The real problem is that I’ve put all my level up points in to Magicka because it’s the one resource I’m always starved in.  Even with magicka regen gear or fortify destruction gear, even after this many levels there is not enough magicka to fight more than two enemies at a time.  The game makes you do this all the time.  But because all my points went to magicka and not health, the mage is extremely fragile.  There really aren’t many good dropped items to really improve armor AND the correct magic thing you want.

One could enchant, but that brings up issue number 2: there aren’t enough skill points.  Even as a Destruction purist, the Restoration and Alteration bring a lot of spells to improve offense, defense, and reduce Magicka cost.  But there aren’t enough skill points to do all that AND level enchantment which is the only way to get the decent gear we need.  You might say that it’s the point, that it’d be too easy otherwise.  But there’s just no balance when a single arrow or ice spell can kill you and you STILL don’t have enough magicka to fend off three dead guys without running or potting.

Luckily, Destruction provides stuns.  If you dual cast the spell, you can stun an opponent and this is critical to surviving any fight.  Crowd control is a must, but it also kills the action.  You dual cast a spell, stun the guy, wait 15 seconds, do it again.  It’s cheap and it’s boring.  It also forces you to dual cast every spell which kind of ruins blocking.  I can’t just hit block to dodge a spell.  I have to switch to that spell, let it charge up, and then hope that it blocks.

But all a magic block or ward ends up doing is draining your magicka pool super quick.  And it usually fails with a single destruction hit.  There is a talent point that can be used to make wards absorb magicka, but see my note about not enough talent points.  Also, like Oblivion, you can simply side step most destruction spells.  Why burn precious magicka off trying to block it when you can instantly step to the side?

Magic blocking would actually be a fun component if it came up instantly with a key press without having to change spells.  Let it burn magicka at the same rate, but if we bring it up for only a second while we need it, that’s fine.

Oblivion had a better magic system overall.  More spells AND you got to create your own monstrosities.  Touch versus range spells were a good idea and gave an otherwise long range class some close range action.  You could be a pretty powerful mage in Oblivion and still have major health.

A lot of people complain about Skyrim’s obvious flaws.  The dated graphics, the shitty UI, the bugs, the crashes, the annoying Radiant AI talking at you in the middle of other conversations, the lack of money at the vendors.  But those things can be forgiven, they don’t really hurt the action.  But hurtling the same spells for 120 hours does.  Flame walls and glyphs are good ideas but almost entirely useless in just about every battle.

This biggest effrontery is that there seem to only be 8 mappable spell keys.  It makes it annoying to try other spells since they require rummaging through a shitty UI to find.  Suddenly need water breathing or a ward or frost instead of flame, well now you have to remap hot keys.  Fun in the heat of battle.

The little oil pots and fire spells are a great addition.  I also like the candlelight spell you can shoot to make, well lets face it, the majority of the game visible.  Oblivion was awesome because of the spell variety it gave.  And it was just dumbed down like all new games seem to be this day.

As a mage, Shouts are confusing.  Ice Form gives great crowd control, but most of the other spells are complete rip offs of spells I already have.  I’m torn on Slow Time since I’m not sure it affects magicka regen, which is all I really need time for.  A “slow their time but keep mine the same” button would work better.

Maybe swords are the way to go with this game.  The combo moves look interesting.  I miss some meaningful combat.  Not this recursion of stun, stun, stun, stun, shout, drink potion, stun, stun, stun, collect loot.

Every month for the next five years came the bill for $382.  It was a good car and really only cost us about $2000 in non wear repairs such as a new master pully and a rusted through catalytic converter.  Tires and breaks probably cost another $3000 on top of that.  We sold it at the rather fair rate of $8000.  In the end, we spent about $226 a month for having owned that car.  If we had kept the car beyond 7 years, we may have made out a little better although it was nearing 100,000 miles and would have suddenly needed a lot more money in repairs.  The 100,000 area seems to be an expensive time for most cars.

There are plenty of cars in the used market that used to cost $20-$30K new and can be had for $2000-$4000 used.  You can usually find them at around 70-100K miles which is about when new cars are sold to purchase more new cars.  If you buy one of these cars for $3000, you will likely dump another $3000 in to it right away for breaks, tires, mufflers, accessory belts, a timing belt, and a tune up.  A manual car may need $1000 in a clutch as well.  This seems to scare many people off since you’re in $7000 on a car that’s still only worth $3000.  They see the repairs as a nuisance and opt instead for a new car which they see as costing less in repairs and being more reliable.

But this car with that work is likely going to last you at least another 50,000 miles.  You can get 4-5 years out of one of these things easily.  At $7000 over 48 months, the cost of this car is $145/mo but you can do better.  This doesn’t account for selling the car when you are done with it, although your best bet is to drive it in to the ground.

It can save you well over $1000 a year to buy a used car.  So I wonder what puts people off the most about it.  Obviously the bigger savings can be had by purchasing from a private party which people may find an intimidating experience.  This is especially true if they don’t know what to look for in a car.  With Google and a printer you can find all sorts of tips on how to buy a used car.  Also there is savings by not involving the bank.  People may not have $3000-$4000 up front to buy a car through a private seller.  Also, if you spend $3000 on a car, expect to spend another $1000 right away for brakes or tires.  They always seem to need something right out of the gate and people may not realize this.

Buying used is the best thing you can do for your environment.  A lot of green conscious people don’t realize that the energy and pollution caused by creating a new vehicle often outweighs any gasoline savings.  How many people have traded in perfectly decent Civics or Camrys for a Prius only to do more harm than good?

Just some other random thoughts:

* Roadside assistance is cheap and although used cars are slightly less reliable, with cell phones and cheap assistance, breaking down is rarely more than a minor inconvenience.  And even new cars can break down.

* If you have a new car, every scratch or ding is going to make you cringe.  If you live in a city or do a lot of highway driving this is especially true.  Looks mean a lot to some people.  But it’s always easier to swallow a dent if it’s on a $2,000 car than a $20,000 car.

* Put $100/mo away for repairs.  You will probably spend about $1000/year on repairing an old car so it’s good to plan for that and earn a little interest to boot.

* Test drive that car hard and get it real warm.  If something smells or sounds off about the car, skip it.  Even a layman can usually tell if something sounds wrong even if he or she doesn’t realize what might be causing it.  Avoid cars with any signs of present or previous leaks as fixing them can be more money than you need to spend.  Accelerate hard in the car to see how the engine compression is doing.  Don’t worry about the tires or brakes, or clutch, just assume they’ll need to be done.

* If you don’t get service records for the car, change fluids like the transmission or differential fluid.  This is usually required for 45-60K service and is often ignored.  Change timing belts on an interference engine if you don’t have records as well.  Never believe anyone if they claim to have had service done.

* Use the dealer’s mechanic sparingly.  They’re very over priced.  They may be your best hope for more complicated jobs such as faulty ABS or a timing belt.  Otherwise, find a local mechanic who is ASE certified.  Don’t be afraid to try a few different mechanics before settling on one who does the best job.  If you can find a mechanic who will install parts you purchase yourself, even better.  Mechanics often add write up to part costs.

* Most mechanics don’t want to spend your money.  I don’t know if they are naturally frugal or used to customers who are extremely cheap.  It’s usually a fight to get them to order higher quality parts or fix things that may only be slightly broken.  If a single hose or belt breaks, have the mechanic change them all.  It can help the reliability situation and keep your down time to a minimum.  But like I said, very few mechanics like fixing things that aren’t broken.  But do you really care if a $3 hose can go 200,000 miles or not?

* Always get a stainless steel muffler system.  Yours will fall off.  And they will keep falling off until you go stainless.  It costs a little more up front but a stainless unit will probably last the rest of the car’s life.  If you do a lot of short drives, you may join the ‘new muffler every 2 years’ club otherwise.

* The little things are going to stop working.  Cruise control seems to be fragile.  Plastic latches and switches will often be very brittle after 10 years.  An older car isn’t going to be perfect so don’t put money in to fixing the little things like mirror controls, seat heaters, etc.

* Buy the best brakes and tires you can afford.  The cost of one accident far outweighs the cost of good tires and brakes.  And tires especially can make a huge difference in your safety.  And do put snow tires on any car you intend to drive on the snow.  Good all-seasons do quite well on the snow, but not nearly as good as snow tires do.  They really are worth the expense if you can’t stay at home when there’s snow on the roads.

* You can get a much ‘nicer’ car used than you can new.  For example, some luxury cars are surprisingly affordable used.  You can get a Subaru, Audi, Honda, for less than it costs to get a Kia, Suzuki, or Hyundai.  Or, get a BMW, Mercedes, Porsche for a little more and still spend less than a Kia costs new.  Or get 4 Hondas or 2 Porsches for the cost of a new Kia.  But beware, parts can be expensive on less common cars.  Japanese and American car parts are very affordable in the US but many European car parts are still expensive.  You have the option of getting an exotic or rare model, but it comes at a price.

* These days a used car is a late 90s or early 00s car and these cars are likely to all have air conditioning, ABS, air bags and many of the features you’ve come to expect.  Avoid cars that are much older even if they have low mileage because you will miss some of the features and the cars are less safe.  The differences between an early 90s and a late 90s car can be dramatic.

* Consider 150,000 miles to be end of life for any car.  Many car engines will gladly do 200,000 miles but don’t buy a car with 160,000 miles expecting to get five years of commuting out of it.  A car at 80-90K miles has a lot of life left but will need that 100K work done.  A car at 120K miles that has already had timing belt, clutch, air conditioning, etc replaced and has quality service records is also a contender.  It has a bit less life but has already had a lot of the major mid-life crisis work done on it so may save you some money.

But then I gave it a little more thought.  On those same cold days we’re heating our houses.  The condensor on the refridgerator is actually cutting money off of the heating bill.  In fact, cutting a hole through the side of the house might actually hurt the heating costs since sealing holes can be quite tricky.

Of course, most of us have our fridges tucked away in to some wooden cubby hole where all that heat builds up and is ultimately wasted energy.  In fact, our aesthetic will causes refridgerators to work harder than they have too since they’ll run inefficiently without proper cooling.  A simple $5 fan is all that’s required to circulate that heat out from behind the cabinets and out in to the open air where it can be of more benefit to cold humans.

Refridgerators are pretty stupid all around when you think about it.  They should be top loading, not side loading.  Throw a retractable counter top or butcher block on the thing and it can be quite functional that way.  The fact that it uses air for cooling food is quite inefficient.  Some metal conductors and some reusable tinfoil packaging might work better.  A little cold water bath for things like soda, milk, or other plastic containers would be nice as well.  Think of a giant cooler at a picnic.  That’s really the right design.

I’m not saying that using the cold winter air for the fridge is a bad idea.  It certainly helps reduce your dependency on the stressed out grid.  I’m not sure it’s the energy win they claim it to be.  It’d be better to make use of the heat energy the fridge pumps to the condensor for heating rooms or water.  Between wasted stove energy and fridge energy you could probably generate all the hot water you need.  That’d be useful in the summer months where you don’t want the fridge dumping hot air in to the house.  But you still take warm showers.

What I really want is a thermo-resonant cooling system that these guys make: http://www.cficinc.com/

Yep.  I upgraded from a $300 mid-range video card to a $700 one.  Even in 2007 the 8800 series was getting a bit dated.  The Ultra was discontinued only a couple months after I purchased it.  It wasn’t a good value for the money so they say.

I’ve been using it for a year and a half now and today is the first day it’s let me down.  I can’t run STALKER Clear Sky at 1600×1200 with full eye candy at 30FPS minimum.  FarCry 2, Crysis, Fallout 3, FEAR2 and GTA4 are all games I’ve recently played with it and it’s done amazing on each and every one.  STALKER:CS is a demanding game with amazing lighting effects and at 1600×1200 it will dip down to 20FPS.  Again, with maximum settings.

Except for AA.  I don’t use or like AA.

The problem seems to be video RAM.  768m just isn’t enough anymore if you want full eye candy.  GTA4 is the most noticible when it comes to video ram usage since it provides a handy little utility for guestimating how much you need.  If you want big draw distances you just need a lot more video memory.

Super fast DDR3 helps when you need to swap textures but it’s still a bad idea.  So I have to run STALKER:CS at 1280×960 resolution.  With full eye candy but less resolution I get the 30FPS minimum I want with averages in the mid 40s.  The video memory usuage drops to 600-800m so mcuh more inline with the card.

Don’t know why dropping resolution drops down memory usage but since it does more power too me.

I’ve noticed that I’m not running the card overclocked.  With RivaTuner and the water cooling I can clock this card to over 720MHz core, 1580MHz shader, and 1250MHz vram.  RivaTuner somehow got uninstalled on this machine so it’s only running it’s stock ‘overclock’ of 660/1512/1150MHz.

The stock Ultra is spec’ed for 612/1500/2160MHz.  So MSI really got some solid numbers out of it out of the box.  But don’t let MSI fool you: the card was NEVER stable at those settings with the stock cooling.  You’d get a lot of pixel ‘glitter’ at those settings though underclocking it to stock Ultra settings fixed that.  So did going to water cooling.

As far as the DangerDen cooler well I think it was a waste to be honest.  I love DangerDen products and I’m absolutely glad someone makes such a massive cooler that can also cool the RAM and power components.  But the thing of it is that you just can’t get much more out of the RAM.  RAM tends not to overclock so well on video cards and even when it does it provides very little performance gain.  Having MORE ram is important.  Does the DangerDen cooler sacrifice GPU cooling abilites for the RAM?  The GPU temperatures are quite high.  Well over 65c after intense gaming.  Thermal transfer from the GPU to the water is poor with this block.  That doesn’t stop 720-730MHz core ranges from being unreachable though.  With a little overvolting I think 730-740MHz would be completely stable.  I would like a better GPU block though.

I still think vram is the limiting factor here.  Who cares about a fast core/shader if you’re swapping textures from system RAM all the time?  If this card had 1GB or more of RAM I think I’d be playing at full res on STALKER.

The bottom line for me is that I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this card.  Being able to run PC games with all the lovely eye candy has sort of made me buy and play a ton of PC games in the past 18 months.  I’m still shocked every time I get a new game and go in to the options screen and crank everything up and watch it not struggle at all.  Did I get my moneys worth?  No I don’t think so.  The water cooling kit was too much for what I got out of it.  And the MSI Ultra, while a good deal at the time, wasn’t priced to compete with the slightly better valued 8800 GTX.

But I still don’t need to upgrade.  The Nvidia GTX 285 can be had for under $400 and it’ll have 1GB of RAM.  It’s a tremendous value for that and it’d be my card of choice.  I get to wait for the next series of GPUs to come out before I start feeling the slowdown.

Imagine your developers are the guys in the back making the food.  Imagine the development managers are taking the orders.  Imagine the product people or upper management as the customers.  The consumers.

It all sort of fits, doesn’t it?

Customers all want the same basic things.  They want fast service.  They want quality service.  They want reliable service.  And most important of all is that they want it cheap.  It’s easy to tell when when your service is fast at a restaurant.  If you don’t have your food right quick you’ll be bloody hungry!  Quality and reliability are easy to measure too.  If the food tastes like burnt motor oil than they’ve failed on both accounts.

For some reason the customers of the software development world have a much more difficult time of gauging the performance of their ‘kitchens’.  They almost always seem to focus on speed and cheap.  I don’t think they always realize that they’re getting McDonald’s though.

Fast food joints provide a ready supply of expedient food options.  Through clever marketing it even seems cheap.  Your typical fast food meal can cost just as much as eating out somewhere more reputable however.  The real problem with fast food is that it’s completely unhealthy and has a tendency to kill you if you eat too much of it.

Your typical developer is like a fry cook.  You don’t even want to know what this guy would do to your burger.  You certainly wouldn’t want him to take your order cause he’d simply muck it up.  He’s getting paid so little and similar jobs are so readily available that he just doesn’t care about your fries one bit.  So you get soggy fries.  And no matter how bad those fries are you’ll still go back to this place because it’s quite simply a quick fix.

There are nice restaurants though.  There are developers out there who think just like fine chefs.  They want to make something beautiful and tasty because that is their passion.  They design their menu carefully and they charge a lot more so they can go buy the best steaks or wine.  The wait staff is cute and attentive and will certainly know which delightful soup the chef has whipped up.

And the chef will certainly feel a little annoyed if you pour ketchup all over your dry aged filet.

You’d probably like your developers to be chefs and not fry cooks.  You have to give them the leeway to do the kind of work they can be proud of.  Just place your order and sit back and enjoy the appetizers while they assemble something you’ll love.  If the food arrives late and cold than don’t pay!

The sad reality of this, however, is that no matter how good of a restaurant your development house turns out to be, it’s still a restaurant.  Your customers are placing orders and waiting to see what will arrive at the table.  It’s almost always a surprise.  I think this is a terribly ineffective way of building quality software products.

Think baseball team instead.  Everyone has different positions on the team but they still all work as a single unit.  They’re all working for a single goal and the greater good.  They’re playing to win the game.  And in modern times they’re also playing to raise someones stock portfolio.  You can make a lot of money while doing an excellent job and having fun.

Oh sure, every company throws out terms like ‘team building’ but they almost always mean hierarchy building.  And hierarchy is exactly the root cause of the restaurant scenario.  You segregate the people requesting work from the people doing the work and create tiny choke points of failure.  No one ever really seems to know what anyone else wants.  By putting someone over someone else you’ve almost certainly reduced the amount of two-way communication between those people.  Person A might feel intimidated by Person B now.  Or Person B might feel they don’t need to listen to Person A because they value their own opinions more.

I know many development companies have adopted flattened management structures.  Others create things called ‘verticals’ or ‘pods’.  Like communism it sounds good on paper but these types of things always seem to have fundamental flaws.  My personal experiences with pods has been grueling primarily because pods don’t interact well with other pods.

The bottom line I think is that if you have a room full of smart and educated people from developers to managers and everywhere in between, why should communications be one way?  How can one set of people dictating requests to another possibly use the full group’s combined potential?  Bi-directional communication has to be encouraged.  The most junior guy on the team might have the best solution for the project.  The product manager might have thought of a simple approach to a tricky development problem but the developers might immediate dismiss it.

Avoiding conflict is not always the best solution.  But the real trick here is to maximize ideas while minimizing conflict.  In the end I don’t know the proper solution.  And I’m certainly not saying that I work for McDonald’s.  But I’m fascinated by the various attempts at company organization I’ve seen first hand.  I’ve seen the ups and downs of many different kinds of structures.  But what I see the most is company after company always falling back on the old standby of ridged org charts and middle management.

I think the offices of the future are going to be much different than that.

Invisible walls.  This is supposed to be a wide open game so why can’t I jump over certain walls or get close to others?

World layout bugs.  Objects through walls, trees floating several inches too high, etc.  These are all things that take away from being totally engrossed in the game.

Incredibly bad car physics.  You do A LOT of driving on this game but it feels so stiff and completely unfun.

Everyone is an enemy.  Surely this isn’t realistic.  Where are all the innocent people to kill?

Enemy respawns.  If you clear an area and go back to it a few minutes later it’s completely rebuilt and full of enemies.  Why not have a much slower respawn rate?

Repetitive audio.  The music is interesting but surely they could have more variety.  Enemy voice acting seems out of place with too many ‘white’ actors and repetitive.  Might as well use the Wilhelm scream.

Audio ESP.  I hate games that change the audio to indicate an enemy is near before I see them.  It’s like cheating.

Can only track one mission at a time.  This wouldn’t be so bad except that missions will randomly take you to opposite ends of the map.  This means a lot of boring driving or re-killing countless guard posts.

Enemy AI.  It’s passable but there are some real problems.  Enemies *always* go far cars it seems.  Kill the driver and the gunner goes to the driver seat.  Enemies are given amazing accuracy.  Shot gun headshot from a mile away.  Right.  They run around a lot which is good but if you fire a gun they’ll STOP and LET YOU shoot them.  Bleh.

Bugs. Game isn’t crashy which is GREAT.  EA could learn something from Ubisoft.  But certain missions don’t work correctly.

Saving.  On the PC after many full saves it now takes the game well over 4 minutes to actually pop open the save dialog.  And the Save Boxes in the game world which make sense on the console versions of this game don’t fit at all on the PC.

Things I Like:

Fire physics.

Gun unreliability and break downs.

Main character voice acting.

Weapon choices.  There is a lot of strategy in this game.

Varied terrain.

Diamond hunting.

What’s worse is that I just recently lost more of this precious data in the past few weeks while upgrading my fileserver.  It’s hard to say just how much I’ve lost.  It’s hard to notice when a rogue file or two goes missing over the years but it happens all the time.  On linux with some historical backups a quick diff or rsync can find problems like that.  Cygwin and Windows doesn’t really work quite as nicely.

So currently I have been sorting through 9 year old backup CDs trying to look for things that have gone missing.  I had been thinking it was silly to keep hanging on to a binder full of ancient CDs but I proved myself wrong today.  In fact I found quite a few little nice surprises that I had thought lost forever.

Windows XP is a terrible tool for archiving or backing up data.  Vista is not much better.  I really wish this thing could be Linux.  Heck, I wouldn’t even mind dual booting if I thought Linux could be trusted with live NTFS partitions.  I don’t mind Ubuntu hacking it’s way through one of my NTFS USB drives but my lovely RAID5 array is another story.

NTFS and Linux is getting better though.  It’s a lot less of a struggle to get it to WRITE to NTFS anyway.

Computers are good at remembering things for us.  From letters we sent to ex landlords to what music we used to listen too and pictures of people we used to work with.  My computer remembers my past a lot better than I do.  I try to focus on making new memories rather than spending time living in the past.  It’s possible that this choice means it’s actually more difficult for me to retrieve older memories.  If you spend enough time dwelling on the past it’ll seem much more clear.  I think that in a sense having an “off-mind” memory storage device is quite beneficial.  If only they were reliable on the cheap.

Amazon S3 is not cheap but it does protect my memories from fire and theives or any other sort of disaster that might befall my house.  It’s money well spent I think.  But like burning CDs or using backup tapes it takes quite a bit of thought and energy.  Archiving anything requires a lot of patience and technical knowledge.  Your average computer user simply doesn’t backup their data properly.

Of course now that the web has become very cost effective one can upload their pictures to Flickr or Snapfish or any number of gallery products out there.  You can probably RAR up your text documents and shove them on to RapidShare or something.  But people have the tendency to unwittingly back things up to the web and this is a trend that should definitely continue.  Archiving data really should be this natural.

For me the problem is sheer quantity.  Home videos and huge print quality photo files and CD and game backups start taking up gigs of space.  I have 3.5TB of storage in my file server and the more I have the more I tend to fill.  The RAID5 array has redudnancy but nothing a power surge or virus can’t wreck in an instant.  So I have backup DVDs.  It can take days to compress and burn just a few dozen gigs worth of data.  So I backup more regularly to portable USB drives.  But this is problematic since Windows XP doesn’t have any good backup utilities to properly handle this.

The real reason I lost data in the move is because In order to back up 2TB of data you need 2TB of backup storage.  I had 1.25TB.  I backed up the most important things, so I thought, and assumed the rest would be safe on the RAID5 array.  After the crash I made sure to buy a 1TB drive for one of my external enclosures and I’ll be sure to be buying more of those.  I really need the ability to have full backup somewhere.

And since I wouldn’t want to squeeze even 1TB in to Amazon S3 I need to consider getting some sort of fireproof safe for the backup drives.  Heck, I’ve even considered hiding a hard drive somewhere in one of my cars.  At least if my house burns down or is robbed I’ll probably have the car with me.  I just don’t know how a hard drive will survive in the car with all the moisture and vibration.  I regret throwing out all those silica gel packets now.

The fun comes from my old Atari 800XL system.  I’m still working on preserving the files I generated when I was eight.  It takes some special hardware to get the data on to a PC but I have managed to get some of it uploaded.  It’s still another time consuming process but one I hope to start in to again soon.  Those old 5-1/4 floppies rot pretty darn quick.

Activity that consituted about half a dozen posts and maybe a few thousand views since the sub forum’s inception.

So they bullied me and threatened me in to legal action until I changed it.

So it’s changed now and that’s the end of that chapter.  But the moral of the story is important here.  Corporations are slowly stripping away our civil liberties.  Bloggers have to watch what they say or risk receiving cease and desist letters.

Donate to the EFF today :)

And then I decided to do an Online Capacity Expansion.  I wanted to go from three 1TB drives in RAID5 to four 1TB drives.  I started the rebuild process and it all seemed to be going swimmingly.  An hour later I came back to check the process of the rebuild and…

The computer went to sleep.  It went to sleep in the middle of the capacity expansion and the RAID controller couldn’t cope.  The failure alarm started to go off, the rebuild was halted and I couldn’t restart it.  My only option was to reboot the machine.  It came back up, the original array was inaccessible but the OCE started again from 0.0% automatically.  I thought that maybe it was a good sign.  Maybe it would pick up where it left off and just make things work again.  I let it run for 14 hours to finish doing whatever it was doing.

It didn’t work.  The result was an incredibly broken array with a weird size and busted partition tables.  I’m really bummed.  I have most things backed up on to USB drives.  I didn’t really loose anything I can’t get back from bittorrent.  But I’m just more annoyed than anything.

I can’t even START getting data back on to the array because it insists on ‘initializing’ itself.  Whatever that means.  It contains no data but it’s going to spend all day parity checking itself for no apparant reason what so ever before I can format it.  It still says it’s a 2TB array and not a 3TB array for some reason so yeah… whatever it’s doing I have to let it do.

So much for my idea of letting my fileserver sleep when I’m not home.  The stupid Highpoint controller doesn’t deal well with it for some reason so I can’t risk it crashing again on a rebuild.  Crap.

I’m more than a little worried about this configuration though.  The Highpoint 1740 still refuses to work on the Asus P5Q3 board even after firmware updates on both.  I still get the “No enough space to copy PCI ROM” error.  It just sucks that my ancient IC7 can run the 1740 and use it’s onboard Intel RAID, but the ICH10R on the new one won’t play ball.

Even if the 2320 works where they 1740 fails, I’m not sure it’s going to read from the data array on my three hard drives.  I could destroy the array simply by plugging the drives in to the different RAID controller.  Sure, it’s backed up somewhat.  But it’d be a bad thing none the less.

Meh, I’m sick of thinking about it.  I need to find a better solution to this problem.  I really might have to get a new motherboard :(