Best posts made by creayt

@scottalanmiller said:

I can't even stand to use a 17" anymore, let alone something like that. That is SO much bigger than a 17"!

I can't stand to use anything less than a 17". I thought I could, but I'm returning the XPS 15 I recently ordered in favor of the 17" Inspiron I'm on as I type this. I think it's mostly just that I have a really tall torso so the distance between the screen and my eyes is far above normal, making everything less comfortable to see without hunching over pretty hard. 17"-ers solve this problem with a bigger screen and typically being less thin and getting it up closer to your face. that said if there was a 20" laptop I'd grab that in a heartbeat. I used to tote a Dell M2010 around college and it was amazing. In auditorium classes I'd detach the keyboard and put the box in the row next to me and be able to read and see it fine. I think it was 20.1 inches at 1680x1050 or something like that. The day they stopped making those my heart broke.

It really was the baddest ass notebook-class computer ( at least it was for me, I'm sure it was too big and heavy for all demographics to carry around ) in human history. folded up like a brief case for easy portability. I'd get compliments on it all day long every day around campus.

http://www.theenglishmall.com/images/product/776/d9fd4fd23aba495eac53f4424345fe19.jpg

@art_of_shred said:

@creayt said:
I think it's mostly just that I have a really tall torso so the distance between the screen and my eyes is far above normal, making everything less comfortable to see without hunching over pretty hard.

So, basically, you need a shorter chair.

It's funny that you say that, because to compensate sometimes I drop my chair down as low as it can possibly go, which looks funny to most people, and put my arms as far into the desk as possible to approximate my face to the screen. Doesn't particularly work in public places like coffee shops and airports where there aren't adjustable chairs, and isn't particularly comfortable. Sharug.

@Dashrender said:

Yeah, I'm with Creayt - working from a 15" or (kill me) an 11" - man I'd rather die I think!

I have a pair of 22" monitors on my desk which suit me fine. I'd be happy with a pair of 19 if that's all I could have.. but doing day to day work from a 15" would just be super painful.

it's one thing to surf the web at home on a 13.3 (my Yoga Pro 2). But when I want to do actual work, I go to my office with the pair of 19's.

Which reminds me. I've tried using a laptop stand to get the screen higher and even tried that at coffee shops before. You always hit an issue w/ getting it closer to your face and still having room to type comfortably ( or at least I do ). I'm totally w/ you on wanting bigger, real monitors to do actual work on. I just sold my rig and 3x 27" monitors to upgrade to a 40" 4k screen and now when I use anything but I want to cut my wrists. Big screens = big productivity IMHO.

@Dashrender said:

I'm not sure I could go back to a single monitor for daily driver. My pair of 22's is about perfect. I might like a pair of 27's, but I'm thinking that would be the max without pushing them about 3 feet back from me. Right now when I'm sitting in my desired location, i can just barely reach out and touch the screens.

My screens are about 40 Inches wide by 12 inches tall.

The dual monitors gives you some advantages over a single, mainly in windowing/full screen modes, but the other thing I really like is the format. Super wide (40 inches) yet not super tall (12 inches) I think I would like something more akin to 40 x 15 or 40 x 17, but eh.

Any wider than 40 inches, say I went to pair of 27" monitors (would be around 45-48 inches wide) I'm guessing I would start noticing neck fatigue from twisting left and right switching between screens.

I'm not a programmers - i don't spend most of my day in a single app writing lines of code that are only 80 or so characters wide. In that situation I can definitely see where a single larger monitor would be nice.

Any time you spend the majority of your time in a single window, you're probably perfectly happy with a single large display.

Actually, quite the opposite. As a fullstack web developer I iterate through somewhere between 4-6 applications continuously ( consistently, you write a nugget of code, run it, test/debug, complete a micro task, update a reference doc, and dip into Google Docs, email, Slack, research browsing, and a few other apps intermittently ) all day long, and after having spent the better part of the decade using the advantages you mentioned about windowing and fullscreen modes, there's a new technology now that's UHD resolution at screensizes where the text is still perfectly readable at 100% scalling. The 40" 4k screen I have is about the same as if you put 4 x 24" 1920x1080 monitors in a grid of 2 by 2 and removed all bezels ( only without the seams ). Windows 10 has amazing screen division shortcutting ( win key and arrows and shift ) to tile your windows exactly how you'd want them to simulate having multiple monitors, only you can also use it as one big giant screen when strategically advantageous ( like seeing 10 zillion database tables and rows all at once ).

I loved using multiple monitors, and I at one time attempted to use 5 at once in a very strange, though stratege-icky setup ( 3 in portrait w/ 2 flanking the trio on the left in landscape but stacked bezel to bezel ), which had its advantages and weaknesses.

Multi-monitors is great and a total productivity boon to a good chunk of people ( some people just can't figure out how to work like that and feel comfortable ), but when you get 3840x2160 in a readable size on a single pane of glass... it's even better.

@Dashrender said:

Does win 10 have anything different from win 7?

Yep.

It might've been 7, but I thought it was 8 that you could hop the windows around between half screens w/ win key + arrow ( and shift to jump to the next monitor ), but what 10 introduced is quadrants, so you can now use the keyboard to position a window in any 1/4th of the screen in addition to 1/2. This is perfectly suited to a 4k screen, where each quadrant is 1920x1080.

Win 7 or 10 Professional
Watercooler
Hexacore i7-5820K ( mine OC'd to 4.5 Ghz w/ a few clicks in the Intel tuning utility and has been rock solid )
32GB DDR4
SSD
4GB GTX 745 ( 4GB 970 is $196 more, 4GB 980 is $336 more, 6GB 980TI is $406 more )
2x2 a/b/g/n/ac wireless and bluetooth

$1239

Throw a $120 850 Pro SSD into this w/ rapid mode and I expect it'll push about 5GB/s if you land on the 32GB or some other quad channel config.

Benchmarked it w/ PCMark and it scored in the 99th percentile, well above both the Oculus Rift recommended spec tier and the 4k Gaming PC tier ( mine has a 980 ).

The OC-ing is supported under the warranty, in fact they list it as a feature. That combined w/ a 30% off coupon just cannot be beat.

http://store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ContentView?eSpotName=HPCouponOffers&storeId=10151&langId=-1&catalogId=10051&jumpid=ps_gymaw6xezr&aoid=146787&002=2190637&006=58807153988&007=Search&008=&009=b&012=hp notebooks coupon&010=NotebooksRemarketingIntel3&025=c

Thought I'd throw this out there in case anyone's looking for a new desolator.

@Breffni-Potter

I have self-admittedly EXTREMELY high standards for what I define as "snappy", and it's a plague that prevents me from using some software ( like some popular IDEs ) because they just can't keep up w/ the pace at which I need to be able to stream code from my fingertips to feel fully productive. Basically I hate waiting for anything small. A new tab to open, one to close, code hinting to process and render, a file list read, a web page to serve and render. Things like boot up or shut down time don't matter to me, because those are one-offs when you're not trying to accomplish something granular. App load times also don't matter, though typically the faster those are the faster the overall "snappyness" will be. It's a quirk, but I think there are a lot of people like me, in fact I've seen a lot of people blow up on smaller scales when their computers aren't responsive. I also feel like I have an exaggerated ability to perceive latency, for example most people I've talked to can't feel that command + tab on OS X is slightly, but palpably slower than alt + tab on Windows ( probably because they have a programmed animation that has an exact, while superficial duration before the stuff is fully faded and at its final static position ). Stuff like that bothers me. The old OS X fullscreen animation used to make me homicidal. It's faster now ( as of El Capitan ), but still obnoxiously longer than it should be. So to answer your question, snappyness is achieved when I don't feel like I'm waiting on an interface to deploy my next keystroke or click, or in more abstract terms, "when a computer can mostly keep up with me". There is not a single mac on the market today, even a $4,000 Mac Pro, that consistently can. End rant.

Have two systems here that I need to decide between keeping, one gets returned.

Totally identical, right down to the power supply, with the single exception of the graphics card

One is a GTX 980, the other a GTX 980TI

Common specs:
i7-5820k proc ( 3.3 stock, overclocked to 4.5 on one system and I'm going to be OC-ing on the other if I keep it, which is where the power supply comes in )
32GB DDR4
Samsung 850 Pro in Rapid Mode

My question is, NVidia recommends 500W for the 980 and a 600W supply for the 980TI. Why HP ships my 980TI config w/ a 500W power supply god only knows ( probably to up their profit ), so my question is:

Will having a 500W power supply affect performance? If so by how much? Will it make it so there's less juice to OC the proc on the 980TI box? If so, is it concievable that the 980 box will actually perform better for all non-graphics tasks because of the lack of power contention? Is that even how power works?

Thank you so much, I'm NOOB to this.

@Breffni-Potter "RAPID was specifically designed to not add any additional risk to user or system data, even in the event of a power-loss. In fact, RAPID strictly adheres to Windows
conventions in its treatment of any buffered writes in DRAM -- RAPID obeys all
“flush” commands, so any writes buffered by RAPID will make it to the persistent
media just like the Windows OS cache or the HDD cache. "

@Breffni-Potter

You actually beat my score on this by about 100 points, trying to figure out wtf. My best guess is that since your base clock is 4.0 and mine is 3.3 that was the difference. I wonder if there's a way to OC my base clock and not just the turbo boost ceiling. Anyone know on this? here are my XTU settings.

Let me ask this.

The only thing that'll be stored on each Raid 0/5 is

The MySQL data files ( not the MySQL installation )
and
The image uploads

So if a drive in the Raid 0 fails, I simply replace the drive, recreate the virtual disk, and then copy the database and images, which I think takes just a few minutes w/ two systems of this caliber 1U away from each other especially w/ so many cores to spare ( won't be competing w/ the load of the live site ).

So, since I have to drive an SSD over to the datacenter 10 minutes away, open the box, and get it in, a few more minutes for the copy feels like it'll be negligibly more time than if it failed w/ a Raid 5, where it would stay online ( though I don't know if my set up lets you do the Raid 5 replacement while the OS is running, maybe it does, or maybe I just hot swap the drive I'm not sure ).

So, because the full penalty for a Raid 0 failing vs. a Raid 5 in my set up is basically a few more minutes to copy the stuff manually, seems like the performance improvements would be worth the gamble. Is that logic sound or do y'all think just keeping the array online is better so 5 is the way to go anyway?

@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@dashrender "Easier backups", how so? Seems less-easy.

Can't be less easy. Can be the same or easier. You lose nothing, only gain options.

Less easy because without virtualization all I have to back up are a folder of images and a small handful of MySQL data files. Adding virtualization for the benefits I perceive peeps here to be championing would require backing up the entire VMs, which is less easy not to mention a much much bigger backup footprint, no? What am I missing?

Can't be less easy. Not possible. Literally, it's impossible to be less easy. Because ANY option you have with physical you retain with virtual, but with virtual you have more.

By less easy I just mean less work, less things to back up. I'd still need to back up the same things with virtualization that I will without, but with virtualization there are additional things to back up is all I mean. Easy was a poor choice of words, sorry.

What extra things do you think you need to backup with virtualization?

The virtual machine(s).

You are already backing those up. That's what you are backing up now. So nothing new.

Sorry, think I mispoke. I'm not backing anything up but the MySQL data files and the image uploads.

That's fine. Virtualization changes nothing. You need to back up nothing more. If you sense any additional needs with VMs, that means you have those needs today but are failing ot meet them. So you are likely discovering holes in your backup and recovery strategy that are bothering you, but you didn't realize until we mentioned the virtualization. But literally anything that works today will continue to work virtualized.

Just to be clear, assuming a requirement is Windows, specifically what you all are suggesting is that

Instead of using the host OS, I turn on Hyper V and use a single virtual machine per server and keep all other things identical?

You never want to enable the hyper-v role.

Download Hyper-v from the website, its completely free and is current. You'd be turning on an old version of Hyper-V which makes no sense.

Do you mean Hyper V Server? The standalone thingee?

@jaredbusch said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

The problem you run into here is that Hyper-V should be put on it's own drives. So you'll need another two drives in RAID 1 to run Hyper-V from, OR you could install Hyper-V on the current RAID1, and assuming there is enough storage space left over on that RAID 1, make the VM VHD for the boot portion of the VM, and on the RAID 0/5 make another VHD mapped into the same VM for the data.

Close, I never even bother with a RAID for Hyper-V. I put it on a SATA drive instead of an array drive.

I think since it's so small I can even just throw it on an SD card, right? These servers have slots for that ( then give the datacenter a back up SD card in case the first one fails ).

Found it: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/262196-one-big-raid-10-the-new-standard-in-server-storage

@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:

Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?

Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.

People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.

The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.

@dashrender said in Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces versus Hardware RAID, how do you decide?:

@creayt said in Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces versus Hardware RAID, how do you decide?:

@nashbrydges said in Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces versus Hardware RAID, how do you decide?:

Which setting was it that you changed from what to what?

It's in the system setup section, can't remember exactly where, but something along the lines of "set link speed to gen2/3", guessing that toggles the PCIe mode, thereby adding way more bandwidth between the drives and RAID controller. I don't have physical access to the servers at the moment so can't get in there to give you the exact info, sorry. But Link gen speed 2/3 should be enough to help you spot it if it's in your options.

LOL thought you loved iDRAC?

They're currently sitting in boxes inbetween datacenters so unless you know about a more Harry Potterish version of iDrac that requires no electricity or Internet connection I don't think iDrac will help. :PPPP

Two pretty insane deals:

17.3" i7-8750H ( hexacore ) , 16GB DDR4, GTX 1050 TI, 128GB SSD, 1TB HDD, mini display port, hdmi, rj-45 out
$636.75 after $ back promotion

15.6" thin-bezels, i7-8750H ( hexacore ), 8GB DDR4, GTX 1050 TI, 512GB SSD, USB-C, mini display port, hdmi, rj-45
$562.74 after $ back promotion

@Pete-S said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

The whole i5/i7 is just a bunch of marketing that creates confusion. There is no real difference between i5 and i7 on mobile CPUs. Usually the i7 can run on a slightly higher clock frequency so it's about 10-15% faster when pushed. Which is not enough for the user to actually notice.

So it's better to take the i5, save a bunch of $$$ and buy memory for that instead. Seeing Dell selling new laptops in 2019 with spinning rust and 4GB RAM - that should be criminal.

BTW, if you truly need speed you should go with one of the workstation or gaming laptops. They have a different, faster category of CPU. Higher TDP compared to the everyday laptops (45W versus 15W). But still slow compared to the desktop CPUs, which should be the choice for speed.

Respectfully disagree. But I will agree that for many people the difference between i7 and i5s ( generally speaking ) will never be perceived/valued, so in many cases it makes sense to go w/ an i5 for the $ savings.

For many other users and specific workloads, the difference is huge. Walking from my bedroom where I have a 2019 hexacore i5 Mac Mini running Windows 10 Pro hooked up to a 43" 4k monitor to my office across the hall where there's an octacore i9 it's like night and day. Each keystroke, click, and task-switch I do on the i9 feels VERY OBVIOUSLY faster than the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini feels ok, great for its size, until I hop onto the i9. When I get into serious workloads the difference becomes even more obvious, thread-dependent or not ( and honestly I don't have many workloads that use the surplus of cores, but I do multitask hard ).

The first time I went from an i5 to an i7-7700HQ it was a similar experience.

I recently started using Chrome mostly for development ( coding ) and then I use Brave for a lot of personal browsing as it's so much palpably faster that everything feels like it's working better. Worth checking out, even Google Docs run WAY more smoothly all the way down to scrolling large docs.