It's a new age in IDE disks. Volume is up (way up) and quality is down (ahem, not sure how far). I've noticed that disks last about 2 years. In fairness, it's often the power supplies which go first.
After loosing too many IDE hard disks I decided to switch to RAID on my file servers. I thought this would be hard but it turns out to be easy. The first thing I did was buy a new, cheap PCI IDE controller. Then I bought two 80gb hard disks (Maxtor). I made them both masters and plugged them into the PCI dual IDE controller. I learned this trick from a friend who claimed it was easier to install a new HD to upgrade linux than install over an existing install (he was right).
Convincing linux to use two hard disks as a single RAID-1 array was easy. Interestingly I had one disk fail the first night I installed it. It turns out my power supply had a lot of connectors daisy chained with a lot of fans on one leg and the IDE drive did not like this. I cleaned up the disk power distribution and the disk was happy again. At least I got to test the RAID array. It noticed the drive was down, took it out of service and kept working. Bravo.
One thing to note. I've had one sever for about 5 years and in that time two (2) IDE disks have failed and none of the IBM SCSI disks in it have failed. My impression is that SCSI disks are just plain better and more reliable.
So, I'm now completly sold on RAID-1 for file servers. I won't go back to risking my data to a sinlge IDE disk, even with nightly backups.
Does your TV run linux?
Your next one might. It seems Sony is going to deploy about 30 tv's all of which will run Linux.
Certainly my TIVO runs linux.
Is my car next?
I think I've seen this in the news before, but I liked it so much I thought I'd add it in.
This is a device that detects when a radial saw is about to cut your finger and instantly stops the saw. The demo (on a hot dog) is amazing.
SawStop LLC was formed to make active devices for woodworking equipment.
It would be great to work for a place like that and feel really good about what you are doing, instead of say, helping exploit low paid Chinese workers while helping to polute the Chinese countryside all to create a lower cost product.
While talking with some friends about a person looking to 'retrain' as a Linux admin (after 21 years as an IT person), someone made a humorous comment.
I had been ranting about Walmart employees being the largest group of comsumers of free state health care (because they get no health coverage from their employeer).
He suggested the person become a Linux admin for Walmart in China while, at the same time, trying to organize a union.
That seemed to summarize my views perfectly :-)
I personally this it's shameful that the nation's largest employeer is 'taxing' people like me who pay state income tax. It appears I'm personally subsidizing the Walmart corporation.
Here another article about corporations free-loading off the state.
I found an interesting article in EE Times about Philips and 90nm fab. It talked about the upcoming LPC3000 familty of ARM cpu's from Philips, with biult in flash and ram. Looks like it has a ARM926F core and 64k of sram.
I've been doing some PIC programming lately. I really love Microchip's parts. Simple, cheap, effective. The 18F series is my current love. The 18F458 has lots of flash, a CAN controller, serial an a little RAM. I wired one up to a Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip and write a simple TCP stack for it. Amazing huh? Other have done this before me, but I was amazed how easy it was to do and how robust the part is.
Now I have a simple ethernet device which does serial, parallel, CAN for very cheap. Can't beat that.
Copyright 2002 J Bradford Parker