[X] My Assistant

I put my desktop PC on its side (horizontally) the top of my desk (on the shelf that stands over it, anyway) with the rear panel facing out. Going to be annoying to burn CD's, but other than that it's a marked improvement for ease of access to I/O.

Also I lost my two 3/4" mono phono -> RCA jack adapters in the move, so my MT-32 is out of commission until I go to a music store or find the damn things. It uses two 3/4" unbalanced phono connectors for stereo out for some reason or another. If they were balanced it'd make sense.

Also got my (used, 2tb samsung evo) SSD in the mail today. SMART info claims it was used 20 hours. IDK if there's a way to fake that or not, but I'm copying my HDD's image to it.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 19 2022, 23:02

I flashed my laptop's boot disk image to the new SSD, and am currently writing the secondary HDD's backup to my old disk (so that it becomes my new secondary storage).

To do this, I'm writing a 1TB disk image to a 2TB HDD. I started 15½ hours ago. I've written 266 GiB in that time. The current ETA for completion according to 'pv' is one day and fifteen hours from now.

Never buy an SMR drive, kids.
Edit: pic
(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/rpsol0Z.png)

I really fucking hope the power stays on for the next two days. Aren't most modern tape drives significantly faster than this?

If the power goes out, I suppose I could try to use 'dd' to try to pick back up roughly where I left off... but it'd be a pain in the ass.

Will definitely be checking SMART when this is done as well, in case any new bad sectors were discovered while rewriting about half of the disk.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 21 2022, 06:40

Never buy an SMR drive, kids.

Real wisdom.

my laptop is dying

Update.
47%. 26 hours remain.
(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/JiW8e7B.png)
This is agonizing.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 21 2022, 14:48

I didn't think SMR drives were that shit. Normally I'd assume a drive was dying if it was taking that long.

I didn't think SMR drives were that shit. Normally I'd assume a drive was dying if it was taking that long.

I bought one of those 8TB SMR seagate external drives from Costco for $119 each.
[www.costco.com] https://www.costco.com/seagate-backup-plus-....100458004.html

It has a ton of wasteful rewrites if there is any fragmentation. That naturally occurs when reformatting an SMR drive, so if you ever try a full format on an SMR drive, it will take a very long time (1.5 days on 8TB costco drive when I tried it) and have an excessive amount of reads and writes to the drive. Of course, that counts against the warranty quantity of annual R/W bytes and cycles.

However, if the SMR drive is newly formatted or isn't fragmented, new files written to it are reasonably fast. The specs say 120 MB/sec and this is correct as I can get a sustained 90MB/sec to 128MB/sec for 50GB file transfers. It writes fast if there is no fragmentation AND it is appending to the very end of that gigantic long shingle. Append, append, append, it keeps appending fast. CostBut an SMR drive is a terrible thing to use if any churning occurs such as torrents, or if you delete and add picture files frequently. You won't notice it for small files because SMR drives usually have a bunch of DRAM to hold the bytes (so that the operating system is freed up from waiting) while the drive itself thrashes around for a bunch more seconds to finish writing the file.

It's good for backup storage, but since windows like to obnoxiously write last usage times to files, I wouldn't consider using an SMR drive as a read-mostly driver either. I figure sooner or later all that churning to rewrite the overhead metadata shingles for the files being read is going to do something bad. So it's more like a write to it, command it to dismount, then remove it type deal. SMR drives suck. All that extra whipsawing of the drive heads for shingle management cannot be good.

You cannot dare to defragment an SMR drive. I tried that and it churned forever. The only way to defrag it is to copy all the files off, then command a quick reformat on it to free up all the blocks. Then copy all the files back to the drive. Ha ha ha.

SMR is basically a gimmick drive. If $119 appeals to you for a write once, read seldom storage drive, the Costco external 8TB is a reasonably good deal in my opinion. It writes fast as long as there is no fragmentation. So if you simply keep adding more files to it until it is full, you will be happy with its speed.

This post has been edited by Anime Janai: May 21 2022, 15:34

When I heard something by the name of Luna had collapsed & caused billions $ losses, I immediately thought of that cryptocurrency that was being sold on Shopee Malaysia. Turns out it was a actually a different cryptocurrency called Luno. Also there used to be an official store for Luno the last time I checked 1-2 years ago. Now it's not appearing on the search results.

When I heard something by the name of Luna had collapsed & caused billions $ losses,

You mean this crypto which lost billions and basically died due to a hostile attack by a malevolent actor:

I just decided abort the write and do an ATA secure erase on the disk first, just as an experiment to see if that made write speeds improve when actually copying the image as much as the above post claims for initial writes.

ETA ~6 hours on that erase, btw. At least according to what 'hdparm -I' said (370 minutes).

I concur with almost everything uareader said above about SMR drives, by the way. They are champion thrashers. Definitely mount with 'noatime' as well. But they don't use DRAM; they use non-volatile SSD-type flash memory to queue writes in case power gets lost.

I didn't think SMR drives were that shit. Normally I'd assume a drive was dying if it was taking that long.

They are unfathomably shit. They are also louder than other drives because they basically never stop thrashing. And yes, torrenting is basically impossible on them.

If they are empty/new and you write them sequentially like a tape they are sort of okay.

After I write the image (again) and resize the partitions I'm going to try running a trim on it (it supports trim because it allocates things in ways similar to how SSD's do), since I'll be re-writing a lot of zeroes or unimportant bytes with this disk image probably.

I should also try to write/find something that searches for files that have the same checksums/are duplicates and hardlinks them to save some space.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 21 2022, 17:30

I concur with almost everything uareader said above about SMR drives, by the way.

You're greatly overestimating me if you really think I could have said anything about such a high level discussion. Check who was talking (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

The idea that SMR drives are best used as expensive WORM media is both funny and depressing considering how much of a clusterfuck it is to determine if a given drive is SMR or not.

You mean this crypto which lost billions and basically died due to a hostile attack by a malevolent actor:

Yup. That's it.

You mean this crypto which lost billions and basically died due to a hostile attack by a malevolent actor:

The issue is that it was near basically a ponzi scheme. They pegged the interest rate way too high and didn't allow it to adjust and it could only be stable as long as more money was coming in.

Academics had theorized and modeled potential attacks against stable coin algorithms exactly like Luna for years. So the attack was modeled out, and obviously people were just waiting for the market conditions to emerge that would enable them to viably take advantage.

The Luna devs did not thing to mitigate this risk vector and relied on traditional financial risk mitigation strategies, which have failed in the past. They didn't look at the maths of the attacks which had been published to adopt sufficient counter measures.

Its like MtGox all over again. Financially expands too rapidly, and decisions are centralized but without taking on enough technical and governance support and then become vulnerable to an attack. Also like MtGox, realizing they had fucked up beyond belief the luna devs took measures to limit their liability after the crash without sufficient disclosure which could lead to charges.

You're greatly overestimating me if you really think I could have said anything about such a high level discussion. Check who was talking (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

whoopsie.

I meant jamal, then.

I "secure erased" the 2TB disk (too six hours) and then wrote the 1tb image in around two or three. So yeah, definitely shit for rewriting when already populated. Maybe running 'blkdiscard (device node)' or even 'rm -rf (drive root); fstrim (drive root)' would have been faster than the secure erase, but I only thought of those options after I'd started the erase.

In any event, that HDD is now my secondary, and I have one more terabyte of storage than I did before. Also, I ran an 'fstrim' on the newly imaged drive partition since I know there was some free space on it still that had probably been 'allocated' by the imaging process.

Also I used 'rdfind' and cleared up about 110GiB of duplicate files on my '/home' partition by creating hardlinks whenever bit-perfect identical files were found.

I will be trying to use a perceptual image hasher to clean up additional image duplicates soon; I have some helper scripts for that but I still have to be there to arbit which image is "closer to the source" in the case where there's more than one. If a PNG and JPEG look identical right down to the noise for instance, it means the JPEG was probably converted to a PNG and the PNG can be deleted. It also checks exif data and such, though.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 22 2022, 17:38

LEL Western digital Red... PRO. Pro just means you pay more to ensure its not SMR.

LEL Western digital Red... PRO. Pro just means you pay more to ensure its not SMR.

Red Plus is also PMR (perpindicular).
But yes, that's the basic principle.

WD swings this as "additional choices for consumers."

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 23 2022, 20:14

Wow, its up to a $100 premium for CMR. This defeats the purpose of WD Red being the balance between performance and storage size for the $$$. Also seems you are still a bit screwed if you want reliable 5400rpm drives with decent performance.

Lol one of the suppliers I use, is just like.... fuck WD Red too many returns. We will only stock Pro and some red plus drives.

They are stocking more of the Seagate CMR drives. Though Seagate is also now starting to do Barracuda PRO / SMR


What are these "AI' drives. Do they have more advanced algorithms for writing to the drive or something?

Seems like they are drives marketed towards authoritarian surveillance states ROFL.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: May 24 2022, 01:46

(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/yRzZkgW.jpg)
I don't like mpv, but I like that statement.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 24 2022, 03:58

I don't like mpv, but I like that statement.

is that the actual devs saying that?


Meanwhile; Humanity is pointless now.