The Hound Of The Baskervilles
This is a book that has flown very low on the radar of North American readers; I became aware of it via the excellent Forbidden Planet UK blog, a great spot for European works in English. The Hound Of The…
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Mechanics: A Love & Rockets Graphic Novel
This is the story of an accidental purchase of a signed and numbered book from the 1980s. I was rummaging among the discount trade paperback section of my local comic shop when I came across Mechanics: A Love & Rockets…
Daytripper
Nothing about this book from the outside interested me in the least. When this collection was published site after comics site sang its praises so I decided to pick up Daytripper from Vertigo. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: What are the…
SMB Server Comparison
Blast from the past: originally published September 25th 2001. When I originally conceived of this article, I planned for two classes of server; a budget machine of $1500 and something decent for $3000. After researching the manufacturer’s web sites and…
Cook Pasta In A Frying Pan
I saw a post recently on Chow that made me very skeptical: cook pasta in a frying pan, just covering the pasta with cold water and cooking on high until tender. This goes against all thinking on pasta cooking:…
RAID Cluster Size
Blast from the past: originally published in 2003.
Testing RAID cards is a long and arduous process. The most difficult part was deciding on a standard cluster size for all cards. While the Promise cards can have from 8k to 2048k, Adaptec’s limit is 128k, and 3ware’s is 64k. All cards default to 64k cluster size, so who am I to argue? Just for comparison sake, I ran the Promise FastTrak100 with three cluster sizes to see the difference.
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RAID Cache Size
Blast from the past: originally published in 2003.
Cache plays an integral part in RAID types that use parity or error checking and correcting (ECC). How much cache to put on a RAID card to get the best performance is a tricky bit of business: the natural reaction is to max it out. Below is a comparison of benchmarks using three sizes: 64, 128 and 256 MB PC133 SDRAM on a Promise FastTrak SX4000 with IBM DeskStar 75GXP 20 GB drives.
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Entertainment PC
Blast from the past: originally published June 1st 2001. Being a computer technician and networking professional, I have quite a few computers at home. The problem is what to do with those old Pentium machines that just can’t keep up…
Windows Product Activation
Blast from the past: originally published February 4th 2002. So much has been made of Windows XP product activation, with every major PC magazine carrying a feature article and countless online rants, that I felt it was covered to death. The…