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Author Topic: Tech-related problems  (Read 480473 times)

Offline frblckstr1

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1220 on: October 02, 2007, 04:18:27 PM »
I'm thinking of RAID 0'ing the drive I'll use for keeping in-progress bittorrents.  At any point in time, I'm seeding and leaching two dozen torrents, and the drive is constantly being read and written too. 
Using a small computer (like discussed here somewhere before) might help even more, I can do 20 torrents (10 active uploads) without problems on my 1GHz celeron.
Using a seperate HD for the temporary torrent files will give you more room to play with then using a stripe set.

You will benefit the most from having a lot of RAM though, so just go all out with the RAM, if you're going with Vista then be sure to get 4gig or something.
chera: for 4GB, keep in mind 32bit systems can't address the full 4GB, 3.2GB is most of the time the limit.
This is a hardware/software design limitation.

Offline shadowstar

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1221 on: October 02, 2007, 05:51:17 PM »
Can a free PHPBB forum (from miumiu.com to be specific) be hosted on a server of my own eventually?

Offline chera

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1222 on: October 03, 2007, 09:12:23 PM »
Thanks for the tips!

Another really dumb question.  I've used an online calculator and seems I'll be needing quite a large PSU to handle the peak power consumption of all the stuff I'll be cramming into the case - probably a 750W unit.  But if I don't have all the HDDs on all the time and don't run anything intensive, my actual power needs will be much less. 

If I get a 750W PSU, will it always suck in 750W from my mains, or will my power consumption fluctuate depending on actual needs? 

Offline ebc

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1223 on: October 03, 2007, 11:39:55 PM »
Nah, it'll pretty much never use 750w. Only what the components drain from it.

If you don't mind, can I ask what the specs of your new PC might be? :)
« Last Edit: October 03, 2007, 11:40:50 PM by ebc »

Offline Asmodai

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1224 on: October 04, 2007, 04:44:31 AM »
Weird, my school website www.uwo.ca won't load for me.

It loads fine for other people, it worked fine a few hours ago, and the rest of the internet works great, but it won't load for me and I don't have a clue why.

Offline frblckstr1

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1225 on: October 04, 2007, 05:11:23 AM »
Weird, my school website www.uwo.ca won't load for me.
It loads even for me :)

Clear your cookies/file chache and try again, something might have 'stuck'.

Offline chera

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1226 on: October 04, 2007, 05:43:23 AM »
If you don't mind, can I ask what the specs of your new PC might be? :)

This is extremely tentative.  The primary use of the machine will be to leach and seed BTs.  Secondary as a gaming machine.  Using a laptop for so long meant that I could only play strategy games, and I really miss FPSes.  Thirdly as a media server.  I have many terabytes of MP3s and crap, and I always dreamt of storing it all on a single machine where it would be available instantly.

Case: Lian Li PC-2000A Plus II.  This baby looks half-way like a Mac Pro, has 7x5.25" bays and 12x3.5" bays and has 3x120mm fans.  I'd store 2 optical drives that I have lying around, a temperature monitor/fan controller (it just looks cool), and a card reader on the 5.25" bays, as well as maybe 3 HDDs on a hot swappable drive array.

Monitor: Samsung HLT-5087S LED DLP 1080p HDTV.  This is the only thing that I've got on hand already.  It's got a massive screen, but is sensitive to viewing angle - a few inches too high or low and the picture dims at the corners.  I'd prefer an LCD or plasma for color and viewing angle, but this strikes a good compromise (and is quite cheap for a 1080p HDTV).  I'd be using this as both my monitor and primary TV.  It takes HDMI and composite, but not VGA and DVI.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66Ghz 1333FSB.  This near top of the line Core 2 Duo CPU is the Ars Technica Hot Rod suggested CPU of 8/07 and Tom's Hardware has it as the highest ranking Intel CPUs in terms of price/performance (AMD takes the cake for the top 5 though).  It also scores very highly on UT2003 and several other graphics metrics.

Motherboard: Undecided.  Any P35 motherboard should support the Core 2 Duo, and also allow room for upgrades to Core 2 Extreme and Quad Core.  My must-haves for a mobo are lots of SATA ports (the max seems to be eight), WiFi (don't want to waste a PCI port for this, and I don't like USB Wifi solutions), and PCIex16 (since nobody makes good AGP cards anymore), and RAID 1 support for a pair of drives.  My nice-to-haves are firewire (my mom's old iMac relies on a firewire external HDD), an ATA port, and dual PCIex16 (for SLI potential, someday).  I don't overclock.  Why RAID 1?  I'm away from home many days a week and my computer will be on doing the BT thing.  Since I use cheap HDDs, I'm afraid I'm gonna come home and find out that the drive housing my OS has been dead for a week and I've made no headway in downloading the complete HDTV version of Planet Earth, or whatever else is in my BT queue.  So I'm planning on RAID 1'ing the drive holding my OS and core applications.

Hard drives: Any 500GB 7200RPM SATA drives, the cheapest ones listed on Pricewatch.  I've got 25 IDE and SATA HDDs ranging from 200GB to 500GB storing everything from MP3s to sports to porn to photos.  Right now if I want to access a file, I do a search in Where Is It (thanks to all who recommended that utility), figure out which drive it's in, and plug the drive in a USB-SATA/IDE adapter.  This is inconvenient, and I'd like to consolidate the most important of those files into about 5-10 HDDs in the internal bays of the computer for easy access.  To ensure long life, the drives will be turned off until I actually want to pull out a file.  The computer will be on 24/7 doing the BT thing, and there's no reason to have the drives spinning all that time.

OS: I'd like to keep on using Win XP 32-bit, but if that means my performance is going to be bottlenecked to using just 3.xGB of RAM, I might upgrade to Win XP 64-bit.  I'm afraid that my old apps won't work anymore though, since some of them are really old, like ACDSee 3.1 and Teleport Pro 1.41.  So I might put XP 64 in another partition, and might even throw Vista in a partition just for the heck of it.

RAM: 3GB DDR2 800, no specific brand.  I'm one of the types of guys who has 80 tabs open in Firefox on at once, so I need as much RAM as I can get.  3GB, probably in 2GB + 1GB sticks if I'm still using XP 32.  4GB in 2GB+2GB if I use XP 64.

PSU: 750W, no specific brand yet.  It seems that a SATA HDD uses 27W of peak load power, so with 10 HDDs, I'll need well over 300W of peak load.  Throw in the GPU and various other crap, and I think 600-700W should be safe.

Graphics Card: 8800GTS 640MB, no specific brand.  It seems that this is the minimum I'll need to fully utilize the 1080p monitor for gaming.  What hurts me is that this will cost nearly $400 - twice as much as the CPU and nearly as much as a PS3!   I'm seriously thinking of getting a cheapo video card and getting a PS3.  Which wouldn't look nearly as good in 1080p as a 8800GTS, but would be more useful (I could conceivably lug the PS3 around with me when I'm not at home).

Keyboard and mouse: IBM Trackpoint USB keyboard.  I can't imagine using anything else.

Crazy?  Absurd?  Just plain dumb?  Comments and suggestions most appreciated.

Offline tiny

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1227 on: October 04, 2007, 06:37:26 AM »
^ comments in no particular order.

1. For compatibility issues regarding Windows XP Pro 64 see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition

2. Peak power consumption for HDDs is at startup. Many (expensive) SCSI HDDs have a delayed spin-up setting as to avoid overloading the power supply at boot time. Graphics cards are slowly taking over from the CPU as most power demanding part of a PC. For SLI you need a PSU with the correct leads.

3. RAM: Whatever brand you buy, buy them in pairs and among the pairs look for sticks with the same timings. (For dual channel operation)

4. Re: many HDDs: have you ever thought about NAS as a storage solution? Bare bones NAS cases exist which can take PATA or SATA drives.

5. Motherboard: carefully consider how many PCI slots you need. Many mobos have maybe 3 slots where only 2 slots are usable if the PCIex16 is used with a large profile graphics card (heatsink/fan sticks out). I found this out the hard way.

Offline LaJon

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1228 on: October 04, 2007, 06:43:52 AM »
Crazy?  Absurd?  Just plain dumb?  Comments and suggestions most appreciated.

Get a sound card. :D

Offline ebc

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1229 on: October 04, 2007, 08:26:52 AM »
Crazy?  Absurd?  Just plain dumb?  Comments and suggestions most appreciated.

Get a sound card. :D

hehe +1 for this.

The specs look pretty good, I actually have the Lian Li v2100b
They're a really nice case.

With the RAM, just get 2gig cause you're only using XP, the thing to remember with ram is that you'll wanna run your sticks in dual channel to get the most performance out of it so ideally you will want to get match paired sticks of ram. 2gig is really plenty for XP, if you were going Vista then I would have advised a 2x 2gig kits mainly because Vista likes to use as much ram as it can. So even though there is the whole "omg 32bit systems won't see 4gig of ram" deal, that's not the point of getting 4gig of ram. Getting matched pairs of ram (2x 2gig or 4x 1gig sticks) is the reason for it.

If you're not sure about getting the 8800gts 640mb videocard, that's fine. You can get the 320mb version they're about $100 cheaper and should still be fine for playing games at high resolutions. If you wanted you could even get by with a cheaper 8600gt 256mb. I have one of these and it is really quite a decent card. I run games at 1600x1200 no problems. Although Bioshock is pushing it hehe but I am kinda fussy when it comes to framerate.
I have a feeling nvidia is about to release a new range of cards in November though so keep an eye out I've heard rumours of a Geforce 8700 which might be ideal for you.
« Last Edit: October 04, 2007, 08:35:37 AM by ebc »

Offline frblckstr1

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1230 on: October 04, 2007, 10:26:44 AM »
This is extremely tentative.  The primary use of the machine will be to leach and seed BTs.  Secondary as a gaming machine.  Using a laptop for so long meant that I could only play strategy games, and I really miss FPSes.  Thirdly as a media server.  I have many terabytes of MP3s and crap, and I always dreamt of storing it all on a single machine where it would be available instantly.

...snip...
I have done single machine 'all singing all dancing' setups and am now going a bit back from them.

I find 'storage should be in the network' (e.g. NAS devices like ebc mentions or just a 'older' machine with drives attached) there is currently nothing (unless you have multiple people streaming high bitrate videos at the same time) that requires even a 100Mbit network, let alone 1Gbit.
(BTW Vista has a very annoying 'feature' that it throttles the network in favor of sound, which makes it that you can't play high bitrate videos like 1920x1080 .ts from the network (1280x720 h264 is no problem)
Very stupid design 'feature' not sure they corrected it for SP1, not going to try the beta on my Vista MCE machine :) )

There are even NAS devices that can do BT's themselves (and use like only 30W of power)

For games you need the machine (close to the screen) for video I am looking again to extenders (like the new v2 MCE extender from linksys) because of the fan noise, the laptop is currently doing ok, so no real need to replace in the next year or so.

I have used a DLP beamer (lamp crapped out on me, haven't bought a new one yet) to produce a 65" screen (4:3), makes for a BIG display of some old MM videos :D

Having such a big machine 24/7 on might surprise you in the amount of power is draws compared to some simple small machines/devices.
« Last Edit: October 04, 2007, 10:27:49 AM by frblckstr1 »

Offline Asmodai

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1231 on: October 04, 2007, 01:38:04 PM »
Weird, my school website www.uwo.ca won't load for me.
It loads even for me :)

Clear your cookies/file chache and try again, something might have 'stuck'.

Turns out that rebooting my modem and router solved the problem. Should have tried that first. I figured it out when my laptop wouldn't load the page either.

Offline ebc

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1232 on: October 04, 2007, 02:46:52 PM »
I find 'storage should be in the network' (e.g. NAS devices like ebc mentions or just a 'older' machine with drives attached) there is currently nothing (unless you have multiple people streaming high bitrate videos at the same time) that requires even a 100Mbit network, let alone 1Gbit.

Actually that was tiny who mentioned the NAS.

Though I have a dedicated Intel NAS...   I regret it T_T
Even though it has 2 gigabit ports it barely handled 100mbit, it's now sitting in it's box unused. But nevermind that, it's kinda complicated to explain why it was slow. So yeah that was the worst $600 I've ever spent, I should have just built a low spec machine with a tonne of sata controllers and a gigabit port, stuck XP on it and it would have been great.

If you just want to have everything in one machine then I say go for it, there's nothing wrong with having tonnes of harddrives all on hand for instant use. You would just need a tonne of controllers to plug the drives into.
« Last Edit: October 04, 2007, 02:47:43 PM by ebc »

Offline chera

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1233 on: October 04, 2007, 09:29:22 PM »
The idea of using my planned dream machine as a BT leach box is now at risk....

This is just the first month of using Comcast cable broadband 8 Mbps in Chicago, and I just got a call today (4 Oct) from the Comcast abuse guy warning of potential account termination for 12 months.

He told me that they do an audit monthly, and that over the past month I had downloaded 500GB, which puts me in the top .1% of Comcast's 12 million customers and the target for a warning phone call. He said that this was the reason he couldn't give me a specific number for how large the limit is - because the usage of the top .1% changes every month (presumably goes up).

On a slightly unrelated point, he also said that I was using over 300x more bandwidth than the average user, which means that the average user only downloads about 1.7GB a month. Given that even a 56k modem user could, if saturating a phone line 24/7, dowload about 18GB a month, it seems that most average users are massively underutilizing their bandwidth.  BT via dialup, anyone?  :lol:  Unfortunately, Comcast is the only broadband provider in my building, so I'll have to figure out some way to deal with this.

Since they do their audit once a month, would canceling my service near the end of each month (before they do their audit) and then restarting my service after the first week of the next month (after they've given their monthly warning calls) solve the problem?

Offline Asmodai

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1234 on: October 05, 2007, 01:30:56 AM »
Probably not.

500GB is pretty incredible honestly. Of course, I have no idea how much bandwidth I use; Rogers' bandwidth tracking tool is broken.

Offline Genesis

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1235 on: October 05, 2007, 01:45:17 AM »
NetMeter is a great little program that records your bandwidth usage and statistics

http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/

Offline frblckstr1

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1236 on: October 05, 2007, 05:03:16 AM »
over the past month I had downloaded 500GB, which puts me in the top .1% of Comcast's 12 million customers and the target for a warning phone call.
Wow 500GB, and I thought I was a rather heavy user with 400GB/month down (and 130GB up) which means that I do about 100GB in torrents/month.

Ok US series season is just starting and I'm going for the 720p versions now (1.1GB/episode) so the download will increase starting this month...
« Last Edit: October 05, 2007, 05:04:31 AM by frblckstr1 »

Offline ebc

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1237 on: October 05, 2007, 05:20:50 AM »
I only do about 100-120g/month
This month might not be even half that though because I've been too addicted to Team Fortress 2 to worry about downloading stuff :D

Offline chera

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1238 on: October 05, 2007, 05:34:28 AM »
I think what killed me was downloading every episode of the documentary Planet Earth in 720p, while at the same time my favorite tracker giving "free leech" weekend.  I sucked down close to 200GB in just three days, which is way more than I'm used to.  What really sucks is that my ISP wont tell me their threshold for terminating my service, so I have no idea what I should be throttling myself to....   :cry:

Offline frblckstr1

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Re: Tech-related problems
« Reply #1239 on: October 05, 2007, 05:45:59 AM »
^ Just geussing but there 'not fair use anymore' seems to start at about 300-400GB/month and it will probably depend on if you do it every month or not.

You could ask it they warn a second time or not, if not you have a problem trying to figure out what 'heavy use but no warning' is.

ALso it might make a difference if the traffic is local (meaning to there news server) or outside (meaning out-of-the-country) they might have different limits for that (because of cost/GB)

Yay for me having a ISP that is an old school hacker group which have not warned me in all the years I am connected (and I have gone up to 600GB/month at times)
« Last Edit: October 05, 2007, 05:46:22 AM by frblckstr1 »

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