The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Agreed. After posting that, it occurred to me that the only TRUE backup, would be off-site, and independent. And the more there are, the more safe. Even 100 drives in raid 1 does not mean SAFE.
Could you imagine? 100 drives failing simultaneously? I shudder at the thought LOL! Or having to rebuild said array in general :S

 

Like I say - the more drives you have, the more likely it is to lose data by other means -
if you have some spare time, have a watch of this

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k

A good example of a high-end system used by a technology professional where mistakes led to a very nasty situation, that ended up well, but not without what I'm sure was a very costly data recovery operation, something that's out of the price range of the average home user.

 

Interesting entertaining video. Almost felt cold sweats for the guy lol
Sounds like he had a VERY complex array going. I can't imagine the day where I would need to employ something so elaborate. Though I do appreciate and see the need for the industry to do so

There's a guy who has likely learned a valuable lesson!

 

RAID 50 isn't enormously complex - but the point is rather, because it happens to people like that, don't think it won't happen to you

 

Raid 5 not so much, but all the hardware, and multiple drives, makes troubleshooting more complex.

Oh I definitely know it could happen to me LOL

I'm now tempted for multiple external backups. But I'm kind of rolling the dice, and hoping the price of both 6TB and 8TB drives come down. Or perhaps even larger drives released. Which would no doubt lower the price of current modern offerings

 

I highly doubt you are likely to see much development in the cost / size of mechanical drives. The technology has pretty much run its course. 2TB disks still cost more than they did 5 years ago, the only difference is that 8TB (consumer) and 10TB (enterprise) disks are available. The 8TB disks are fairly appropriately priced considering the rest of the industry, but I'm only using one so far as it's still a pretty hefty outlay for a single disk - certainly the most I've ever paid.

 

I spent $300 on my first 1TB drive. Which I still have by the way A few reallocated sectors, but still serves me well. It's more a buffer drive, than a storage drive though
What did you spend on the 8TB? I'll admit I was desperate for the 1TB at the time, and am able to get by without spending so much now. $200 is closer to my limit now.

Keep in mind, necessity is the mother of all inventions. Our technology is constantly demanding bigger and bigger drives. More and more redundancies. People are highly innovative when they need to be. I would not be surprised to see 100TB drives within 10 - 15 yrs. Granted, they will likely be a new technology.

 

Pre-tax my WD80EFZX worked out at $353, so £295 including tax here.
A drive with reallocated sectors is a bit of a time bomb. Eventually you'll find something it can't retrieve due to those bad sectors, and it's all downhill from there! It's difficult to SMART monitor disks when there aren't any proper tools that can handle 20 disks in a machine at once, plus obviously the backup disks can't be monitored unless they're attached, but if I spot a disk with bad sectors, it gets replaced in pretty short order - when I procrastinate on that, it usually ends up with me losing data on the disk I wanted.

There are plenty of reasons to have bigger disks, otherwise large file servers wouldn't exist - everybody would be using a disk or two in their PC. The fact that manufacturers are resorting to things like Helium-filled casings tells me that mechanical disk storage is running out of ideas - there is every reason now to store more data than ever, I'd argue that there's been far more of an increase in need for storage than there as been for processing power in a desktop machine, yet the maximum capacity of mechanical disks has only gone from 4TB to 8TB in almost three years and prices have hardly changed at all. The first 100TB disks will almost definitively be solid state. That is the only market where improvements are being made at a reasonable pace.

 

Sam, that video is kind of a joke. He was doing datacenter-class storage, in a home built machine, and had no idea what he was doing with his disk array. He got called out on it in detail a while ago. His hardware is hardly high-end in comparison to what he was tasking it with. He's for sure a smart guy, and a respected professional, but he's a rank amateur in some areas. He simply never set it up for proper redundancy, and I'm pretty sure I remember him admitting that in the video or subsequent videos. Fair enough. Everyone's entitled to a few mistakes.

Proper usage of RAID should ensure near bullet-proof data storage. Law of averages basically says expect at least two to go at the same time. I remember reading a few articles on it in the last year or so, but consensus seems to be that RAID is workable as long as an entire array isn't destroyed. I'd imagine RAID 50 or 60 would be enough for most. It can go as complex as you want.

Personally used to help maintain a RAID 60+1 array when I worked helpdesk at a local software developer. Quadruple redundancy for all on-site storage. Double redundancy from each RAID 6, with two RAID 6 arrays striped across RAID O. Then that array in RAID 1 with an identical array. I believe they called it "Nested RAID". You basically had to lose IIRC 4 drives at once to render it inoperable. Possibly more. It used 32 x 2TB drives in a single rack. Plus they had an offsite backup. I wasn't an Admin and it really wasn't my job to know much about it. Most I ever did was swap out dead disks and route cables. Cabling in most server rooms is a nightmare.

I agree though that data is never safe. The only true fool-proof backup is etching the 1's and 0's in stone. Consumer storage is relatively reliable though. Never found myself losing tons of data as long as I take a look at SMART once in a while. As far as monitoring multiple drives, MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition can give you a full list of drives with SMART statistics next to them. It's also a damn sight more capable than Windows Disk Management.

I'm no seasoned storage pro though. Most I've ever run at once in my home is about 10 drives. With no redundancy. The drives in my PC are all less than 6 months old as well.

 

Agreed - I was quite surprised at how that was handled given his reputation. But nonetheless the fact that his situation existed proves that there will be a lot of similar cases out there. I would like to argue that the systems we deal with at work are far more resilient as they have both VSC and offline backups, as well as second-site replication for not just the data but also some of the backend hardware. The point of me linking it wasn't that 'even professionals lose data' (although they do), it's more that there are plenty of screwups that cause data loss even with far more sophisticated systems than a desktop PC with a RAID 1 array.
To add to that - I know around a dozen people who have used RAID arrays with the intention of redundancy instead of (or as well as) performance. As far as I know, only one of them has not lost data due to some sort of mishap with the array. While on average their loss rate may still be lower than if they were using individual disks like I do, it goes to show that as said, RAID is a tool to reduce the labout cost of replacing faulty disks, not a means of protecting valuable data. A disk in a RAID 5 array goes, no worries - swap the disk out and let the machine rebuild itself, it's a few minutes of labour. Multiple disks or the array goes, you'd best hope you have backups, but if you do, you're on a similar workload to if you weren't using RAID and had a disk fail, unless the array is fairly extensive. If it is a large array in production, one might argue you ought to have a second system on standby and not just data backup to minimise downtime, hence why we do it (I say 'we', our datacentre supplier does it).

As it stands between my live disks and my backups I run just short of 60 disks. - if you count those in the other machines it works out just over 60. Not including a dozen or so older, smaller disks that have already been retired. Until the autumn of last year, my last DLE (data loss event) was in 2012 - when I got my first 3TB disks and didn't realise the RocketRAID controller in my machine didn't support 3TB disks - I only discovered this when I had more than 2.2TB of data on the disk as it seemed to work perfectly up until then, then once it hit that point, the GPT headers corrupted and that was the end of that. After that I confined myself to using 2TB disks until I found a controller that dealt with that issue, hence upgrading to the Adaptec 71605E. Since then I didn't actually have any disks fail until late last year, when suddenly three failed at once - 'Emerald', the 2TB 'Misc' disk in my gaming PC that stored some essential personal data which was backed up, and some random other stuff that wasn't. Fortunately it only developed enough bad sectors to make explorer keep crashing when accessing certain areas. I was able to retrieve everything relevant before I retired it and replaced it with the current 4TB, 'Ariel'.
'Expansion' the 2TB drive fulfilling the role of 'TV 5' in my server also started throwing errors accessing certain files - by the time I had a replacement drive to displace it, half the data on it was showing corrupt - the number of bad sectors showing in SMART was enormous. Copying any data off it was written off as a bad job, and the replacement TV5, another 4TB 'Rhea' was populated from my 1TB backup disks of it instead - only a day or two's changes lost from that one, which were updated again from the FTP as the data hadn't been cleared off the remote server.
The third disk to fail in short order was 'Illusion', the 750GB 7200.10 which was the games drive for my old LAN PC (the silver NZXT) but is still used as my 'second desk PC' until the point at which I'm comfortable for the new LAN PC (the white Fractal design atop the desk) to take over. I didn't lose much as most of it was just installed game files, but I think I did lose my saved games from when I did another run through of RollerCoaster Tycoon a year or so back, which was a bit disappointing, but that's on me, I should have backed them up
The Seagate was the only 'proper' disk failure - started making loud clicking noises and became invisible to Windows, but at 9 years of age, it was being run well beyond its design life anyway. It's temporarily been replaced with my old WD1001FALS which has been sitting idle since being displaced by its 2TB equivalent back in 2012. It too is now almost 7 years old, but I'm reluctant to spend too much money on this machine as I'm not sure how much more use it will get. The WD1001FALS is quite noisy for vibration in the aluminium case though, so if the machine is to be revamped then it may get displaced by another SSD.

 

Agreed about solid state standing the best chance of reaching 100TB. And frankly, I don't believe I'd trust mechanical storage at that size. They'd be hard pressed to convince me of its viability anyhow.

 

Well Sam, nice looking workspace. I was going to say when you talked about the empty area bottom left - "yeah, what about some legroom.?" I would say, "Clean the carpet then, and leave it empty! Stretch out a bit."

I didn't watch the video - I think when I'm in a good mood to scare myself, that's when I'll do it.

I was running your Raid 1, Kevin, for a long time on the other tower (which animated Left 4 Dead ) but on this compaq core 2 duo the bios is too simplistic for that - sata are in ide-only mode - and none of the silicon image soft raid cards will work - so no raid at all.

I have the one enterprise 1TB drive, currently running at 40 degrees according to HD Sentinel, with the two partitions, plus another 1 TB enterprise drive, currently running at 39 degrees, in the machine just for backup, and another enterprise, in a box, for a clone every 3 months. The enterprise are rated to 50 degrees.

I am trying to figure out how to make work an acronis differential backup system done weekly.

I did like the raid 1 - and I kind of see Kevin's point - it always seemed to provide an extra level of redundancy against just plain disk failure, barring power surge, motherboard blowing up, etc.

Yes, it wasn't backup, but despite those things that can take down several drives at once, which thankfully never happened, it did provide a certain level of safety. I do have an external large drive sitting here, always attached but usually turned off, for backup of critical files. Every couple months I did a full clone to one in a box.

I was not running enterprise drives at that time, and several times I got blue screens - and then one drive did go bad. But I never went down for a second because the other drive in the raid 1 mirror kept on running.



I haven't heard back from you Jeff about any great games out there that I might have missed, so there probably aren't any.

I didn't quite understand, Sam, about why you don't want to post a full-size screenshot? But you know what, that camera image you just posted about your workspace was pretty awesome - how about a camera image of a screenshot? In other words, although we know it won't capture the intensity - take a game you like and then see if the camera captures some of the detail of that 4k monitor. Probably won't work. Well, screenie then.

I'm getting ready to go up to LA. In the meantime I got the wild idea of being a grenadier again for a few minutes - some close-in brutal action in Arma3.

I got about 30 minutes in before it froze up due to the heat - it's 96 in the trailer right now. I really shouldn't even have tried to go on until tonight. But I just wanted to grenade some opfor again where they all come back and try to kill my sergeant and the other guy down in the hole with him, and of course yours truly.

Wow was I rusty. They got me good about 5 times. But finally after about 15 minutes I was lobbing those 11 grenade rounds with reasonable accuracy, and there was only one bad guy left - and my two buddies were still alive - when the machine froze.

That was a reasonably satisfactory Arma3 fix for today.

Rich

EDIT: Wow I put it on for a minute - just enough time to see that these are some of the guys who do a really good job on tech reviews! I know these guys!! This definitely looks like it will be worth watching in full.

 

The LinusTechTips guys do a lot of surprisingly amateur-ish stuff and don't seem to be very good at planning. Watch em hack apart a heatsink trying to fit a proprietary rackmount PC, when there are plenty of purpose made heatsinks for said purpose, and... yeah. That guy is basically a homebuilder like us who was lucky enough to get involved in the right group of people. Obviously learning as he goes. Not to say there isn't some really great practical advice from that channel. It was his episode on AIO liquid setups that led to my using a Pull-only fan setup on my rad. He's no dummy.

Am not hurting with any of my drives. I let the ones in the secondary PC spin down when not in use, which is often. Usually only one drive in use at once. Since they aren't accessed very often it saves on wear and tear, and keeps the hours low. Replaced my old pair of 1TB WD10EADS SATA2 drives with a pair of brand new 1TB WD10EARS SATA3 drives with double the cache. Currently my oldest drives are the pair of 1TB WD10EARX drives, which are about 3 or 4 years old. The WD1001FALS I'm using as its OS drive is dated now, being 32MB SATA 2, but it's okay on hours and only about 3 years old as well. Most of my drives are less than 5,000 hours and under a year old.

Everything gets perfect SMART ratings so far *knock on wood*.

 

Wow, Jeff, your drives are in good shape. As I recall, Kevin doesn't have too many drives. I have quite a few - outdated old things - but just a reasonable number of modern drives.


But why does Sam have so many drives? Sam are you still compiling all known historical data?


I am amazed at how much less attention I give my hard drives than I used to. But I had a hard drive unpleasant surprise this past weekend. This was during the LA visit. I had to get into my hard drive testing mode and get that very sick laptop back up to speed.


The dell laptop, used daily, all of a sudden was crawling!!! HDTune revealed a benchmark at only 2 mb/sec versus the normal 60 mb/sec for that drive.


I have had this happen before. Apparently the drive started throwing a lot of errors, probably due to heat, or an old mechanic, and so the cpu downgraded it from DMA to PIO mode - full cpu input on every byte transferred.


PIO mode: super slow computer with 100% cpu activity!


We took the external ide 8500 power on hours 320 gig 2.5" backup drive, deleted the movies off (we still have the other main 500 gig movie external) and cloned to it.


It took Acronis one full hour to accept the on-board source drive (that made sense because it often takes two full minutes, times 30 times slower, equals one hour.) The clone process itself after identifying source and target, for 70 gigs of data, was 10 hours.


The clone went in and magically the laptop is up to full speed again.


Rich


PS - HTC Vive VR. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Negatives: You have to stand up, so you can turn and look behind you. It gets hot inside that head enclosure. Positives: Brookhaven Experiment: Freakin zombies are closing in from 360 degrees.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRsRRbY0zDI


It's a Left 4 Dead lonesome dark night, and you can hear the crunch of their feet on the gravel - which helps quite a bit when the flashlight batteries die out - a few monsters are 12 feet tall and can run! (At one point the animator grabbed me around the waist and tried to induce a heart attack - he thought that was a funny thing to do - he's dead now.)


That VR stuck in my mind.


Back home, with the weather cooler and my computer not crashing, I got a 4 hour fix on the close-in grenade launcher defense-from-the-counter-attack, with me, the sarge in the mrap hole, and the other guy prone behind the mrap against about 12 enemies, all 30-100 yards out.

My save starts me prone, with the pistol I ran with, behind the FOB wall, with one enemy directly in front behind some bushes, about to get up and come gunning for me, while I ditch the rocket launcher, go for max zoom on the rifle (hold right mouse zoom, hit M for map, scroll zoom in on map, hit M to leave Map - all which locks rifle zoom at max) then F to go full auto, then Ctrl to rise to crouch, shoot that one guy, then F for grenade launcher.

Then I stay in crouch for better aim, come out from behind the wall, if the coast is clear I target the guys coming in the back of the FOB where the other two mraps are parked - BOOM shoot a grenade - pull back to reload another - about 3 seconds - keep an eye on the side of the FOB to my left where they also come in from - target any that may have come in and are prone gunning for my buddies - BOOM.

My shots always get way more accurate after the first hour. The director really varies it up each time. In that 3 hours I was successful about 1/3 of the time, and both team-mates survived twice. The sarge survived every time I did, except in 3 instances.

One time he died and by now I was out of grenades and there were still a few enemies left. I turned around and sure enough a machine gunner had come all the way around the FOB and was behind me about 30 yards - I fired full auto about the same time he did, but he was full erect and hip shooting, and I was still crouched using my red dot, and my bullets found him first. I ran past him, stopping to grab his Zephyr and his ammo - giving me 500 rounds with 150 round belts - (but I forgot to keep my red dot sight - it doesn't zoom any more than iron sights, but with the red dot I can use the map trick and keep it in full zoom without holding down the right mouse key - which improves mouse control.)

I rounded the other side of the FOB but the 2 or 3 enemies had the bead on me so I got the heck out of there, backtracking the way we had initially come in. I had forgotten to shift to pistol so soon I was staggering along, barely moving, breathing heavily. Finally I found a boulder with a little height, went prone behind it, and checked the map. The map showed two enemies left. I came out from around the side of the boulder, and zooming in with cursor, for max visibility, not iron sights (about a two to one zoom) I could see two tiny figures looking around for me about 250 yards back near the FOB. I let rip with that zephyr, twenty-round bursts, using the tracer rounds to keep the fire in their general vicinity, until one little guy went down, followed soon by his buddy. Sweet kill!


My sweet Arma3 grenadier fix was satisfying. How did it compare to VR? Well, it's more COMFORTABLE. And not so hot around my head.


But for pure immersion - that VR was "WOW!!!."


Quite simply, I prefer to game sitting down. I don't like the idea of standing up all the time. I think turning around the way I do it now will be fine, with keys on the control, and moving the way I do it now will be fine, with keys on the control, all the while actually sitting down comfortably.

I don't know what the resolution is, but the graphics quality looked outstanding. I can see the immersive power of VR. Just let me sit down and add a fan inside the helmet - then I'll be ready to do some shooting!

When the VR dragon flies down to do battle with you, Jeff, that will be IMMERSIVE!!!!!!!

 

19TB not including some jump drives. I also have some derelict (old SCSI) drives. As well as a S-ata 500GB drive waiting for a professional recovery. It has precious family imagery on it. I refuse to spend nearly a grand at present. I'm hoping for another option one day. I'm afraid to try swapping control boards. Because that COULD do more harm than good.
It would be 21TB, but 2 (2TB drives are in Raid 1).

 

Interesting to hear your HTC Vive experiences Rich - a friend of mine ordered one and has recently taken delivery of it (the first one was DOA due to a faulty HDMI cable which unfortunately is part of the unit's cable harness and not easily replaced).

19TB is still a fairly sizeable storage volume Kevin, if it's that all live storage. Certainly still more than is currently typical. I've expanded mine a few times in the last 4 months, but predominantly to enable extra free space to make moving the data around and backing it up easier (doing so when disks are full to the brim is a nightmare, and also means they often don't defragment properly). The actual amount of data stored on them has changed little. There is currently 67TB of live capacity split over 19 disks, but the total amount stored isn't much over 45TB.

Offline backup disks are numerous, hence the 36 Kosbon boxes to store them in, however as said a few were needed for old 1TB disks that were retired as part of this process. I'm now withdrawing live backup disks after 5 years of use and backup disks after 7 years. As most of my twelve 1TB disks date to 2008-2009, that means they're all coming out, likewise the 2TB live disks from 2011 being replaced with 3,4 and 6TB counterparts.

 

I know what you mean there! Lol
I've had to juggle data around with minimal space. Not a fun task lol

 

You guys tossing around your storage capabilities - Kevin at 19 (0r 21) Sam at 45 - capacity 67.

I thought about it, and I'm probably at 8-10 total capacity. But a lot of that is just replication - clones. Like I have one 2 tb in my gaming machine, and another 2 tb in the machine, in order to clone the first one. Oh, and a 250 gig drive, as paging file, and for xp. So that's 4.25 TB, but only really 1.1 TB of data.



That's great Sam that your friend has gotten his HTC Vive. That means you'll be facing down those zombies pretty soon (correction, monsters, not zombies, phosphor likes to point out.) The demo is great, but the full game is only a couple of days from release.

How about you, Kevin? Have you been able to experience this technology yet? Imagine Left 4 Dead, single player like you always did, but in VR. Once you try it you'll know what I mean. And you, Jeff?

When do you think your buddy is going to let you take it for a spin Sam? Sometime in the next couple of weeks do you suppose? That will be very interesting to hear about.

Rich


Edit: Last night's grenadier fix. It's difficult to keep both of them alive, but occasionally. Sometimes I can hear when their machine gunner is inside the FOB trying to kill the one behind the mrap - and if I am able to pop out in time I can usually lob a very close 20 meter grenade and take him out.

Last night they converged on him and also the sarge down in the pit - the one who pulls targets for me - and I very soon announced "man down" meaning I was all alone. This was very early in their charge.

I didn't feel like running to my rock - I don't like to do that unless the sarge is still alive.

So I high-tailed it out of there, grabbing the zephyr like last time. That thing gives me a sense of power.

This time a quick check of the map showed 5 enemies alive.

I did it a little different this time, heading back where we came from, but going up the hill on the left this time - past the mrap pad meant to help defend the position. The enemies were scattered inside the FOB.

I had changed to pistol, and I stopped running, just let myself do a steady jog - so I wasn't so winded this time. I rounded the road up that hill, then began climbing until the FOB was well below me.


Then I saw what I had been looking for, a nice boulder to hide behind. Approaching the boulder from above, a few of the opfor saw me, and I began to take fire.


I dropped to prone, keeping the boulder between me and them, crawling forward until I reached it.

Now they were able to enjoy the distinct pleasure of experiencing the full power of that awesome 7.62 machine gun.

Using cross-hair mode for max visibility, holding right-mouse for 2 to 1 zoom, full auto, 20 round bursts (I had three 150 round belts) using the green tracer rounds to help me bring the gun back on target, it was time for revenge.

Within 90 seconds, I was methodical like swatting flies. They were inside that FOB with very little cover from my vantage point practically directly overhead.

One after another. All dead as doorknobs!

Nice!

 

VR left 4 dead? That would be nothing short of incredible!

 

I so totally agree with that!!!

I'm thinking, VR Arma3.

Kevin, have you tried it yet? Do you know anybody around town who has one?