Craig's Musings

Seagate has leaked (either by accident or an on-purpose accident) the up & coming Seagate 7200.10, which will have a 750GB version (the ST3750640A and ST3750640AS). Sporting a 16mb cache and supporting 3.0Gb/s SATA, these drives would kick some serious ass. 15 of those bad boys in my Vtrak 15200 would give a whopping 9 terabytes of storage in a RAID 50 + hot spare configuration (vs 4.8 terabytes that I have now). Damn!

According to Excaliberpc.com, the ETA for the drive is 5/1/2006, and they are asking $517 per drive. So the 15 drive thing is just a drug-induced hallucination for now. Well, by the time I get my tax return next year, they'll probably be in the $300-$350 range and I could at least fantasize about having them.

Posted by Craig at 6:39 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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Its been almost 2 weeks of screwing around in little bits and snippits of time, but I finally got everything working on my spiffy new server.

There was un-ending joy in trying to get it the final details to work. Microsoft's latest iSCSI initiator doesn't work with my Vtrak 15200, but their old version 1.06 did work. Oh, and of course it didn't occur to the folks that built the iSCSI initiator that you might want to share directories on an iSCSI disk, so every time you reboot your server, all the shares go away. I just cracked that problem after about 2 hours of googling over the past 2 weeks - turns out you just have to run the command sc config LanManServer depend= MSiSCSI from a cmd prompt on your server. Lord knows that was too complicated to just add to iSCSI setup.

Then there was Virtual Server 2005 - whenever a virtual PC was running, it would disconnect the network briefly a couple times a minute, thus ensuring that no files could ever be copied to or from the server. But Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition (how is that for a mouthful!) seems to have fixed that problem. I'm running 3 virtual machines, each running Windows 2000 server and DVArchive, a way cool java app that emulates a ReplayTV. Now my ReplayTVs can see the 3 different show archives again, and all of the archives are consolidated on my Vtrack15200.

Final project is to move pull the old servers out of the server room, and either sell them for parts on ebay or find new homes for them. Wahoo!

Posted by Craig at 5:46 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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