Re: [gentoo-user] Rearranging hard drives and data.

[Wols Lists]

On 19/12/20 21:31, David Haller wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, antlists wrote:
>> On 19/12/2020 18:49, David Haller wrote:
>>> -dnh, the MoBo though is quite a fine piece with 8 SATA + 2 eSATA
>>>      ports onboard:)  I'm gonna miss eSATA in newer HW:(  Hot-plug
>>>      almost like USB but full SATA feature set and speed (e.g. SMART).
>>
>> Buy add-in sata cards. The ones I've been looking at are two-port cards, with
>> two internal and two external (jumper-selected) connectors.
>
> I already got one. Yes, I'd pitch MoBo w/many SATA vs. MoBo w/fewer
> SATA plus AddIn, but PCI(e) slots are also limited and >=2 port cards
> get expensive rather quick, say a card with >= 4 internal and
> _extra_[0] 1-2 eSATA ... So, I'll rather have a MoBo with lots of SATA
> + addin than MoBo plus tons of addin cards...

Well, I feel as frustrated as you with my new setup. My new mobo
wouldn't boot so I took it to the shop saying "I think it needs a BIOS
update". They replaced the mobo, and fortunately offered me the old one
back before chucking it. I discovered it was still under warranty, sent
it back to Gigabyte, and it came back fixed with a BIOS update!!!

The replacement mobo (which they charged me twice what I'd paid for the
original) was spec'd as having "plenty of onboard SATA". I think the old
Gigabyte mobo had at least 6. The new one has 6, of which two collide
with the graphics cards or NVMe. Seeing as I'm planning on running
multi-seat, I need two graphics cards ... :-(
>
>
> Were it not for gentoo and large stuff needing 6+ hours to compile,
> the occasional reencoding of a video[3], and some fucking websites
> which take ages to load (which was one reason for me to update 10
> years ago from my then Athlon 500[2])... *ELIDED* those *ELIDED*
> webdevs *ELIDED* - sideways - *ELIDED* that *ELIDED* *ELIDED* so
> called webpages that gobble CPU as if there's no tomorrow! And
> *ELIDED* I know, I built webpages that (besides larger pictures) load
> snappy over a 4kB/56kBit/s modem in fractions of a second (no wonder,
> being typically <0.5KB in size and no JS or other crud, there's a lot
> you can fit in 1 KB :).
>
> What was I saying, ahh, yes: ... I'd not even consider upgrading.
>
> Well, more RAM would be nice by now, what with those *ELIDED* browsers
> and *ELIDED* Java-Apps gobbling RAM as if there's TiBs of it for
> free... *ARGHHHH*&&RAS*()#@*{!@_)(@I*CONNECTION RESET BY BEER*

Smile ...
>
> -dnh
>
> [0] i.e. working in parallel to the internal ports
>
> [1] SATA2 was still normal then
>
> [2] yep, the original, slowest Athlon ever sold, sufficed for me for
>     many many years, along with an even older Matrox Mystique (the
>     original 150MHz RAMDAC but as the beefy 4MB SGRAM version)

I ran that same Matrox - loved it - with an Athlon 1400  - tbird - and
that lasted me ages and ages. The chip ran at 1050 because the mobo was
a 100MHz bus but the chip wanted 133MHz. I think that machine had 758MB
ram - 3x256MB sticks because that's the max it would take. And because
its replacement had "issues" (still does) I compiled everything on the
slow machine before installing it on the fast one ...
>
> [3] BTW: it's astonishing how inefficient some streamed videos are
>     encoded, just today I crunched down one from 2.9GiB to about
>     639MiB. Albeit, I scaled down from 720p to 576p, but do the maths.
>
>     I regularly get to <50% of the size of the original without any
>     scaling, and all without any visible loss (x264 with crf=23:nr=750,
>     that codec-internal noise reduction alone can get you ~10% less
>     size ;) Well, it's what you get when you don't know about codecs
>     or you just run HW-encoders at defaults, I guess...
>
Oh - and if your original is mpeg2, you might find you've deleted entire
streams of stuff you're not interested in.

Cheers,
Wol