| repak shawahb | |||||
| I suppose I'll just have to waterboard myself | |||||
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Thu, 16 Jul 2009
end of an era; stroker and The world is a different place. Last night, after a trip to Fry's, I replaced the last proud vestiges of positron Mk. III, the IBM Ultrastar DNES-318350 U2W SCSI boot drive (a whopping 18.2 Gb!). Not that it died, or anything; it's still running great, and I'm keeping it as a cold backup of my boot drive. The reason I replaced it is that the SCSI controller was unhappy when I put the computer into ACPI S3 (suspend-to-RAM), or more specifically when the computer resumed operation: it would timeout for almost a minute before doing a bus reset, and I was concerned that this could cause problems with filesystem consistency. Since I'm running XFS, I'm not taking any chances—as far as I can tell, it's somewhat less robust against corruption than EXT3. The replacement drive is a 500 Gb Hitachi Deskstar, née IBM Deathstar. These days the Hitachis have a better reputation and a 5 year warranty, plus I have my trusty old Ultrastar in case something goes wrong. Because I don't need much space on the boot partition, I decided to short stroke the drive for a bit better seek performance and thus faster boots. Basically, I made a 30Gb partition at the beginning of the disk, and left the rest to other partitions. Since the partition is small, the average seek time within the partition is much shorter than the average over the whole disk. The rest of the drive I devoted to a swap partition (kind of a waste, but whatever) and—horrors!—a Windows partition. I haven't run windows on positron since late 1998, which means I broke an even longer standing tradition than my 10 year old SCSI drive by installing it last night. I doubt I'll boot it at all until I start playing some fancy computer game that isn't happy enough on my T61, but it feels really wierd to see Windows booting. Also, even with a "fully updated" XP SP3 install CD, the install took longer and required more intervention (during and post install when it hadn't gotten my drivers right) than the last Ubuntu install I did (I'm not going to say it was harder than a debian install would be for the average person, but it was certainly more painful for me (in a "guilty conscience" kind of way, really)). I guess most people never install Windows since they just throw away their computer when it becomes too full of viruses, but it's nice to see just how good Ubuntu et al have gotten, especially when reflecting on the computer on whose earliest versions I ran a 1.0.2x kernel. (OK, there is nothing left of that machine but the name, but what's good enough for Theseus is good enough for me.) [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] |
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