Best posts made by creayt

I'm David, heard about ML from Scott after stumbling onto the SMB IT Journal recently. I'm a long-time web developer looking to up my server game and preparing to deploy an R620 for personal projects. Excited to participate here.

Planning on using Samsung Magician to adjust the over-provisioning levels on 6x 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs to be used in a single Raid 10 on a 1U Dell R620. The server has 10 total slots and I'm hoping to add an additional 4 drives to the array at some point in the future. The controller is a Perc H710P Mini w/ 1GB, and I'll be running Server 2012 R2. Full specs at the bottom of the post.

From what I understand:

1. Hardware raid controllers don't support TRIM.
2. The higher the proportion of the total capacity you dedicate to overprovisioning the faster the performance will be because of how SSDs shuffle data around to level wear, and the longer the life of each individual drive will be.

I don't need the maximum capacity of the drives so can get pretty aggressive on the amount dedicated to OP, at this point the only thing running on the server will be a new product I'm launching that has zero users at this point, but which I'm projecting ( hoping ) will grow to a few hundred thousand in the next 6 months.

Full specs: 2x Xeon E5-2680 octacore procs, 256 GB RAM, 6x 1TB 850 Pros in a Raid 10, probably 4x 300G Seagate SAS 10k drives from the original purchase in a 2nd Raid 10.

If it influences the decision much, I'm going to be running a full web app load on it, IIS, MySQL, and a Java-based app server.

Thanks!

The only source of any audible noise is from the two fans of my H75, which had to be mounted outside the chassis because of the god-awful case I chose ( which I may try to return ). My question is, CPU temps seem to hover at around 24-31 C at any load I throw at it ( I keep my apartment very cold and have fans blowing at me, semi-toward the case )... Is it totally insane to just turn the water cooler fans off and watch the temps to see if they get much higher? To make it dead silent?

So I tried out this new monitor stand which puts 2 of them in landscape atop each other. And I'm in love. And have decided to upgrade to 5 monitors in butterfly formation.

I currently have a non-SLI motherboard w/ a single GTX 970. All monitors are 2560x1440. I may be able to return the motherboard and grab the upgraded version of it which does support SLI. But, these are 1155, older boards, so maybe I'm better off grabbing the new SkyLake and a fresh mobo and RAM kit. So my question is, does SLI let you use the multi-monitor capabilities of both cards? My GTX maxes out at 4 x 1440p, and I need a 5th, so it'd be amazing to be able to pop in another GTX 970 and use all 5 monitors without having to resort to smoke and mirrors like DisplayLink.

If not, is there a card that can handle 1440p x 5?

Thanks!

Just consolidated a 3x 27" setup into a single 5k ( running at 3840x2160 on Windows for the moment ) rig. Other than it being a lot slower than the T110.2 I used to work on, I'm loving the simplicity of a single monitor.

@scottalanmiller Thanks, liking the site so far

@xByteSean and co., would be interested to get your feedback on this too if you have any. Thanks!

Heard a lecture at the 99u Conference in NYC last month that said that the latest research showed that stress was actually... wait for it... a good thing. It was pretty convincing and from what I remember she showed some pretty shocking correlations between longevity, happiness, achievement in general, and physical health... and stress.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend

The video of the lecture I saw should be available within the month ( they're slowpokes to get that stuff edited and available ) and I'll try to post it here when I see it. She also has a book on it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583335617/

The big takeaway seemed to be that by simply changing your attitude around / perspective on stress you can use it as a driving force and motivation to excel rather than a crippling, paralyzing enemy. Easier said than done for sure, but the research she cited made a pretty impressive case for checking yourself before wrecking yourself.

http://blog.ted.com/could-stress-be-good-for-you-recent-research-that-suggests-it-has-benefits/

New to enterprise RAID controllers, and looking for some quick guidance.

Working w/ an R620 10-slot w/ a Perc H710P Mini ( 1GB ), and getting ready to deploy a bunch of SSDs to it.

Based on my recent experience w/ an R610 w/ a SAS 6/iR Integrated controller, where we found out late in the game that the controller can't/won't run the SATA SSDs at anything about 1.5 Mbps ( calls it its "negotiated speed" while listing the "3.0 Gbps capable speed" in OpenManage ) while intermingled w/ our other SAS drives, even though they're SATA III drives.

My question is, is there a way I can tell beforehand whether the R610 will use the 6 850 Pros I bought at a lower speed or their max of 6 Gbps?

Dear Best Buy, you've outdone yourself.

After more research and looking the exact model up by code in other suppliers, it turns out that the laptop Best Buy sold me is imaginary. It's made up. The model I ordered actually IS 24GB of RAM, both on Amazon and Asus.com, and they don't sell a 256GB PCIe SSD, 4720HQ, 980M laptop w/ 32GB of RAM, they're all 24.

So Best Buy is just listing the laptop they are selling w/ 8GB more RAM than it actually has anywhere on Earth in the real world. I've been duped by the ineptitude of their web developers yet again.

Fool me once...

The worst part is the 2 accessible slots are taken, so in the inaccessible slots there's just one empty, so I can't even upgrade to 32 myself.

F, ML my friends. F. M. L.

Hoping to save myself some hunting

To anyone who'se curious: the drives ( all 6 SSDs and the 4 10k SAS HDDs ) are now deployed and all are working/"negotiated" at 6 Gbps. Hooray. The only drawback is that the SSDs are throwing the little alert symbols in open manage, though they appear to be functioning fine and at full speed. Open Manage can't read the power status, etc, and shows them as "non-critical" ( while online ). It's unfortunate.

Pic: RAID 10 of 10ks on the left, Raid 10 of SSDs on the right.

Initial 2 thread IO benchmark using SQLIO.

Left is a 6 SSD OBR10, right is a 4 SSD Storage Space:

So the RAID controller had a subtle, ambiguous setting available to switch it from PCIe 2 mode to PCIe 3 mode ( though it was labeled something more cryptic ). Simply enabling it made it jump from this:

to this:

Thank god for iDRACs.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2050443

Looks like it can cause issues w/ ESX/ESXi, so if the box was used as a v-farm that could've been why.

Have a Dell R620, the bios on which supports a feature called "i/oat dma engine", which a quick Google revealed that some people had claimed made a huge performance difference but *in order to work required that your full stack was Intel/compatible, not just your motherboard.

Have any of you used this? Do you know how I'd tell whether my R620 fully supports it?

From Wikipedia
I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) is a DMA engine (an embedded DMA controller) by Intel bundled with high-end server motherboards, that offloads memory copies from the main processor by performing direct memory accesses (DMA). It is typically used for accelerating network traffic, but supports any kind of copies.
Using I/OAT for network acceleration is supported by Microsoft Windows since the release of Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003 SP1.[1] It was used by the Linux kernel starting in 2006[2] but this feature was subsequently disabled due to the possibility of data corruption.[3]

specious said:

The entire point of the Mac Platform is to allow you to be more creative because hardware issues are minimized because of standardization and the removal of low end hardware. There is no cheap underperforming barely have enough specs to survive systems that I have to work around.

This is specious at best. Though the MacBook Pro has legit hardware it's the software, OS X, that glitters almost every single action you can take on the laptop w/ latency and sporadic slow. The HiDPI approach is nice, and makes half of everything very beautiful, but OS X and or the graphics drivers just cannot keep up with an expert computer user, unless they tend to interact w/ a computer slowly enough that the rampant latency doesn't frustrate them. I personally just cannot write code on a mac, I find myself almost screaming as I watch the OS flounder and try to keep up with my keystrokes and interactions, and have almost thrown a MacBook Pro out a window before because of it, not exaggerating.

Macs have crashed on me and had "hardware related issues" so, so, so much more than Windows machines that it makes me snicker when people make claims like this.

Have a new laptop coming and I'd like to run something like Time Machine for OS X where I can just restall the whole system from it if possible. Any suggestions?

My Stealth Pro is supposed to arrive any second now. Semi-debating doing my first YouTube unboxing/review.

Has anyone ever tried a workflow where you use separate Windows user accounts on the same machine for separate purposes? Like one for work, one for personal, one for experimentation, etc?