Changed my workstation setup a little bit
 

I like it!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14789/2012-07-16%2010.25.32.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14789/Screen...23.48%20AM.pnghttp://dl.dropbox.com/u/14789/Screen...20AM%20(2).png

Nice man. I was planning to do a 23x32x23 (sides vertical) but it kinda looked weird.

I prefer to have at least 1 monitor in horizontal (standard) rotation. Videos look better this way :)

Well i'm running a 3 monitor setup, center was going to be horizontal.

And this is the beast powering everything:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14789/2012-07-16%2011.09.08.jpg

i7 2600K @ 4.4GHz
16GB DDR3 1666MHz
GeForce 550Ti GTX
1TB WD Black (boot/OSX drive)
500GB WD Green (Windows 7)
750GB WD Green (Games for Windows)
4x 1TB 7200RPM Seagate drives in RAID 10 (3ware 9650SE-8LPML controller; home directories, backup)

Waiting for 2x 120GB OCZ SSD's to come in mail. Those are going to be set up as OSX primary array in RAID 1.

I was considering adding a wall-mounted 17-19" with network monitoring running 24/7. Don't think my wife would appreciate our living room turning into a NOC.

How are you running Mac OS?

Also, you need an SSD in that tower. I just set one up and the difference is unreal.

He's smart, and he knows how to use Google.

Hackintosh would be my guess.

- SSD's are coming tomorrow
- tonymacx86

asking him requires fewer mouse clicks. who is the smart one now

Needs more 30" Ultrasharp beside the vertical one (20"?), in place of the Samsung. That combo happens to line up perfectly. Plus, you get ton of awesome pixels. The 30" are way overpriced though. There are some Chinese 27" high res panels that you can buy on eBay now for around $400. On hardforum there is a big thread reviewing the various ones available and some of them people really like. They aren't as feature rich as the Apple or Dell versions, but way cheaper and still good. Same res...

I'm probably going to be ordering the 512GB Agility 4 for my laptop soon so that I can run my VMs on it instead of the platter drive. Right now I have a 120GB Vertex 2, but it's barely enough for my OS, some apps, and Steam games. So I have to run my VMs off of the second internal HDD, a 1.5TB drive I ripped out of a 1.5TB external Seagate drive. No raid or anything, but I already auto copy the VMs to external nightly, and have all of my VS projects operating inside of my Dropbox folder on the host and the VMs. So they are always synced.

I'd love to have some more baller HW as far as displays, but I make do with my 17" laptop LCD and my 24" Ultrasharp. My laptop:

Asus G73JH
Core-I7 920XM w/ all cores running up to 2.6Ghz with ThrottleStop
32GB Ram
120GB Vertex 2 SSD
1.5TB Seagate

I also have a Asus UX31E-DH72 in my room, but I don't use it very much. It is actually a great, speedy little laptop and was using it as my primary for months when I initially left my G72JH back home after leave. It ended up being way too restrictive though with only 4GB of ram and not being able to upgrade to more. 8GB would have been way more livable. I did get to experience running my VM on it's SSD though and I'll tell you that VMs on SSD can make up for a lot of what you lose in having Ram restrictions. So I'm really looking forward to having both.

I've thought about upgrading to a newer G75, or equivalent from MSI or Clevo P170 so I could get USB 3 and other newer stuff. I can't really justify it though. This laptop is already a beast, I just with I had faster external transfer speeds since I use external USB HDDs and thumbdrives mostly.

What editor/IDE is that top window?

I have family members who work in the data storage industry and every time I talk about buying a hard drive, they remind me that Seagate 1TB drives have a failure rate that's 4x the industry average. I would never back anything up on one of those drives and expect it to be there when you need it.

This made me rather curious, as HD reliability has always been rather elusive.

I did some googling.

One interesting result: PC component failure rates documented | ITProPortal.com

An excerpt:So according to this one datapoint. WD makes the most reliable 1T drives, but the least reliable 2T drives. That's the sort of thing that drives me nuts when component-shipping.

I've had 6 drive failures on a 6-drive RAID5 array. All of them were Seagate 7200.11 500GB drives (back in 2008). There was a specific firmware failure on these drives. Swapped them for 7200.12 models within warranty and never had a problem since.

IDE: Sublime Text 2
Monitors are both 24" 1920x1600.

This took a while but I've finished reinstalling system from scratch some time closer to 2AM yesterday (today actually). While I was at it, I've changed all my fans for . I'm waiting on 3 more to come which will be installed on CPU (push + pull) and RAID cage.

I've also upgraded firmware on 9650SE RAID card so now I have read-ahead and write-behind on all my arrays :)

SSD drives are hooked up to 9650SE and are configured in RAID1 and are used as primary OSX drives.

4 x Seagate 1TB (ST31000340AS) drives were re-configured into a new RAID10 array to enable read-ahead and write-behind. There are now 2 partitions: 1TB for home directories and 1TB for Time Machine backup.

I've got a bunch of drives unused as a result of the whole process so I need your help figuring out which drive should be used for what :). Oh, I've also wiped my Windows drive while I was redoing everything.

Running through 9650SE (w/ cache and BBU):

• Western Digital 1TB Black WD1002FAEX
• Seagate 750GB ST3750640AS

Running through motherboard's SATA:

• Western Digital 500GB Black WD5002ABYS (had 2, one failed yesterday)
• Western Digital 1TB Green WD10EACS

PS: the reason I'm running Seagate drives in my RAID (which I normally don't) is because I got them for free :) My usual choice would be either 6xWD5002ABYS or 6xWD1002FAEX in RAID10.

One of my clients has a 58TB SAN that they've paid $500k for. It uses 3TB 7200RPM Hitachi Deskstar drives. It has been running fine for about 2 months now but I'm waiting for drives to start failing one-by-one.


I've made an executive decision to only use Western Digital drives about 7 years ago when I've started a computer parts company (targeted to overclockers). We had an insane amount of RMA's on all drives other then WD.

Nearly 10% failure? Man thats a LOT.

SSD benchmark:
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1342719984

RAID 10 benchmark:
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1342719984

I guess I've been lucky. Aside from one OCZ SSD, I haven't had a total failure of a hard drive (with loss of data) in more than 10 years.

For a long time, I was a huge fan of Deskstars. Back when they were actually still IBM. Even during the era when they were suffering massive failures left and right, I never had one fail on me. One of 'em did develop a weird clicky noise, but it ran like that for several years. The 2TB drive in my media server is a Hitachi 7K2000, which I bought right when they first came out.

I had a Toshiba 1.8" drive start to go out in my Vaio a few years ago, but it was gradual. Started making a whining noise, but it ran for more than a week like that, giving me plenty of time to back it up and order a replacement.

I've had a couple of Seagates and WDs over the as few years as well. No problems with any of them.

In fact, the last drive which I can honestly recall suffering a total failure was a full-height, 5.25" SCSI drive made by Control Data Corporation, which I think was somewhere around 100MB. The spindle bearings failed.


Still, I've gotten pretty ---- about backups. Every machine I use on a regular basis either contains a dedicated internal backup drive or is linked to a dedicated NAS backup volume, and the machine performs a differential backup of itself every single night. This way I'm protected not just from physical faults, but also from data corruption which a RAID would be powerless to stop. (eg: if you hose the OS, or accidentally over-write a file, etc., the RAID will just faithfully make a duplicate copy of the bad data. With differential backups, I have access to 30 days worth of valid data, and can revert either individual files or the whole machine back to any point in the past month.)

$500K. That's extraordinarily expensive for SATA drives. I just left one of the top 3 SAN data storage companies in the world and that pricing is very high. Sounds like they had a big bunch of other stuff bundled in? I know, because I wrote the quotes...



Good boy. Among the many things I'm an expert in (not wrenching, duh), I'm an expert in data storage. Now the question I have for you is: are the backups offsite?

I back up my stuff onsite to my NAS and also send everything to the cloud. Whee.

My desktop has only local backup (on RAID10 though, but with shitty drives) since I only deal with code and EC2 credentials which fit fine on an encrypted volume of a flash drive. Everything else is dispensable. All of my VMs are in a cage with a proper KVM/QCOW2 over Gluster setup.

I'm running Supermicro 2U boxes with 6 hot swap bays and an Atom-based Mini-ITX server board. The whole setup of 3 boxes (3x replicas with RAID10 behind them) cost me right around $3,604 from NewEgg (drives were purchased bulk from eBay). That's only 1.5TB though (500GB SATA WD Black) but it's 400Mbps on writes and 650Mbps on reads. That's with absolutely no cache other then buffer on hard drives themselves.

If you reconfigure it slightly and use same 3TB drives and larger enclosures + RAID controller to handle more drives, it will cost ~$0.50-$0.60/GB.

That's $8.62/GB that they've paid by the way.

No offense, but I haven't seen an e-pen0r circle jerk this big since I stopped posting at the hardforums.

I feel like i'm back in 1999.

If yo dont mind, What do you guys do anyway? If I had to guess id say either you operate a colo, lease rack space in a colo or consult data management services.

DevOps consulting, infrastructure architecture, hybrid (private + public) infrastructure management, application lifecycle management (automated deployment, QA, etc), and a little bit of hosting on the side.

It depends on how you look at it.

The overnight differential backups are all on-site, to dedicated hard drives co-located with the PCs which they are backing up. Some in the same physical case, others in the same room via USB or the next room over via ethernet.

I do have one USB drive which holds a mirror of my primary home PC which I keep at the office, though I'm fairly undisciplined about updating it. Maybe once every three or four months I remember to bring it home and cycle it.

Of late, I've started using DropBox (cloud storage) for projects that I am actively working on. This has the obvious benefit of mirroring the data across all of my PCs including both laptops so that I can access it wherever I am, and the incidental benefit of creating de-facto backup copies of everything in five different places in real time. Dropbox, of course, does not guard against accidental data corruption, so I include my dropbox directory in the nightly differential backups of two of my PCs- one at home, one at the office.

So in a nutshell you make sure a companies production, development and test environments meet application requirements from a technical point of view, are always running properly and you maintain a process for deployment of applications/changes from one to the other doesn't affect the system as a whole?

Urban. EC2?

You use AWS? I find AWS very interesting because it puts infrastructure management in the hands of developers. I learned all about it when I interviewed with Amazon a few years back. Bezos is a visionary.

EC2 is OK. It's very limited on resources and also very expensive. This is why I manage hybrid infrastructures (your own metal is always cheaper).

Saml01 - not exactly. I mostly focus on auto-scaling and easy deployment to a large cluster. Most of my clients have distributed applications so there are LOTS of different components that are mini applications on their own. Real complexity comes in optimization. Think about it this way - ~10x c1.medium (app servers) + 5x m1.small (web) + 2x c1.large (queue broker) + other crap. It all adds up to a large sum of money and my job is to find all the things that can be optimized for lower disk I/O and network I/O. Once that is done, I go through application code (whatever language it is written in) and try finding obvious bottlenecks that can reduce latency even further.

That's pretty impressive. What do you do when you dont have access to the code? Not every company develops their own applications.

I mostly deal with start-ups that have just secured their first/second round of financing and are looking to scale their infrastructure ;)

Makes sense.

Do they find you or do you find them?

Both. Helps to have lots of contacts in the field ;) I also do presentations at local tech meetups once in a while so that is another way to pick up some work.

Cleaned up wiring a little :)

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14789/2012-...015.55.33.jpeg