the Anti-submarine Warfare guys. Russians subs were extremely easy to detect and trace because of their crappy props, and now the sonar guys had to get back to work.

US business has never really let minor geo-political problems interfere with making money. At most they set up bogus subsidiaries to handle the transactions and stashed the profits off-shore.

19 Badtux { 09.23.13 at 10:59 pm }

Samsung dumped their hard drive division to Seagate because they decided SSD’s were the wave of the future. They may very well be, but they don’t have the reliability or density of hard drives yet. It’s a future that has been just around the corner for a couple of decades now, and is only just now arriving for laptops (I’m lusting after one of Samsung’s 1Tb drives for my laptop).

Having had my Crucial 512Gb drive crap out once already, I am not particularly impressed by the reliability of SSD’s. They don’t handle lots of small writes (like the Windows registry!) well at all…

20 Bryan { 09.23.13 at 11:20 pm }

I would have serious concerns about heat with the density involved. The sticks for my new box came with heat sinks. I don’t run them at their top rated speed, so I don’t worry about it, but it shows a concern by the manufacturer that it is an issue.

21 Kryten42 { 09.24.13 at 7:28 am }

Samsung made a stupid decision IMNSHO!

They had a market that wanted their HDD products because they were the most reliable HDD’s out there (until they had decided in 2011 to get out of the HDD biz and QA went downhill).

With the new 8 & 10 TiB 3.5″ HDD’s (and 3 TiB 2.5″) about to hit the market, SSD’s won’t be able to compete on capacity or price for a long time, if ever (and that’s what Toshiba said was one of the reasons it wanted to expand their HDD division, not shrink or dispose of it). Also, SSD’s are not suitable for high-write rate data applications, unless you factor in regular replacements, which adds significantly to the cost-of-ownership.

By way of example, the Internet Archive have stated that they will continue to use HDD’s for the foreseeable future because SSD’s simply do not have the capacity they need and will need for their Petaboxes. As of 1 year ago (Oct 2012) the IA’s Petabox 4 total *used* storage was about 10 PiB! Try doing that with SSD’s (at anything approaching reasonable cost)!

IA Petabox 4

Hmmmm. I wonder if NSA, Google, etc use the IA Petabox technology? They spun off the division that designed/built them as a commercial company called Capricorn Technologies in 2004 (they seem to have mysteriously vanished 2008, though someone is still making IA’s Petaboxes!) *shrug* In 2006, IA stated that they were paying about US$1.50 / GiB (pretty good for that time!)

There was a review (2006) here:

The Wayback Machine: From Petabytes to PetaBoxes

My company designed a system similar in some ways to the PetaBox. We started in 1999, and it took about 2 years to get to prototype stage when we looked for VC (and were offered $25m to fund a prototype). Though, our design aims were different from IA in that our primary goal was end-to-end security.

in 2001, we were planning to use the Seagate/Maxtor/Quantum Atlas 10K III Ultra-320 SCSI Hard Drive (KU73J0) HDD’s for the prototype (16 drives). It’s spec’s: 73 GB, 10,000 RPM, SCSI 80pin SCA-2 (Hot-Swap), 55 MB/s Sustained Throughput, 4.5 ms R/W Avg Seek, SCSI LVD U320 – 320MBps 16-bit i/f.

The concept plan was: 16 drives / node (about 1 TiB), 1024 nodes / cluster (1 PiB), 1024 clusters / super cluster (1.2 EiB). The major issue was latency, but my team and I worked on solutions to that problem, and had a prototype of part of that (which is why we found investors easily). 🙂

Ah well. Back to work! 🙂

22 Bryan { 09.24.13 at 10:48 am }

It looks like the electrical engineers didn’t want to work with the mechanical engineers – stranger things have pushed corporate decisions.

Samsung probably felt that the chances of capacity increases were more possible in solid state than they have proved to be because of the heat problems. It is possible that new materials will someday resolve that issue, but until then, solid state will remain less reliable than ‘spinning rust’.

In 2007 the research grants were all drying up, so colleges and universities didn’t have the funding to buy Petbox installations and were more apt to lease storage than build it, so the demise of Capricorn isn’t really that unusual. Most of the people installing storage to lease have their own teams to create their systems.

23 Badtux { 09.25.13 at 7:51 pm }

Right now enterprise 7200 RPM drives are $100/Tb. So my 72 Tb of storage is $7200 worth of disk drives. Enterprise SSD’s are currently $1000/Tb. So my 72 Tb of storage as SSD’s would be $72,000. Big difference there. If you have $100K worth of rotating storage (not hard to do, I had that much in the back room at my last company), spending $1M for SSD to replace it likely isn’t in the cards.

Where SSD works out well is IOPS for read-heavy random workloads. For bulk storage, though, rotating rust is still king.

24 Badtux { 09.25.13 at 7:53 pm }

Oh, regarding HDD vs SSD at Samsung, at the time there was a price war in the hard drive business and everybody was losing money on hard drives. They chose to concentrate on SSD rather than continue competing in hard drive. They’re making a fair chunk of change on SSD’s (and no, they don’t run hot compared to hard drives), and were making nothing on spinning rust drives, so from a business point of view you can’t say they made the wrong choice. If you’re not making money on a business, why *not* sell it for cash, at least then you get back some of your sunk investment.

25 Bryan { 09.25.13 at 11:32 pm }

We all are a bit selfish, and it isn’t nice to lose good products and end up with the ‘MalWart’ end of the market. Hindsight is 20/20 and you can’t continue to lose money when people are bent on killing off competition. It’s a miracle how the ‘low prices’ are magically higher when there is no competitor to hold them down.

Being 10 times more expensive really does limit the competitiveness of SSDs. You really have to need and/or want their advantages to spend that kind of differential.

26 Kryten42 { 09.29.13 at 5:29 pm }

Just been catching up on some tech news. Seems the *future* is closer than many thought. 😉

Will be interesting too see how long it takes for a fully working implementation. 🙂 It will be a real game changer for all fields of electronics, not just computing.

An Early Look at the Carbon Nanotube Computer Your Kids Will Use

It *SHOULD* be cheaper than current silicon based systems (but I’m sure they will find reasons to make it extremely profitable for the corp’s). *shrug*

27 Bryan { 09.29.13 at 8:24 pm }

Well, they need to build something that can count higher than 32 to be of much use, and prove that it can be mass produced. There have been a lot of products that have been produced in the lab that have never gone anywhere. The step from the lab to the factory can be very long and steep.

We can hope, but have to wait.

28 Badtux { 09.30.13 at 11:54 pm }

Bryan, it is theoretically provable that if it is capable of counting to two and is Turing-complete, it is capable of counting to infinity (or close enough for our purposes).

The step from the lab to the factory, on the other hand, is a different story. One thing that irritates me today is that so many people have forgotten that stuff does *not* automagically build itself. Like those morons who romanticize the ideal of the Jeffersonian gentleman farmers. Well, Jefferson could do all that philosophizing because he had *slaves* to do all the actual work on the place, otherwise he would have been working so hard from dawn to dusk that all he could manage after lights out would be sleep. Who’s going to provide these jerkoffs with the steel plows and lantern fuel and medicines and etc. that they’re going to need once they ride off to be gentleman farmers? And if someone says “the clerk at the grocery store” I’m going to slap them! It takes cities and factories to build that kinda stuff, yo!

But then, I’ve been a manufacturing engineer before so been there, done that, annoyed with people who don’t “get it”. So it goes…

– Badtux the Manufacturing Penguin

29 Bryan { 10.01.13 at 11:44 am }

It is also theoretical provable that bumblebees can’t fly, but theory only goes so far. I have been involved in way too many disasters in failed scalability to assume that anything that works in the laboratory will work when you expand it to the level that is required in the real world.

You can’t ‘hand build’ a 64-bit processor and expect to sell it at a profit.

Guessing that it will take at least 5 years to find out if these chips can be produced on a profitable scale, and a lot less time to find out they can’t, means I probably won’t be around to buy one if they succeed.

Getting a product to market is not simple or easy, no matter how much promise it may have.

30 Badtux { 10.01.13 at 12:00 pm }

Bryan, it is most definitely *not* theoretically provable that bumblebees can’t fly. See the Snopes page for details.

Computers are math. Mathematical proofs are mathematical proofs. They don’t state what’s *physically* possible, but they most definitely do state what’s *mathematically* possible. So it’s mathematically possible for this new technology to implement extremely cheap computer systems. Now, whether it’s *physically* possible to do so — i.e., to devise a manufacturing process and scale it — is a different story, and that one relies on materials science, not mathematics.

31 Bryan { 10.01.13 at 1:43 pm }

It was at the time provable that bumblebees can’t fly, but the theory was wrong because it didn’t include all of the variables that applied, i.e. fixed wing theories don’t work well for what are essentially helicopters.

They are reaching the stage where it has to be turned over to the engineers to find out what is actually possible in the real world and what it will cost. The basic materials will be cheap, but the process may be prohibitively expensive. We won’t know until it is tried.

32 Kryten42 { 10.02.13 at 2:36 am }

Since you guy’s are having so much fun over that one… How about this one? 😉 And look where it was posted! :O (And I actually do read CSM because they do some good *REAL* Science and Environmental stories. Not all US *Christians* are batsh*t insane! 😛

CSM: New particle accelerator can rest on your fingertip

And apparently, DARPA is funding it to create real *field-portable* X-Ray machines for Medics. And the Moon really *IS* Made of cheese! Yup! 😉 😈

Oh! Hey, hipparchia… 😉 You might find this one interesting (and others also of course):

CSM: Big bang: Scientists study light from a softball-sized universe

Speaking of CSM… They have also done some good (I think) pieces about the Gov shutdown:

CSM: Government shutdown: Obama faces political risks, too

33 Bryan { 10.02.13 at 5:24 pm }

DARPA is about the only US government source for basic research that is still being funded, so you take what you can get.

What they are doing sounds reasonable, but they are years away from an actual product which will make a lot of money for a corporation, and little or nothing for taxpayers and the people who create it.

34 Kryten42 { 10.03.13 at 2:41 pm }

That’s true of course. But they are not the World’s greatest altruists when it comes to said research. 😉

Here’s one I (and many) predicted years ago:

Microsoft Will Let Windows 7 Die Quicker Than XP

I’ve lost count of the number of times M$ announced they were going to end XP, and their major clients said “No, no you are not!”

I don’t know of another major corporation that is so hellbent on killing their cash-cows! Just shows that even in a Corp, Idealism trumps sanity and even money. Morons.

Oh, and anyone who thinks for a second that M$ hasn’t killed XP because of the millions of *der little peoples* who can’t afford to upgrade (or even have any need to) or schools etc… None of that is even a tiny blip on the M$ radar!

35 Bryan { 10.03.13 at 8:21 pm }

I have never understood why M$ would decide not to sell something people obviously want to buy, like XP. As a real capitalist, if people want to buy it, I will certainly sell it to them. Software isn’t like cars, where the assembly line has been reconfigured for the new model. Burn the CDs and ship them.

People, especially corporate IT people, are not going to buy Win 8, even with the changes. They want more compatibility, and don’t want to get into a lot of retraining of users. People are under too much pressure these days to tolerate it.

Microsoft stumbles from one mistake to the next.

If Win 9 is stable and recognizable it will sell, otherwise – Long Live Win 7! We both know it. Selling people things they don’t want requires a level of marketing skill that M$ has never had.