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Omega-TI

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44 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

Linux is orphaning the floppy driver, TI-99/4A gets a mention.

 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/30/torvalds_floppy/"

"

We have fond memories of wielding a hole punch to transform a single-sided floppy disk to a flippy or, more likely, simply ruin one of Verbatim's finest in an effort to sate a 1980s TI99/4a's hunger.

"

 

feed me.png

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So, are USB floppy drives still supported or not? I'm not sure whether I got that article right. Obviously the drivers for the floppy board controller are removed, which is understandable since for almost a decade, none of the modern main boards have had any floppy connector.

 

For the purpose of reading old TI disks on a PC, I kept one older computer with such a floppy controller.  This news means that I may now probably dispose of it or that I have to keep an old Linux version to keep it running. As for USB, I am not sure whether USB floppy drives allow for setting the disk geometry; this is of course needed for TI disks. But I think no one has ever seen 5.25" USB floppy drives, so this is hypothetical after all.

 

I suppose the proper way to preserve old disks would be to use Kryoflux, anyway.

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27 minutes ago, mizapf said:

So, are USB floppy drives still supported or not? 

My reading of the article was that USB floppies are still supported. The downside of this is that it is not possible to read the raw disk content, therefore non-standard (non pc) formats are not readable. 

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47 minutes ago, jrhodes said:

Just wait until they drop CD/DVD support ... Who needs that when everyone just burns a USB stick now days, right?

That might take a little longer than one might expect.  Granted I rarely use my CD/DVD device much for software installation or burning CD's, however I do use it quite frequently for ripping DVD's I own for editing and conversion to MP4 format to put on HD for easier more convenient viewing.

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Speaking of computers, my boyfriend and I are trying to get a fairly old desktop upgraded to allow him to run his games on it. We're hoping to be able to upgrade everything to the point where he can at least run Doom 2016, but that might not be likely on our budget.

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7 minutes ago, jrhodes said:

First time i played a SimCity game was SimCity 2000 on the original Playstation, with the PSX mouse. ...And a modest amount of GameShark codes.

It's been one of those games that I've always wanted for the TI, but there are 'things' getting in the way.  

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18 minutes ago, --- Ω --- said:

KaCHING! ?

It may cost a ton of money, but if you NEED space...  << CLICK HERE >>

And no, I'm not going to get one, I'd probably die before I filled it up or the technology would become obsolete.

 

hrmmmm except for the quad-core Celeron, the specs look fine for performance..  4GB RAM expandable to 8GB, four gigabit ports.  For iSCSI it should do fine with MPIO over 4x gigabit and 355MB/s write speed (but encryption divides that in half,) but I would not place any heavy I/O loads on it (SQL, etc.) Probably want it divided into multiple LUNS, and assuming you can share iSCSI LUNs with multiple clients (it says VMWare and Hyper-V ready, but that does not always mean LUN sharing.)  The $3900 alone is WELL worth the WD Red 10TB drives (these are NAS-certified, dual-core with a deep command queue, 256MB cache) though anymore I go for the Gold series enterprise drives.

 

I might could pick one up just for the drives, drop them into my EMC NASes, then put the empty chassis up for sale.

 

EDIT: I just noticed this little tidbit: "ASUSTOR’s snapshot technology provides almost instantaneous creation of snapshots. It saves a significant amount of time and storage capacity when compared with traditional LUN backups."

 

That is actually quite noice.  Not many NASes offer iSCSI LUN snapshots.  This could be a life-saver in some scenarios.

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57 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

I might could pick one up just for the drives

10 TB NAS drives are $250 each so that's only $2500 if you are willing to forgo the NAS itself:

 

WD Red: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0719498XY/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_KJ6rDbCREHGF0

Seagate Ironwolf: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H241VK4/ref=twister_B01MG9FYNQ?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

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8 hours ago, chue said:

10 TB NAS drives are $250 each so that's only $2500 if you are willing to forgo the NAS itself:

 

WD Red: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0719498XY/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_KJ6rDbCREHGF0

Seagate Ironwolf: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H241VK4/ref=twister_B01MG9FYNQ?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

 

1) I do not buy from/through Amazon

2) I buy through WD authorized distributors: in-channel the 10TB Red Pro run around $375 each depending upon vendor (I found some of the skeevier ones buy from Amazon but I get no WD warranty that way)

3) I never, ever, buy Seagate.

 

I see your point, though: if I buy this NAS for the drives, the likelihood of them being authorized WD distributors is low so I might as well buy from a questionable outlet like Amazon.  Might as well buy the drives from channel distributors and forego the NAS.

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8 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

if I buy this NAS for the drives, the likelihood of them being authorized WD distributors is low so I might as well buy from a questionable outlet like Amazon

There's also the fact that you'd be using the drives from the NAS in some other device, so the NAS people could say "no we don't support that config".  But I suppose you could ask about it before you buy from them.

 

There are two approaches to buying: buy for price and get little or no support, or buy for support but pay heavily for it.  I tend to do the former for personal stuff, and the latter for business stuff.  So yeah, I do buy from Amazon since I'm a cheap SOB.

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9 minutes ago, chue said:

There are two approaches to buying: buy for price and get little or no support, or buy for support but pay heavily for it.  I tend to do the former for personal stuff, and the latter for business stuff.  So yeah, I do buy from Amazon since I'm a cheap SOB.

 

Fair enough and no argument from me.  I do not, however, have an Amazon account as I have boycotted Amazon since the On-Click patent nonsense.  Of course, there have been times when I figure out Amazon was part of my purchase chain -- nothing I can do about that and so long as the vendor honors warranty and support I get that part.

 

It seems kind-of sad thinking about it, I really do not buy anything modern for personal use.  Pretty much everything I do outside of retro-computing is business or has a business purpose.

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12 minutes ago, Mitkraft said:

That's funny.  For traditional spinning drives I always buy Seagate because I've killed way too many WD drives and stopped trusting them all together.

Back in the SCSI days I was Seagate exclusively.  But IDE and SATA, I have never had a Seagate last as long as a WD RE, Enterprise, or Black desktop drive.  WD Green are pure trash.  WD Blue had a VERY bad stutter start with a very high percentage dead within 36 hours of deployment if not right out of the box.  Blacks and above, nary trouble.  I have RAID Edition drives which are eight years old running with no errors (not for anything critical, mind you -- I am not crazy.)  Not to say they never fail, but it has been such a low percentage I will self-warrant the systems I build with them for five years.

 

Much to my chagrin, I had one customer go almost ten.  Since the system's cooling crapped out and the server was in a non-ventilated storage room, the drives reached almost boiling. I cannot use them as a case since there is no way to determine if almost ten years of continuous service killed them or if they cooked.

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5 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

Back in the SCSI days I was Seagate exclusively.  But IDE and SATA, I have never had a Seagate last as long as a WD RE, Enterprise, or Black desktop drive.  WD Green are pure trash.  WD Blue had a VERY bad stutter start with a very high percentage dead within 36 hours of deployment if not right out of the box.  Blacks and above, nary trouble.  I have RAID Edition drives which are eight years old running with no errors (not for anything critical, mind you -- I am not crazy.)  Not to say they never fail, but it has been such a low percentage I will self-warrant the systems I build with them for five years.

 

Much to my chagrin, I had one customer go almost ten.  Since the system's cooling crapped out and the server was in a non-ventilated storage room, the drives reached almost boiling. I cannot use them as a case since there is no way to determine if almost ten years of continuous service killed them or if they cooked.

 

Ah, I'm speaking strictly from a consumer point of view.  I've never bought Red or Enterprise drives.  WD Blue to Seagate consumer level drives I've had better luck with Seagate.

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14 minutes ago, Mitkraft said:

That's funny.  For traditional spinning drives I always buy Seagate because I've killed way too many WD drives and stopped trusting them all together.

I've had trouble with both.  I think it comes down to statistics: some people will have WD drives fail more often, and others will have Seagate drives fail more often.  I go with Seagate, because I'm comfortable with their RMA process.

8 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

WD Green are pure trash

Have to agree with that.  Those drives are what made me go to Seagate initially.

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11 minutes ago, chue said:

I've had trouble with both.  I think it comes down to statistics: some people will have WD drives fail more often, and others will have Seagate drives fail more often.  I go with Seagate, because I'm comfortable with their RMA process.

Have to agree with that.  Those drives are what made me go to Seagate initially.

Seagate has always been easy to get replacement drives.  I think the application of the drives tends to make a difference in resulting statistics.  This is where Dell really pissed me off: they would build "Workgroup Servers" with RAID using desktop drives!  This is a recipe for disaster for a number of reasons.  Seriously, the right tool for the job goes a long way.

 

My favorite failure mode for hard drives is when the head makes contact with the platter and opening the drive is a show of recording media confetti and one or more huge gouges in the platters.

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So, after getting it analyzed, we've determined that the desktop we salvaged can be upgraded to a decent rig, for around $200 or so, with the right parts. Right now, we're looking at a Phenom II X6 1090 processor, at least 4 more gigs of ram, and at least an AMD R9 290X video card, maybe some more hard drive space and a wireless card, but those aren't particularly necessary. It's going to be rough scrounging up the money for the parts, especially after what we had to do to get the money for our recent car repair, but we'll be looking into any help we can get (paid, of course).

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Interesting.. I have replaced more bad Seagate drives in systems over the years than any other brand.. while I have wd drives that have operated 24/7 for over 10 years.. they are all the blue or black drives.. might be a green in there but not many of them as preference is performance..

Sent from my LM-G820 using Tapatalk

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I've not had any real bad luck with Seagate drives. I forgot if it was a Seagate or a WD drive, but I bought an external 3 TB hard drive secondhand that ended up busting on me after a while, almost got nothing off of it before it died, and several things I still lost on it.

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