2014 — 14 May: Wednesday
It's a beautiful (yawn) sunny (yawn) morning1 and I toddled downstairs, partly to check on my new 4TB NAS and partly to check my email where I found the sad, but expected, news of the death of an old friend. Another of those potholes strewn along Life's little highway...
Meanwhile...
... I've just shutdown the NAS and will now reposition it somewhat more tidily. No rush! It can wait while I make the cuppa that will actually wake me up. The (small) glass of Jamesons I raised last night to my friend helped me sleep, no doubt, while the NAS was spending the best part of 10 hours 'verifying' every last bit of both disks with no bad sectors reported. I had paused "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" — one of the more exotic of the many films Christa and I had seen and enjoyed together over the years at the little Harbour Lights cinema — at a natural break, one hour into the story, and headed for bed.
KBO
I've just read...
... an interesting essay on inequality, by a chap who's studied Marx for 40 years, but I'm dismayed by some of the rabid comments it's been attracting. If this is the level of intellectual debate across the Pond... (Link.)
As I set about...
... systematically populating the new NAS with my music files, I am transferring these files via one of my SSDs, and am currently seeing writing speeds on the NAS — for what are a bunch of relatively small files — in excess of 100MB/sec. Were I to transfer the same files "direct" from NAS to NAS I suspect I would completely saturate2 my (Gigabit) network. This way I'm using 30% or so of the SSD's read capability and around 90% of the network. The WD Red drives in both the NAS boxes are 5,400 rpm SATA III devices theoretically capable of sustaining transfer rates of up to 6Gb/s but the RAID 1 "mirroring" obviously affects that.
Being retired, and having lots of other things to do as well, I can't say I'm worried about these data rates. I've also just heard the BBC Radio 3 chap suggest that we should get used to the idea of only travelling at 40mph on UK motorways. Whether this is by imposed restriction or because of sheer volume of traffic I didn't hear. I do recall the suggestion that each car in the UK has, on average, about 65 feet of clear road. That speaks volumes about human stupidity (much as I like driving).
As lemonses looms...
... rather near, all seems well so far:
"Put kettle on, Mother."
One who knows...
... has been trying, for by no means the first time, to clear up some of my misconceptions. (I'm very proud of my misconceptions, having been carrying some of them around with me for many years.)
Transfer via SSD? Not sure what you mean by that. Are you copying all the files to the SSD on Blackbeast then copying them to the NAS? Whatever it means, I find the 100MB/s figure difficult to believe. The WD Red series max out between 30 and 70 MB/s in real-world testing according to everything I've read. It is notoriously difficult to measure such things accurately but if you somehow saw 100MB/s it was probably the result of buffering somewhere and unlikely to be sustainable.
The 6Gb/s figure is the capacity of the SATA3 interface. No spinning rust drive can approach that — even top end SSDs currently don't saturate a SATA3 link. With a competent NAS you should not notice any significant speed change with RAID1 as the thing will write to both disks simultaneously. To be fair to Windows (very unlike me) the lack of performance on a NAS-NAS transfer is probably not entirely the fault of the misoperating system. The data read on one NAS is buffered in Blackbeast before being transferred to the other, passing twice through the not-wonderfully-optimised windoze TCP/IP stack. However, it also passes twice though the router where there will be additional buffering and churn, so I'm not surprised at the speed drop.
Well, I know what I saw, and the reported copying speed has been as high as 108MB/s (though not sustained at that rate). There are potential buffers inside BlackBeast, inside the NAS, and (for all I know) in the router, the switch, and the carpet pile.
Having cunningly arranged...
... to inspect the diminishing contents of Roger & Eileen's biscuit barrel this afternoon, and having also helped Mr Postie diminish some of his burden...
... it only belatedly occurred to me that fresh comestibles are also in some danger of diminution hereabouts, so I quickly dashed out to Waitrose. The afternoon is bright and sunny (like me) but there's the odd cloud around (like me). Somehow it's not been feeling very, erm, Wednesdayish.
The amazing...
... Richard Russell has recently added touch-screen support to his BBC BASIC for Windows product. Very cool.
Bright audio idea...
Now that I've seen how trivially easy it is to spool a digital radio recording from my Humax Freesat PVR, and convert it to high-bitrate MP3 format, it occurs to me that I could start capturing some of my favourite weekly material on BBC 6Music in better quality than is currently made available by get_iPlayer command line downloads. Radio 3 stuff (jazz and Late Junction) can be downloaded at 320kbps, but 'lesser' (translation: lower-class, non-classical) stations have to be content with 'lesser' bitrates. This will also save me download bandwidth, come to think of it.
I will, however, have to get rather more organised... I'm completely out of the habit of using that Humax as I've long ago stopped watching broadcast TV.
Alas, "Safety" did not make me laugh out loud. Can't win them all.