Is this a common thing in machines that have multiple drives?
I just wonder about it sometimes. I used to have a twin drive PC with RAID. I used to lose one or the other 500GB disc once a year on average. That's why I got rid of it. It was costing me half a laptop to repair each time it happened, so I figured I'd actually buy the laptop instead.
Posted By: LoopysueIs this a common thing in machines that have multiple drives?
I just wonder about it sometimes. I used to have a twin drive PC with RAID. I used to lose one or the other 500GB disc once a year on average. That's why I got rid of it. It was costing me half a laptop to repair each time it happened, so I figured I'd actually buy the laptop instead.
It is an indirect cause. Having more drives doesn't increase the chance of a drive failing, but if the average life of a drive is 5 years, and you have 5 of them in the computer, then on average, one will fail every year, which makes it feel like drives have a shorter life span, while in reality, it is no different from having 5 computers side by side with one drive in each.
My server runs a raid setup with 5 drives, in addition to a couple of standalone disks for backup, SSD's for performance and such, so I do expect to have to replace drives fairly regularly. The drives are also at work 24/7, which also contributes to much more wear and tear than you would have on a desktop computer. I do run monitoring software, so I usually replace them when it is predicted they will fail, I don't wait until they actually fail. Sometimes, they can live for a year or more still in that predicted state, but I don't want to take that chance. I always also keep brand new disk around for spares, ready to replace immediately.
Posted By: LoopysueThey must have been cheap discs, or RAID must somehow put more stress on them.
Depending on the level of RAID, it will put a little more strain on the disks, but not significantly. Normally, I don't recommend RAID solutions in home PC's though, it just adds another layer of complexity and is usually not worth it. For a two disk raid, your are stuck with either RAID 0 or 1. Raid 0 isn't really raid at all, because it provides no redundancy, it is just raid technology used to pool all the space from two drives into one volume, with the added disadvantage that if one drives goes bad, you loose all the data on both. Raid 1 is mirroring, which means you basically pay for two disks to have the storage space of one. You've got the redundancy, great, but it isn't a replacement for backup (several things can happen to the machine that effectively causes the loss of both drives anyway), and if you need to keep backup anyway, that extra redundancy is usually wasted for the average home user. Great for servers, and for important workstations at work, but not for standard PC's.
This was Raid 1 - two discs mirroring one another. It proved useful because the discs always failed at different times. The greatest pressure was on my purse.
It was a machine bought for me by a friend about 10 years ago, when 500MB was really huge, and RAID was dead impressive :P
Posted By: LoopysueThis was Raid 1 - two discs mirroring one another
I had one of those back in the times myself too (Two 60GB drives I believe). I stopped doing it when I needed to replace my motherboard, and realized the raid implementation were proprietary, so I couldn't read the raid discs on the new motherboard at all, only option was to reformat them and start anew, problems you don't get with a single disc. Add to that the raid implementation on consumer motherboards are really shitty, even today (real raid solutions have battery backups in case of power failure during write and a dedicated processor to handle the raid operations, consumer solutions don't have either, just offloads the workload to the system CPU instead.)
about 10 years ago, when 500MB was really huge
I clearly remember when 500MB was really huge. It was a bit more than 10 years ago though
I remember my first computer that had a hard drive. My Amiga A3000, one 52 meg and one 105 meg SCSI hard drives. And it was considered on the I-Amiga listserv email list I had an excessive amount of space.
Something seems to be seriously wrong with the core hardware in my server. I am not sure what exactly, but I suspect the motherboard is bad. I think this may also have contributed to the higher than normal disk failures I have been experiencing the last 5 months.
I've ordered a new server to replace the old one, but it will take a week or two to arrive. I'll hopefully manage to keep the old one running until I have the new one up, but if you experience any interruptions for the atlas website in the near future, this would be why.
So, just got my new server box. I am currently in the process of testing it to make sure everything is ok, and then I will install it and get the atlas (and everything else) moved over from the old server. I hope I will get everything done tonight, and that will result in a bit of a downtime for the atlas (up to a few hours).
So, the new server is installed, and everything is running off it now. That is, things took a bit more time than planned, so it is only running with a temporary setup with some manual routines and such, I need to tweak a bunch of configuration, but at least everything seems to be working fine so far. I guess I'll just have to see what I wake up to in the morning. Unless something major unforeseen happens though, future service breaks while I tweak stuff should be very short.
For those interested, the new box is running a Core i9-7940x CPU, 14 cores (28 threads) @ 3.1/4.4GHz. 128GB of RAM (Quad Channel). Note that the box does not just run the atlas website, it has loads of other tasks as well.
Of course, the cat immediately claimed the new box as his the moment it arrived: [Image_11761]
Posted By: LoopysueIs that the very same cat who can manage to stand on ALT+F4 at the same time?
Yup. He has also thought me that I had previously misunderstood the term keyboard shortcut. Obviously, a keyboard shortcut is when walking across the keyboard is a shorter distance than walking around it (even if you only save a couple of inches).
As for the island, I'll leave the decision up to you, but in my view, it should probably be kept just a tad smaller than the islands already on the map (to justify why it didn't show up on the continent map)
I would like to work on the northern entrance area of Basher Bay. About 25 x 20 miles, with some details around the light house and the keeps.
edit: I downloaded Quenten's map of Fisher Island to make sure I had the latest. I'll stop short of what to my eyes looks like a marsh area north of the map I posted here. This is really a wonderful map of Fisher Island, thanks Quenten !
edit 2: Hmmm... now it looks like a brush area. Anyway, I'll stop short of it for my overall map.
I made a small improvement to the search feature on the atlas website. You can now also search for text in a map. Great for finding that over-world map containing a particular city or counting how many maps contain a temple to the spider queen. This search option searches through all text associated with a map, such as the text labels on the map, but also the description and other map notes.
You've always been able to do this in the actual .fcw atlas, but I've now also started bundling it with an index file to make searches faster, with any map open, just point the text search dialog to $..\index.idx, using this index files makes searches MUCH faster than having CC3+ search through the actual map files. (The website search uses this same index file).
For those not familiar with a CC3+ index file, it is basically a file containing all the text of all the map files in a certain directory (and subdirectories), and it can easily be created with the INDEX command.
792 views for my posts about Interactive Atlas on Dragon's Foot. ( I subtracted my post number on the subject there and the times I remember looking but not replying. )
Comments
I just wonder about it sometimes. I used to have a twin drive PC with RAID. I used to lose one or the other 500GB disc once a year on average. That's why I got rid of it. It was costing me half a laptop to repair each time it happened, so I figured I'd actually buy the laptop instead.
My server runs a raid setup with 5 drives, in addition to a couple of standalone disks for backup, SSD's for performance and such, so I do expect to have to replace drives fairly regularly. The drives are also at work 24/7, which also contributes to much more wear and tear than you would have on a desktop computer.
I do run monitoring software, so I usually replace them when it is predicted they will fail, I don't wait until they actually fail. Sometimes, they can live for a year or more still in that predicted state, but I don't want to take that chance. I always also keep brand new disk around for spares, ready to replace immediately.
It was a machine bought for me by a friend about 10 years ago, when 500MB was really huge, and RAID was dead impressive :P
I clearly remember when 500MB was really huge. It was a bit more than 10 years ago though
Actually that's a typo. I meant GB, not MB!
I blame the fact I have flu at the moment!
I've ordered a new server to replace the old one, but it will take a week or two to arrive. I'll hopefully manage to keep the old one running until I have the new one up, but if you experience any interruptions for the atlas website in the near future, this would be why.
Sounds like you might need a bit of downtime yourself after all that!
For those interested, the new box is running a Core i9-7940x CPU, 14 cores (28 threads) @ 3.1/4.4GHz. 128GB of RAM (Quad Channel).
Note that the box does not just run the atlas website, it has loads of other tasks as well.
Of course, the cat immediately claimed the new box as his the moment it arrived:
[Image_11761]
As for the island, I'll leave the decision up to you, but in my view, it should probably be kept just a tad smaller than the islands already on the map (to justify why it didn't show up on the continent map)
edit: I downloaded Quenten's map of Fisher Island to make sure I had the latest. I'll stop short of what to my eyes looks like a marsh area north of the map I posted here. This is really a wonderful map of Fisher Island, thanks Quenten !
edit 2: Hmmm... now it looks like a brush area. Anyway, I'll stop short of it for my overall map.
You've always been able to do this in the actual .fcw atlas, but I've now also started bundling it with an index file to make searches faster, with any map open, just point the text search dialog to $..\index.idx, using this index files makes searches MUCH faster than having CC3+ search through the actual map files.
(The website search uses this same index file).
For those not familiar with a CC3+ index file, it is basically a file containing all the text of all the map files in a certain directory (and subdirectories), and it can easily be created with the INDEX command.
Xinxing Region
Basher Bay North
Old Grouchy Tower Environs
Old Grouchy Tower Exterior
Old Grouchy Tower Interior
Old Grouchy Tower Basement
Old Grouchy Tower Sub Basement
Old Grouchy Tower Dungeon