# Unboxing the Hardware, Pt 1 - The HDs



## Dragoneer (Jul 15, 2008)

Some admittedly low quality images for your enjoyment.

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The box gives birth, yielding a NexStar hard drive dock... and some bubble-wrapped joy.





We ordered so many hard drives we even got the manufacturer's tray they came in.





Even my 17" Alienware laptop seems dwarfed by the cosmic array of seemingly limitless storage.





The Great Wall of Data





These drives are so fast I was barely able to capture their movement on my iPhone's camera.





Shiny. Silver. Lovable. Yeah, lil' guy. We're giving you a good home.





It's a bouquet of awesome.​


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## TheGreatCrusader (Jul 15, 2008)

Cool.

On a side note: Alienware? iPhone? What is with the pointless and overpriced bling?


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## Dragoneer (Jul 15, 2008)

TheGreatCrusader said:


> On a side note: Alienware? iPhone? What is with the pointless and overpriced bling?


Because I like to play PC games, and integrated graphics on laptop suck just that much. It was my last big purchase when I was living in Kyrgyzstan. And believe it or not, the m9750 is one of the cheaper gaming laptops there are. Besides, I buy cheap builds then add in my own hardware. Much cheaper without paying giant corporate overhead.

And the iPhone? Because it's hand-held crack.


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## TheGreatCrusader (Jul 15, 2008)

Dragoneer said:


> And the iPhone? Because it's a hand-held crack.


You've got good point thar.


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## Kaeko (Jul 15, 2008)

Great to hear! hope the Great wall holds up many years for us! Keep us updated  

+ was hell boy any good?


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## Dragoneer (Jul 15, 2008)

Kaeko said:


> + was hell boy any good?


I liked it as much as I did the first!


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## kusanagi-sama (Jul 15, 2008)

With my limited experience of Western Digital drives (consumer grade, not server grade), is that they only last a couple years.

Maxtor drives last quite a long time. My oldest is about 6 years old and still going. I have three, the oldest is one I bought in Nov 02 and is a 60GB drive. The other two are 120GB drives I had in RAID 0 for about 4 years (RAID array was starting to fail last year as I was getting file access errors that would temporarily shut down the array - it was on an integrated Highpoint 372 RAID chip on a ABIT KD7-RAID)

Maxtor D740X-6L 60GB, Manf date not listed on drive, but bought Nov 02
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB, Manf date: Apr 2003
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB, Manf date: Sept 2003

I am currently running on a 250GB Seagate SATAII drive bought last year for my new computer.


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## tundra_arctic_wolf (Jul 15, 2008)

Now that's quite a lot of Western Digital hard drives you've got there, dragoneer.


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## Koda (Jul 15, 2008)

*chuckles*

I remember getting a box like that for the computer lab I worked at last year at school. It was a load of 26 IBM (dun dun dunnnnn) DEATHSTARS X3, at a whopping 30GB each. The rest of the box was full of RAM sticks, the RAM was practically the packing peanuts! Hehe! 

Exciting!


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## Rhainor (Jul 15, 2008)

kusanagi-sama said:


> With my limited experience of Western Digital drives (consumer grade, not server grade), is that they only last a couple years.
> 
> Maxtor drives last quite a long time. My oldest is about 6 years old and still going. I have three, the oldest is one I bought in Nov 02 and is a 60GB drive. The other two are 120GB drives I had in RAID 0 for about 4 years (RAID array was starting to fail last year as I was getting file access errors that would temporarily shut down the array - it was on an integrated Highpoint 372 RAID chip on a ABIT KD7-RAID)
> 
> ...


Plenty of people agree with you.  There are also plenty of people who have the opposite experiences.  Personally, I've only ever had one WD drive fail on me, and it was already obsolete by a few years.  I buy WD whenever I buy HDDs, and have no complaints with them.


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## Dragoneer (Jul 15, 2008)

Rhainor said:


> Plenty of people agree with you.  There are also plenty of people who have the opposite experiences.  Personally, I've only ever had one WD drive fail on me, and it was already obsolete by a few years.  I buy WD whenever I buy HDDs, and have no complaints with them.


As an IT tech, the ratios for the major brands tend to put Seagate as the most reliable with Western Digital at a second, Maxtor in the third position. But we're talking points of a percentage between failure rates on all of them.

I recall seeing some actual stats in the past, but it's been a while. All HDs will fail eventually. They shelf life is about 3 to 4 years average. Some life longer, some die within the first month. Some the first week. Others live to be ten years.

With a hard drive you never know when it will die... just that, one day, it will. Which is why it's always good to have backups. And backups OF your backups, too.


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## ADF (Jul 15, 2008)

That's... a lot of storage.

Any idea what the space usage of FA was before failure?


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## ponyguy (Jul 15, 2008)

kusanagi-sama said:


> With my limited experience of Western Digital drives (consumer grade, not server grade), is that they only last a couple years.
> 
> Maxtor drives last quite a long time.



Maxtor bought Quantum because they had such a lousy reputation for reliability.  It's amusing that they're thought of as reliable, now.  That's the same reason Seagate bought CDC (Now I AM showing my age).  I've had probably 30 drives personally, and dealt with a lot more professionally.  Brand is less important than you think, especially when you don't know who the OEM is.  I've had the best luck with IBM/Hitachi, but others will swear they are failure prone.  All of my IBM drives that are running 24/7 were made well before 2000, and out of 19 drives, I've had one failure (and these were all refurbs.).

Google did a survey from their pool of millions of drives, analyzing failures, and their conclusion was the same as D's:  If a drive lasts 90 days, it will probably last a long long time.  If it's showing ANY kind of SMART errors, it WILL die within one year.  But it may also die without any signs whatsoever.

BTW, seeing that precarious tower of terrabytes made the tech inside me cringe.  PLEASE don't do that!  It's like seeing somebody juggling kittens on the edge of a crumbling cliff over a pit full of flaming alligators, with the teaser text "See what happens next!"


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## Anonymous1157 (Jul 15, 2008)

An interesting question just came to mind... HOW the FREAK are you supposed to back up several TERABYTES, provided that we ever rack up that much art/stories/music?

Other than that, the legible part of the stats on the label are pretty nice. Does that say 22MB cache!? Most HDDs I've seen barely have 2MB!


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## Dragoneer (Jul 15, 2008)

Anonymous1157 said:


> An interesting question just came to mind... HOW the FREAK are you supposed to back up several TERABYTES, provided that we ever rack up that much art/stories/music?
> 
> Other than that, the legible part of the stats on the label are pretty nice. Does that say 22MB cache!? Most HDDs I've seen barely have 2MB!


32MB cache.

And you back up TB of data... to even more TB of hard drives. Full hardware backup. Or you get a tape deck loader where you can load in multiple tapes at a time. But that's really expensive.


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## Furthlingam (Jul 15, 2008)

Awesomeness!


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## Daniel Kay (Jul 15, 2008)

Must have been nice to play around with so much storage power, just hope you didnt build a card house


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## Koda (Jul 15, 2008)

Hehe.. FA's next server purchase: The backup machine!

Then you got everything you need, DB, WWW, DATA, and Backup! Quite the rag-tag bunch!


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## Dragoneer (Jul 15, 2008)

Koda said:


> Hehe.. FA's next server purchase: The backup machine!
> 
> Then you got everything you need, DB, WWW, DATA, and Backup! Quite the rag-tag bunch!


We already have the backup box. We're not just throwing away that data server, hardware failure or not. =P We'll replace/repair the motherboard and put it back into service.


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## talakestreal (Jul 15, 2008)

I don't even know computers except the bare minimal, but those pictures make me drool.  Wow, awesome.


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## pikachu_electricmouse (Jul 16, 2008)

Oh my god, you removed the hard drive from it's electrostatic packaging?  What have you done!  You're never supposed to remove them from the little baggies they come in!  It totally destroys their valu...

...Wait.  No.  I'm thinking of collectable comic books.  Silly me!  Never mind.  Carry on!


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## RailRide (Jul 16, 2008)

kusanagi-sama said:


> With my limited experience of Western Digital drives (consumer grade, not server grade), is that they only last a couple years.
> 
> Maxtor drives last quite a long time....



Not to cast doubt on your particular experience, but I currently have a Maxtor drive in a data-recovery facility a thousand miles away from home. The folks there say they see quite a few of them. Last I heard, they were going to pack it in dry ice. Yeah, that was my first external backup drive 9_9. I ignored the signs when it started to act odd (spontaneously losing it's drive letter). Then Windows stopped assigning it a drive letter _period_.

I now have most of my data generated after that incident backed up twice (seperate HD's). And my art projects 3X (two HD's and a flash thumbdrive). And I'm considering adding another HD to each category for offsite purposes (kept in my locker at work).

---PCJ


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## Tachyon (Jul 16, 2008)

I can't help but think there is a significant oversupply of harddrives, considering the new server only has 6 bays. Are 8 of them just going to sit on a shelf somewhere, or is there something I'm missing?


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## Nanakisan (Jul 16, 2008)

Tachyon said:


> I can't help but think there is a significant oversupply of harddrives, considering the new server only has 6 bays. Are 8 of them just going to sit on a shelf somewhere, or is there something I'm missing?



if you had read the site status threads you would know that 6 of them go in the server and the extra two are just in case of a emergency and we need emergency back ups.


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## Tachyon (Jul 16, 2008)

Nanakisan said:


> if you had read the site status threads you would know that 6 of them go in the server and the extra two are just in case of a emergency and we need emergency back ups.



There are 14.


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## Rhainor (Jul 16, 2008)

The original plan, when they were getting the HP server, was to have 8 drives in it in a RAID...10, I think? ...have 4 as active data backup drives (yesterday, 3 days ago, last week, last month, or something like that), and two as spares in case one failed.

Since the Dell only has space for 6 drives, we'll probably have an extra backup drive and an extra spare.


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## Tachyon (Jul 16, 2008)

Wouldn't you need at least one spare drive bay to swap a backup drive in/out of? Even then, it wouldn't be an active backup drive (unless I'm mistaken about that term).


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## Rhainor (Jul 16, 2008)

"Active" is my own word, not theirs.

I'm not sure how the backups are accomplished.  Possibly by having the backup drive installed in another machine, and dumping the data across the network.


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## stevefarfan (Jul 16, 2008)

MMmm, technoporn.  An orgy of it even.


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## rednec0 (Jul 16, 2008)

well then again there's always the possibility of getting RAID cards down the road (when site storage warrants it). things are really starting to get in gear for FA and though i don't like the idea of relying on WDs its better than nothing at all.


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## TigerShadowclaw (Jul 16, 2008)

rednec0 said:


> well then again there's always the possibility of getting RAID cards down the road (when site storage warrants it). things are really starting to get in gear for FA and though i don't like the idea of relying on WDs its better than nothing at all.



In terms of Enterprise class drives all of the brand names are on pretty even standing when it comes to reliability and stability.


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## Chevallier LaChance (Jul 16, 2008)

*nerdgasms*


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## Dragoneer (Jul 16, 2008)

Tachyon said:


> There are 14.


If we end up not using them every one of the drives, I'll buy some off FA and dump the money back into the pool. Our server plans changed midway and the cost to return the drives is at a 15% restocking fee.

Rather than lose $30 per drive it makes more sense. 

And so far, I've done full formats and chkdsks on 4 of the drives with 0 faults found. I'll format 8 make sure they all go fine, then start stress testing them.


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## kusanagi-sama (Jul 16, 2008)

RailRide said:


> Not to cast doubt on your particular experience, but I currently have a Maxtor drive in a data-recovery facility a thousand miles away from home. The folks there say they see quite a few of them. Last I heard, they were going to pack it in dry ice. Yeah, that was my first external backup drive 9_9. I ignored the signs when it started to act odd (spontaneously losing it's drive letter). Then Windows stopped assigning it a drive letter _period_.
> 
> I now have most of my data generated after that incident backed up twice (seperate HD's). And my art projects 3X (two HD's and a flash thumbdrive). And I'm considering adding another HD to each category for offsite purposes (kept in my locker at work).
> 
> ---PCJ


 
Yeah, its a sort of YMMV sort of thing.  I only based it on my experience that in from 2000 to 2005 I had to buy about five Western Digital drives (two for my computer, about three for my Mom's)


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## selth (Jul 16, 2008)

maybe you should just keep a few. just in case. I wonder what OS will be used on the servers...


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## Erro (Jul 16, 2008)

@ OP: Dragoneer I think  you were having just a bit too much fun playing with thew new drives for pictures xD
Western Digital though... mmmmm *drools* I can't blame you for the cam play, I'd likely be leaking in my pants holding a stack of those beautiful things *is such a hardware fangirl x3*


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## Dragoneer (Jul 16, 2008)

selth said:


> maybe you should just keep a few. just in case. I wonder what OS will be used on the servers...


Windows ME.


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## kusanagi-sama (Jul 16, 2008)

Dragoneer said:


> Windows ME.


 
LOL, now thats funny.


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## Drake_Husky (Jul 16, 2008)

I'll be movin in next week ;p

As for the Windows ME much lulz. Why not Windows 2000 Server or 2003 Server?


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## Rhainor (Jul 16, 2008)

rednec0 said:


> well then again there's always the possibility of getting RAID cards down the road (when site storage warrants it).


These drives are already going to be in a RAID; RAID-10, I believe.


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## Jarz (Jul 16, 2008)

Please, tell me you didn't do THIS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YocnQ0NMTUA


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## Grimfang (Jul 16, 2008)

Excellent! The goods have finally arrived from Colombia. Nobody thought you guys would deliver like this when it was said we'd have FA on crack when it was back up.


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## KMakato (Jul 16, 2008)

Windows ME??? *cringes*


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## Fuzzypaws (Jul 16, 2008)

I seriously can't believe that people are actually taking the Windows ME joke seriously.  I've heard of misinterpreting sarcasm on the internet but come _on_.


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## Dragoneer (Jul 17, 2008)

Fuzzypaws said:


> I seriously can't believe that people are actually taking the Windows ME joke seriously.  I've heard of misinterpreting sarcasm on the internet but come _on_.


Don't underestimate the power of Microsoft's premiere OS. Why, just look at how powerful and efficient Windows ME is. It's loads better than what we've got right now!


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## KMakato (Jul 17, 2008)

Okay, you scared me, I'm actually surprised that I believed that for a second... I mean, there was no Windows before WinXP x64. Don't try to prove me wrong with your fancy "proof" and what-not. :3


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## Arkolyte (Jul 17, 2008)

LOL.  My buddy's Windows ME actually had about that many errors open at one time once...  Love the top error.  Too many errors ftw!


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## Houshou (Jul 17, 2008)

KMakato said:


> Okay, you scared me, I'm actually surprised that I believed that for a second... I mean, there was no Windows before WinXP x64. Don't try to prove me wrong with your fancy "proof" and what-not. :3



Do NOT make me find my 50Mhz (With Turbo Button ON) 8MB Ram, 320MB HDD, Windows 3.1.1 computer. Where DOS 6.2 was the better OS!

Fucking 14.4 dial-up modems...


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## KMakato (Jul 17, 2008)

Houshou said:


> Do NOT make me find my 50Mhz (With Turbo Button ON) 8MB Ram, 320MB HDD, Windows 3.1.1 computer. Where DOS 6.2 was the better OS!



Holy Sh**!!! you have a 320MB HDD??? I thought my 203MB with a 81MB secondary was kick-a$$. you lucky son-of-a...


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## EmberTiger (Jul 17, 2008)

At least it looks like the stuff came in safer than your PC and other equipment did from Fed Ex or wherever with your PC and stuff

=X

Cuz, you know, you just have horrible luck with things. Haha.

But in all seriousness, it looks awesome and I'm excited for the mega Awesome and cool FA when its up! =D


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## selth (Jul 17, 2008)

Dragoneer said:


> Windows ME.



ooooh.... very good joke, sir! 

too bad I was asleep after your answer was posted. *curses timezones*


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## foxystallion (Jul 17, 2008)

Fuzzypaws said:


> I seriously can't believe that people are actually taking the Windows ME joke seriously.  I've heard of misinterpreting sarcasm on the internet but come _on_.



Even though I'm a high performing Asper, I immediately realized it was satire - but if I were an Asper who knew zilch about OSs, I would have taken it at face value.  I know of a _lot_ of furrys on FA with Asperger's syndrome or some other flavor of the autistic spectrum, and we tend to take things literally.  This makes it easier to understand quantum mechanics without the existential angst experienced by non-Aspers, but it does make it easy to miss satire.


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## foxystallion (Jul 17, 2008)

Houshou said:


> Do NOT make me find my 50Mhz (With Turbo Button ON) 8MB Ram, 320MB HDD, Windows 3.1.1 computer. Where DOS 6.2 was the better OS!
> 
> Fucking 14.4 dial-up modems...



MS/DOS could do quite a lot with the MKS UNIX utility toolkit.  It has pipes and redirection built right in, and running a file through AWK, SED, and other standard utilities allows one to do some amazing things.  Of course, it was still single user, but I wrote decent accounting program for my business with Bourne shell script.  It ran quite fast on a 4.88 MHz IBM-XT with 640 KB RAM and a 10 MB HD.  The trick was to create a small ramdisk and run the shell script from it.  I started with a 300 baud modem that got too hot to hold your finger on it...


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## foxystallion (Jul 17, 2008)

selth said:


> ooooh.... very good joke, sir!
> 
> too bad I was asleep after your answer was posted. *curses timezones*



Is your red hat from Red Hat Linux?


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## net-cat (Jul 17, 2008)

We don't need this fancy-pants "Windows ME."

I'm pushing for either MS-DOS or Mac System 6.


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## foxystallion (Jul 17, 2008)

I seriously hope that the FA OS is one of the flavors of BSD UNIX because it has good stability, fine performance, and high security.  LINUX security isn't as good from the data that I have seen, though I must admit that I run BSD rather than LINUX.


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## net-cat (Jul 17, 2008)

The old server was FreeBSD 6-STABLE with network drivers pulled from FreeBSD 7-CURRENT.

The new servers will be FreeBSD 7.


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## ponyguy (Jul 17, 2008)

foxystallion said:


> I seriously hope that the FA OS is one of the flavors of BSD UNIX because it has good stability, fine performance, and high security.  LINUX security isn't as good from the data that I have seen, though I must admit that I run BSD rather than LINUX.



I run four Linux servers attached to the net, with years of uptime.  I haven't had a successful intrusion since 1988.  It's not about what color box you buy.  Security is a process, not a brand name.


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## RailRide (Jul 17, 2008)

foxystallion said:


> I know of a _lot_ of furrys on FA with Asperger's syndrome or some other flavor of the autistic spectrum, and we tend to take things literally.  This makes it easier to understand quantum mechanics without the existential angst experienced by non-Aspers, but it does make it easy to miss satire.



I experienced this firsthand not too long ago. Except that the person at the time didn't acknowledge his condition, and I accidentally 'diagnosed' it after casually looking up AS on Wikipedia (I had heard it used in discussions regarding Slashdot posters). I swear the article read like the story of his life. It was _very_ weird seeing it all laid out where I could match up the symptoms to what he had been telling me over the past year or so.

---PCJ


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## selth (Jul 17, 2008)

Red Hat is not failure free. and they know that, so thay provide great support and patches that don't only go to Red Hat Consumer, they also go upstream.
Red Hat is stable!


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## Kitch (Jul 17, 2008)

net-cat said:


> We don't need this fancy-pants "Windows ME."
> 
> I'm pushing for either MS-DOS or Mac System 6.


System 7.5.3 was the shiznit.


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## selth (Jul 17, 2008)

get BeOS!


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## dmfalk (Jul 17, 2008)

Mac OS X is fantastic, and its core OS is BSD Unix- I have several *nix-intended programs compiled on it to keep me happy. 

BeOS- I fiddled with this when I was using Windows 98SE... Very good, although weak support. Alot like OS/2 with a Linux-like core. One of only a few alternative OSes that will riun on a Mac, incidentally. (Another is Ubuntu Linux.)

Let's see... Over the years, I've used AmigaOS 1.3 and 2.0, MS-DOS 3 through 6, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, and XP, Tandy Deskmate, OS/2, SunOS/Solaris, VAX, Linux (CSH shell and Knoppix), SCO, BSD and FreeBSD Unix, MacOS 8.6-9.22 & OS X 10.1-10.4.11 (except 10.3.x) and lastly, Windoes CE/Mobile (Pocket PC) v.2 through 4. I might've missed a few.  I really happen to like alternate OSes, regardless of machine, and I'm not one to side in any OS war (whatever works for you is fine by me!), but I thank God i'm no longer under Windows! My last 'puter was WinME, and that was the LEAST stable version I've ever seen. (98SE was the best version of Windows.) Best OS I've ever seen is AmigaOS, any version- Fully-integrated filetype support with the best memory management and multitask threading I've seen on any OS. 

Oh, yeah- and I started with a TRS-80 (one of the first school computers EVER, back in '78 ) and an Apollo mainframe. 

And for the record, FA was, is, and will be running FreeBSD Unix. Solid. 

d.m.f.


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## foxystallion (Jul 18, 2008)

net-cat said:


> The old server was FreeBSD 6-STABLE with network drivers pulled from FreeBSD 7-CURRENT.
> 
> The new servers will be FreeBSD 7.



Thank you!  I am delighted with that choice!!


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## foxystallion (Jul 18, 2008)

RailRide said:


> I experienced this firsthand not too long ago. Except that the person at the time didn't acknowledge his condition, and I accidentally 'diagnosed' it after casually looking up AS on Wikipedia (I had heard it used in discussions regarding Slashdot posters). I swear the article read like the story of his life. It was _very_ weird seeing it all laid out where I could match up the symptoms to what he had been telling me over the past year or so.
> 
> ---PCJ



You and your friend might find my comment on this page interesting - it explains the "Born furry" over my avi:
http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=13158&page=2


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## foxystallion (Jul 18, 2008)

dmfalk said:


> Mac OS X is fantastic, and its core OS is BSD Unix- I have several *nix-intended programs compiled on it to keep me happy.
> 
> BeOS- I fiddled with this when I was using Windows 98SE... Very good, although weak support. Alot like OS/2 with a Linux-like core. One of only a few alternative OSes that will riun on a Mac, incidentally. (Another is Ubuntu Linux.)
> 
> ...



That is a wonderful collection of experiences!  I started out on an IBM 650
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/650.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_650
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_intro.html
back in the 1950s at the tender age of 14.  I was chosen as a lab rat by the National Science Foundation for an experiment proposed by Minsky and McCarthy at MIT.  They thought that 6 year olds would be able to learn computer languages easier than adults.  NSF psychologists warned that exposing children so young to computer language might sidetrack their brains away from human languages and hence cause brain damage! NSF compromised by allowing the experiment to be performed on 14 to 16 year olds.  M&M were right; within a few days I was debugging my professor's code.  Of course, my being a hyperlexic high performing Asper helped...


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## foxystallion (Jul 18, 2008)

ponyguy said:


> I run four Linux servers attached to the net, with years of uptime.  I haven't had a successful intrusion since 1988.  It's not about what color box you buy.  Security is a process, not a brand name.



That is a very impressive track record!  Thank you for your information.  Which flavor of Linux are you running?


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## EQINOX (Jul 18, 2008)

haha win ME altho it would be intresting to see it run that super server  tho they prob will go with XP pro and hopefully not that peace of crap sorry mess of an OS vista.

anyway good luck with the servers hope the buld goes smoothly


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## ponyguy (Jul 18, 2008)

foxystallion said:


> That is a very impressive track record!  Thank you for your information.  Which flavor of Linux are you running?



Whatever falls off the truck.   Actually two of the servers are compiled from scratch (including the firewall/router -- first part of security is being able to have NOTHING installed you don't want and to know exactly what your server is doing, and all the issues surrounding the particular version of each package you install).  The other two boxen are running Fedora because I was under time pressure.  I hate the Redhat config, because you almost always end up with crap you don't want (and crucial things missing, but it goes quite a bit faster than a from-scratch compile!).

Part of the reason I like Linux is because I'm banging different hardware.  I've cross-compiled it for a Freescale MPC5200 embedded controller, (PowerPC core), a Sparc Ultra2 (tier 2, officially unsupported by FreeBSD -- thanks, guys), and the usual commodity PC stuff.  First server I ever built up, though, was FreeBSD, from a Walnut Creek CD (in 1996).  I like some elements of their philosophy, but the religious fervor has soured me somewhat.


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## cesarin (Jul 18, 2008)

WD drivers have never died on me, neither Seagate
while in other hand, 2 maxtors have died on me, and the most awful one was a quantum fireball , not even out of the garantee and it died horribly.


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## RailRide (Jul 18, 2008)

Coincidentally (or maybe not) The Maxtor I had fail on me was also a Fireball model.

---PCJ


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## EQINOX (Jul 19, 2008)

I have run WD / fireballs and curently running the maxtor L6080P0 and in all my years of pc building and useing i have only had 2 HDs fail and they were both WD tho i suspect they were down to a durty powersuply, tho i have read rumors about the unreliabilty of the new WD drives but i hope they dont turn out to be tru


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## Dragoneer (Jul 19, 2008)

RailRide said:


> Coincidentally (or maybe not) The Maxtor I had fail on me was also a Fireball model.
> 
> ---PCJ


Maxtor has gotten a LOT better over the years. I'd trust their drives a lot more now. 2 to 3 years ago? Hell no.


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## Shyla (Jul 19, 2008)

Well also don't forget Seagate bought Maxtor, so Id hope the drives get better.

Just since folks have been mentioning it, Ive had over 20 different WD drives with no issues, Ive had IBM/Hitachis with no issues, Seagate use to be the coolest fastest drives.  Only failures I have had were 3 Maxtors, within 24 hours from 3 different venders, in one week.


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## XoPp (Jul 19, 2008)




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