Update: I tried the freeze the hard drive trick and the swap hard drive circuit board and neither worked. My guess is that the hard drive is EOL. Well, lesson learned and I’m glad that there was nothing important on that drive. Meh, in 6 months I won’t even think about it.

Several days ago, while I was away having eye lasik surgery, one of my hard drives failed. The probable cause was from not plugging in the computer to the battery backup UPS and from constant hard restarts from the power failing from multiple thunderstorms. The final cause was that the hard drive was 3 years old and nearing end of life.

Good News: Drive does not contain any important data or information that I can remember. I believe I might have duplicated data across drives, so there might be music files on this drive that I also have elsewhere.

Bad News:

1. The 1.5TB drive was not backed up.

   If I remember correctly, the music files that might be on this failed drive, was copied and duplicated elsewhere for redundancy sake. The iTunes information probably will be located again on the iCloud when I sign up for that, so that music is not lost. Any documents I had on this drive was not really important enough to keep. I didn’t have all that many documents or photos on this drive, so I was extremely lucky with that.

   I do need to double check and look at my other drive and make sure that I have everything. It is possible that since most of the files were copied from other existing drives that I’ll be able to (maybe) pull the existing older drive and pull the information off of that. The odds of that working is minimal since that drive may not exactly work after all of this time.

   It was an acceptable risk to lose everything since the data wasn’t important enough to warrant a backup. If I’m able to get the drive running, I’m planning on moving the documents first and then attempt to pull any remaining data off of the drive.

2. Drive head appears to be failing or failed.

   I don’t think the drive heads crashed into the drive platters, so it might be possible to retrieve the data off the platters by replacing the heads, but that is not something I’ll attempt. If it is impossible to retrieve the data off of the hard drive then I doubt I’m going to spend the money to retrieve the information. I’ll simply pull what I can from the older drives and build up my collection again over the next few years.

3. Other hard drive might be failing.

   I bought 2 1.5TB hard drives at the same time, 3 years ago. The second hard drive does have valuable information.

Lessons Learned

The only partial good news is that the hard drive that failed does not contain anything that I can’t afford to lose. True, it is inconvenient, but there are other solutions available that the data is not that big of a lost. After a few months, I’ll barely think about the lost. The other good news is that I’m finally getting my ass in gear and will buy a few externals for backing up my data. My photos, raw HD videos, documents, programming projects, other important files are all going to placed on the external after I buy it.

Right now, I’m going to back up my current existing drive to the 3 2TB hard drives and will replace the old 1.5TB with a SSD for primary boot drive. Once I receive the externals, I’m going to move my files to that as well. I think I’m also going to look at cloud solutions. I have about 3GB of pictures covering over 7 to 10 years of life. I’m thinking about uploading them to Facebook, Flicker, and maybe a data cloud service for the originals. I can’t afford to lose those pictures. As for the raw HD video. I probably can’t find a simple cloud solution that will store the RAW that is cheap. I have close to 900GB of RAW HD video.

I’m thinking about Rendering what I can to the highest quality and uploading to Youtube. That way if the raw AVC Video is lost, then at least the video still exists. I’ll probably upload my documents to Google Docs for storage and invest in a cloud data storage as well. The programming projects will probably be uploaded to github and regular cloud service.

I think the main reason I haven’t done any of this already, is time. Going through the pictures and uploading them takes time: tagging, cataloging, and finding pictures. Well, worth it, since it only needs to be done once. The problem for me is knowing which service will stand the test of time. I don’t want to invest in a cloud service that will die in 5 to 10 years. At least when I put something on a hard drive, internal or external, I know it will at least survive when I upgrade and buy a new one. Pulling from some cloud services are also difficult. If someone wanted to copy all of my pictures, they would have to go through each one and right click and save picture. I think in the future, this will most likely be made quicker and easier, but it lacking at the moment.

I’m lazy, if something is not immediately at my fingertips then it might not even exist. I don’t like having to go to a web site to see what pictures I have available. Many web sites do not allow you to reference pictures on other web sites. This should hopefully change in the future, but with all of the cloud services, it might be too daunting a task.

Solution

I’m freezing the hard drive and will attempt to plug the hard drive in after it is done. I bought some ice packs and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get some extra time out of the drive before it warms up and fails again.

If this solution does not work, then I’ll be spending some time pulling as much as I can from past hard drives. I’m hoping SpinRite will work well enough in pulling the information off as quickly as possible. However, I might be better off attempting to load Windows and doing it that way. I’m not sure if SpinRite will allow me to chose which directories to prioritize. If I have 20 to 40 minutes, that is not enough to pull 1TB of data off of the drive. I’ll be lucky to pull the 100 to 300GB of existing documents, music and (paid) downloaded games from various online providers. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to pull the 100 to 300GB and catalog the remaining disk files. Probably should get that program ready to list the files on the drive.

I’ll also need to find a program that works better than the normal Windows move operation. I don’t want to start copying a file or directory only to find out that one file or directory could not be read and halts the entire operation. Update: I found UltraCopier and KarenWare Directory Printer.

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Monitor prices have gone down considerably, since the time I bought my 24″ monitor. I’m still going to mount my current monitors on the walls and my TV as well. The monitors will be near eye level when sitting down and the TV will be above it. I’m not going to buy a new TV for the “office” room.

I’m going to budget around $700 on what hopefully should be two 27″ or 28″ LCD monitors. Well, I could always replace my 22″ with a 24″ for $200 and then spend $100 to mount the two 24″ monitors. It isn’t like 24″ is is small or anything, I just like big and given how much I can do with a 24″ monitor, I can only imagine I can see more with a 28″ monitor.

My long term (5+ years) goal is still to have OLED monitors and possibly a OLED TV. My short term will be to buy another 24″, replace my 22″ and mount both on the wall, then wait for OLED monitors to be mass produced. I also have to wait for the price to come down, because I’m not going to spend over a $1000 on a single monitor that will only be 19″.

The advantage, I believe with OLED monitors is that with the lightweight and thinness, I should just be able to “hang” the monitor on the wall and not mount. So ultimately, the short term goal is going to end up costing me more, because I’ll obsolete the mounting equipment after 5 to 7 years. Or, I think I could hopefully still use them and just hang the OLED monitors on them instead.

I have a year and a half before I can make the decision. By this time, OLED monitors should be already out and the prices known. At that point, it starts the countdown for a cheap and reliable OLED monitor for those who don’t have a lot or don’t wish to spend a lot of money. Well, the year 2012 will be creeping closer, so that will at least give some perspective on the prices.

Well, actually, I’m going to buy the mounting equipment within another month or two and mount the 22″ and 24″ monitors, but spaced out far enough to allow for 27″ monitors. I just need a drill and stud finder, then I need to buy the mounts.

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I’m thinking of buying a Netbook and putting Hack-n-Tosh on it to try out Mac OS X. I don’t have any aversion against it. It just seems that a lot of the users are fanboys who would fight to the death to defend it. In which case, the misinformation or distortion of Microsoft Windows.

I really, really hate defending something that I don’t feel anything about. I use Microsoft Windows, because it is easy to use, and when I was a gamer was a requirement for playing those games. The problem is that as I moved away from being a gamer, my choice of operating systems was no longer locked in. Alas, given the advancement of virtual machines, it is completely possible to run Windows on Mac OS X and have it not suck.

Well, my choice would be running different OS on a hypervisor and have them run all the time and just switch back and forth depending on what I need to do. If I want to play a game or use an application that only runs on Windows or better on Windows, then I want to use Windows. If I want to use rsync, program, or whatever, then I want to be able to use Mac OS X or Ubuntu. The problem I have with Linux is that it has issues with Audio and a few other problems.

Therefore, well, Mac OS X would be great, if you have the correct hardware to run it. That is right. You have to have the correct hardware to run it. The reason why Mac OS X doesn’t have hardware compatibility problems is that you don’t have hardware compatibility problems when you make and choose the hardware supported in your OS. Microsoft Windows has to support and does support far more hardware than Mac OS X has to. It seems that people ignore certain facts when it is inconvenient and yet point it out on another platform as a valid complaint.

What I really care about is productivity and I like the small form factor of netbooks and the cheap price. I do want to try out Mac OS X, but I don’t want to pay the higher costs. I will probably buy an actual Powerbook at some point. I like the 24″ iMac form. Really clean, computer components are built-in, and has some neat features. Unbelievable, I liked that it stayed on during an power outage, while all of the PCs powered down. That is really quite impressive.

Actually, it will be a while before I can buy a netbook and well, my plans to build another PC or server will have to wait another year or two. I do plan on upgrading my current PCs RAM to 8GB and buying Windows 7 Professional. To be honest, I’m liking Windows 7, so far, but I made a promise to not hate on Mac OS X until I’ve tried it for a few months or years.

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Linux is for die-hards. It is plain and simple.

Linux is still not simple enough for the average user who needs shit to just work. Don’t need to be in the middle of recording something and the sound crap out or playing music and it not work on their $30 to $150 device they just brought. There are some of us who will take the time, the hours to get it working, but even we are going to have our limits.

In the coming years, Linux will hopefully become easier as it always has and I believe the distributions are becoming smaller enough to focus on one or the other. I mean, when I last tried Linux RedHat distribution 5 or 6 years ago, I knew enough to get around, but not enough to really do anything useful (setup Wine? Nope. Was it worth setting up Wine? Probably not.)

I discovered the problem with forking projects and have several versions. The fact that Microsoft is one company and Apple is one company doesn’t seem to appear to make any amount of sense. For example, if you took everyone that was doing the ALSA drivers, the Pulse Drivers, the OSS drivers, etc and like, I don’t know, developed a single driver based off of one of those, then you might just have something that works and works consistency with majority of devices and in VM.

Another fact is that you have really two big Windowing Shells: KDE and Gnome. You will notice that Windows and Mac OS X only has one for their distributions. Which is the best one? You also have various smaller compact ones that will most likely force you to do more work, but will be compact, lightweight, and crash less frequently (not that the others crash frequently, just that it will be more stable).

Just think about if the developers put their heads together on just one and made one awesome! It would be one that developers building applications for would have to support. They wouldn’t have to choose between the QT or the Gnome API. I wouldn’t be using KDE or Gnome and wishing that I could use an application that works on the other.

I want stuff that just works and for the most part, Linux just work fine for what I’m doing right now. That is, if I don’t want to really do anything with sound or like test my graphics card. I’m not sure if I could go back to Windows, except for the 64-bit versions with 8GB of RAM. I think the problem is that with Windows, I’m constantly using more swap file than I need to use and on Linux, I’m barely using any. On Linux, I’ll need to use upwards to all my RAM before the swap is used. If I tried to do that on Windows, my system will run at a crawl as it tried to push the majority of my RAM usage to the page file.

I don’t know about you, but I get real irritated when I have 3.2GB and I’m using 2GB swap file and 1GB of actual RAM. So, I think I might go for the MacOS and run Windows in a VM. I believe Linux will eventually do what I want it in another 3 or 4 years, but by then, I might learn about a setting for Windows to not use the page file as much and it would be decent to use.

Well, that said, I won’t be buying a Mac, I’ll be building one. Also, it won’t be for another few months, I might need to buy specific parts for it. Actually, I could probably get away with having a PC for development and building a PC using Windows for Games and other Windows applications.

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ApacheLounge.com does not seem to be up any more. The site has been, at least to me a great boon for administration of the web servers I work with that run Windows. It is a lot easier to just download and grab the compiled versions than it is to have to compile them and test them. I’m not at the point where I trust applications I compiled on one Windows system to work correctly on another.

I think I’m at the point however, where I’m more comfortable with doing it that way. I can compile Apache and all of the modules I need on my system. The reason I don’t like using the official releases from apache.org is PHP. For a while running mod_php with Apache was causing the server to malfunction. Switching over to ApacheLounge.com Apache + FastCgi (mod_fcgi) with PHP has fixed it.

The server used to slope up and then cliff down, and repeat this process until it crashed and stopped working. After the switch to FastCGI, the server is a flat line for weeks. Well, after a restart it will creep up there, but for the most part it no longer slopes like a steep hill.

I do hope that the site comes back up or at least it will give me a reason to create my own automated solution to the site.

Updated: ApacheLounge.com has transitioned over to new owners and is back up! (See comments below) Sweetness!

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I was planning on building a new PC or two this Fall, but after spending as much money as I have, I’m going to not do that. Bills come first, then saving, then building new computers. I won’t have the money until I pay off my credit cards, then pay off my Federal taxes that I’ll eventually owe.

The good news is that I’ll be working on several projects, which might make some money from both ads and premium memberships. The bad news is that the projects won’t be finished until probably next year at the earliest. The even worse news is that the game projects probably won’t be making hardly any money at all for the first six months.

The cool news is that I’m going to have a lot of fun coding the projects and hopefully enter in some new paradigms along the way. They will be coded in PHP 5.3 and will be using WordPress as the core. The reason is that you can only recreate the user, registration, and administration wheel so many times before you start wasting your time doing so. If I’m going to get the games out the door as quickly as possible, I just need to focus on the game logic and design and forget about all of the extra stuff.

Back to the point. By the time I have the money, the next generation of CPU architecture will be available, and therefore I want to use that for my next few new machines. I’m looking forward to the GPU core on the CPU die and it will be interesting to see how many games develop for it. If it has the same opcodes as the Video cards, then it shouldn’t be too difficult. It will also be extremely fast.

I’ll be looking for a minimum of four cores, with one of them devoted to graphics. If that is out next year, then I’m going to build off of it. If not, then my gaming machine will have to wait another 6 months.

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I plan on building the file server and media server together, so I can have both machines up at the same time. It will be better motivation to build the file server, since it is extremely needed. I still plan to build both in the Fall, but it just means that it will probably take until Winter to complete the machines.

After those two are finished, I’ll still have my media PC, which I can use to test both servers. I still need to build a gaming PC, but since I don’t play games that much anymore, I think the priority of that is pretty low.

I’m thinking of upgrading my current 1.6 AMD processor in the media pc to something a little bit faster. It is annoying to be working and have to idle because the PC needs to catch up.

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I’ve decided the purpose for one of my PCs and what it will be used for. I’ve always wanted to have a PC, where anyone that comes over can use. I’ve had the PC for a number of years and besides just waiting for it to die or recycling it. I think it can be used to just display Pictures in a loop and Surfing the web.

Which, it is only a 1GHz processor of five years ago and I absolutely hated watching videos on it. Actually, most of the videos that I’ll have on the network won’t be able to be displayed because it would just take too much processing power.

Instead of having Pictures scatted around, I can just have a LCD monitor mounted on the Wall and hooked up to the PC. I’m not sure what the operating system will be yet. I’m thinking Linux, since I can strip it down to the absolute bare components.

I may be able to do that with Windows Vista, but the only catch there, is that the system probably won’t be able to handle it. I can’t wait until Windows 7 comes out for the MinWin to set it up. It will be this year, during the Fall.

However, if I can’t do the picture project going, then I’m just going to have it as an Internet machine for visitors, when they come over. Well, that is somewhat of a catch to that, since I’ll need to get my own place before I’ll even be able to have people come over. I think it would be totally interesting to have a video of fish floating around and play it.

It might be interesting to build a .NET application, which pulls the pictures in a loop, plays the video, and surfs the net and lock the machine down to where only those three are the only are possible.

I’m excited, because this box has been sitting around for ages and I’ve yet to have a purpose for it. I still might give it away to my sister, but I don’t think they will enjoy it as much.

I will probably hold off on buying a new case for it until I find out if it will even fit in the new case. If it does, then it will have a new case, a new operating system (I do have a legal copy of XP sitting around if it comes to that), and nothing else. It’ll be nice, because once I have the Windows Home Server up and running, the needs to have a huge hard drive in the machine is diminished.

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