Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

On Sep 25, 6:19 pm, Jeff Liebermann <je...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

As for Western Dismal, they are the worst. Most of their drives died
within the warranty period and were replaced by nearly identical
refurbished drives, that also died in a few months. The office next
door went through several in their Sony desktops before they gave up
and let me install a replacement Seagate. That was about a year ago,
and I've sworn off WD since then. I have no idea if their current
offerings are any better (or worse) and have no interest in finding
out the hard way.


I've heard it was bad but I had no idea it was that bad.



You can sorta get a clue by looking at the warranty lifetimes. The
current retail Seagate Barracuda drives all show a 5 year warranty. WD
Caviar offers a 1 year warranty. Only the WD Raptor has a 5 year
warranty.

Our computer tech is one of three who help about 200 of us.

The usual ratio is 1 tech per 100 desktops. I know of some companies
with 150 desktops per tech. If IT also supports the servers, the
ratio is much less. If your organization needs 70 desktops to tech
ratio, then there might be some kind of equipment, environmental, or
organizational problem.

The SX260's all came with Hitachi 40GB Travelstar laptop drives. I've
had VERY bad luck with the 3.5" Travelstar drives, but these 2.5"
laptop drives seem to be surviving so far. Out of 14, I've had no
failures of any type. I also monitor the S.M.A.R.T. statistics using
SpeedFan:
<http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php>
which has been quite useful at predicting hard disk failures. No
unusual problems so far.
Very strange! I've heard IBM/Hitachi is one of the most reliable
available.

As I indicated, it depends on IBM drive type and model. It was bad
enough that there was a class action suit against IBM for shipping
junk:
<http://www.ibmdeskstar75gxplitigation.com/>
I got the option of 25 blank cdrom's or a 15% discount on future
purchases from IBM. Swell.

Yeah, I work off my C:, and then schedule a batch-file backup with
7zip and then transfer that big file to our network drive overnight.

You don't have a backup unless you've done a dry run and tried to
restore it. 7zip is just a file compress/uncompress utility. It's
not really suitable for backup and restore. Batch files and even some
backup utilities have problems when they encounter open files, thus
making file by file backups a crap shoot. That's another reason why I
do image backups.


Ah. We're kind of limited in what we can do at work - we're not free
to install backup software for instance. The IT folks don't do any
backups for us besides backing up the network drive, and working
directly from the network drive is SLOW. (There was some sort of bug
in Windows XP that made network access super-slow... I discovered the
bug through some web research, and told the IT folks the fix [THAT in
and of itself should raise a few eyebrows] - it involves going to
Device Manager and setting the network card Speed and Duplex to 100Mb
Full instead of Auto) but it's still slow. I work off the C: drive
and keep all my files in the C:\Files folder, which makes zipping
really easy. (I close all programs before leaving the office, so open
files aren't a problem.) I create the zip file on my C: drive then
shuffle it over to the file server.

At home I take it a step further - run tar backups and run a sha1sum
on that before and after transferring.

I ran a few tests and was always able to get what I wanted, so I'm not
worried.

Michael
www.acomputerexpert.com (my side business, after work)

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT-True Image Backup
    ... Make sure the USB drives file system is NTFS and not FAT32.. ... Jaymon is correct in that the disk image you create and save to the D: ... partition of your USB external HDD will have no effect on the other ... Step-by-Step Instructions for Using the Acronis True Image Program to Backup ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: OT-True Image Backup
    ... Make sure the USB drives file system is NTFS and not FAT32.. ... Jaymon is correct in that the disk image you create and save to the D: ... partition of your USB external HDD will have no effect on the other ... Since the disk images you will be creating (at least the initial backup ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Back up data to USB?
    ... A flash drive is fine as a secondary means for storing backups of particular files, but I don't think it's suitable for storing drive images unless the amount of data is very small, nor would I rely on a USB flash drive as the only media for the backup of data. ... It also can do file backups and disk cloning. ... can take to back up the entire contents of one's day-to-day working HDD, ... With both hard drives connected, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Need help backing up my C: drive
    ... I tried using Windows' backup and restore which works for important data ... consider a disk imaging program such as ... Acronis True Image to clone the contents of your day-to-day working HDD onto ... With both hard drives connected, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Two "expert" issues I must solve before upgading
    ... The NT Backup utility will backup to file. ... supports external drives, like connected to a USB or firewire port. ... > the restore because they are tied to physical disk locations (games ... Hard drives go bad ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers)