Comments on: A Note Of Caution Part Doh

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 03:48:56 +0000

The life of the user: you keep patching and updating and wonder when these corporations we have come to depend on are finally going to get it all together. The answer of course is never. Hell, we have seen major fails at product introductions which made the CEOs look like fools, so why should users expect any better treatment.

You reminded me of the days when I would take my Red Hat installation disk with me, Badtux, to wipe and rebuild a disk for a new clean Windows install. Windows wanted to “protect” you from wiping out a disk it assumed was already partitioned and formatted.

You’re right, co-locating is an expensive alternative to using a cloud system. You have to really need the extra control to justify the cost

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 09:11:10 +0000

Yeah, I updated the firmware in all my Crucial SSD’s in that database server last night, as well as BLKDISCARD’ed them since I was putting a new filesystem on them. Flashing new firmware onto Crucial SSD’s is easy *if* you have a Windows 10 system with hot swap trays. We put four SSD’s in, flashed the new firmware onto them in parallel with the Crucial SSD Manager, popped them out, and popped in the next four. Then I had to pop them into my Linux system (SATA ports) to run the blkdiscard program, since the LSI Megaraid driver under Linux (what’s running on my big database server) won’t pass through the DISCARD commands to SSD’s. GRR.

This is starting to make me think about the viability of putting our own hardware into data centers. But we’d need to hire someone full time to run it as well as spend a ton on infrastructure and power and at current Silicon Valley prices that’s a *lot* of Amazon credits.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 04:51:39 +0000

Well… yeah! Can always guarantee either Dotard or MicroSux will screw up your life!

My PC, Server, Notebook & Tablet are all Intel! PC & Tablet run W10, so it wouldn’t really matter if they were AMD as the M$ *FIX* screws them all up. Server is Xeon & CentOS which has been patched & DELL issued a Firmware update. It has impacted LAN & storage performance, but not as badly as W10.

The Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 Tablet uses a Core M-5Y71 which is a 2-core, 4-thread Mobile CPU. I haven’t noticed much impact on that so far, but not used it much.

The Dell Precision M6800 Notebook has a Core i7 3940XM Mobile Extreme CPU, 4-Core/8-Thread. It runs W7 & Linux Mint. No real difference noted. While I was checking, I decided to do some comparison benchmarks with my newer 6th Gen PC (Notebook is considered 3rd Gen). In most multimedia/graphics tasks, it beat my PC, sometimes significantly! Probably due to the NVIDIA Quadro K5100M gfx system with 8GB GDDR5 dedicated RAM. It also has 3 Samsung 840 PRO 512GB SSD’s in RAID 0. So R/W performance is very good. It can have up to 4 SSD’s & I had planned to get a 4th. Held off when the 850’s came out with 1TB capacity. I may have to use it more than I have been!

It’s looking more likely Intel knew about this some time ago.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 04:11:18 +0000

It’s not Intel, or AMD, or ARM .. it’s Trump. I don’t know how or why, but this is his fault. He is such a disaster, an “asteroid of awfulness”, that the odds are it is his fault.

I finally checked and my only Intel box is the Dell I use for XP every summer.

If it wasn’t Intel, M$ would have screwed up your life, so there is no point in regretting choices. We will always get screwed by someone else’s perfidy or incompetence.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 03:22:13 +0000

My previous system was AMD. I KNEW going to Intel was gonna cost me somehow! Typical. *sigh* I really should have waited until 2017. I would definitely have gotten a new AMD system. *shrug*

Hindsight… Always 100%. Bah!

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 23:36:46 +0000

aha, I see it now, thanks!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 23:34:25 +0000

In reply to hipparchia. Go to Control Panel on the Start Menu and select System

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 23:25:25 +0000

oh, great. I’ve forgotten – how do I figure out if I have an amd computer?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 01:32:03 +0000

This is like running Oracle – you spend years fine tuning everything to get the optimal performance, then they update and none of your tuning works with the new system.

Of course this is worse because the problem is in the hardware and machine code.

Then there is the problem of dealing with clients who all believe that every year things are going to get better, faster, and cheaper. They are not going to appreciate slower and more expensive. I have people still using software that would take hours to process thousands of records and was processing millions of records in seconds on today’s systems. They are not going to remember what it was like in the 1980s. They want at least what they had last year.

I think we can all agree that this is Trump’s fault 👿

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 23:38:28 +0000

Yes. Prometeus/IWstack discovered that with their SSD VPS/Cloud servers. A lot of annoyed clients. Hitachi are working with them to help minimize the performance penalty.

Just to add insult to injury, Samsung released firmware, driver & management s/w updates for Commercial & Enterprise SSD’s a couple days ago supposedly to alleviate the performance impact somewhat. If anyone can get them! Twice I’ve been greeted with:

“Download limit exceeded.

We apologize for your inconvenience

Please try again within 24 hours

There is a daily limit on the number of this software.

Unfortunately, the download limit for the day has been reached, please try again within 24 hours.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you. Thank you.”

Seriously??! A multi $billion company being such a cheap bunch of a’holes?! Needless to say, their forum/twitter/FB are full of pissed off clients (including a few Corp’s!) Thankfully, an enterprising (necessarily anonymous) group put them up as a Torrent! Unbelievable!

Also, to update the SSD firmware on Samsung drives, you have to create a UNetbootin USB disk to boot the F/W ISO image for the update. The 850/840 EVO’s updated with no problem. The 950 PRO I had to try a few times! I was half afraid I’d brick it! I have 2… Still! If that happened, Samsung would DEFINITELY get the bill! They’re still under warranty, but they state that if it’s damaged during a F/W update, warranty is void! Like to see them argue that in a Class Action right now!

Geez! I truly despise Corp’s! They are all damned cheap crooks!