DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I needed a benchmark to determine just how fast my striped SCSI RAID subsystem really was. I found xbench.

First I tested my local applications partition, expecting serious fireworks. But the results were underwhelming; for a pair of drives that are each capable (theoretically) of delivering 80 Mb/sec, this was pitiful:

Sequential
  Uncached Write    0.63 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   22.27 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read     9.05 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	   23.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
  Uncached Write    0.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   13.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	    0.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	   12.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Next I tested the stock boot drive in the new G5:

Sequential
  Uncached Write   33.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   44.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read    31.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read    53.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
  Uncached Write    1.82 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write   34.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	    0.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	   24.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Well, OK then. No wonder Apple used SATA.

I still needed a RAID solution for data safety — RAID-1, mirroring, writes every file to N separate devices. In this case N=1, because that’s all the room there is in the case.

Adding a second SATA drive to the G5 took 5 minutes. Apple provides the screws and cables. Like everything else about the physical layout of the G5, the drive bays deserve a feature in Architectural Digest.

Initializing the drive with SoftRAID took a few more seconds. And then I used SoftRAID’s “convert to mirror” feature to turn the original boot drive into a RAID-1 array. This took all night, as every byte (even the free space) was copied to the new drive and verified.

Ironically, my xbench scores dropped after this operation. So much for improving performance via striped reads.

Even so, overall the SATA RAID still a whole lot faster than my current setup — conservatively, it’s twice as fast by most measures, and subjectively about five times as fast. It’s also simpler because there’s no aftermarket SCSI interface, no 3rd-party driver software, no additional cables, no terminator hijinks. And it’s quieter, both because modern drives are less noisy than vintage components, and because I have only two of them, rather than three.

I’ve been a SCSI snob ever since Apple started using SCSI in the Mac Plus. Even when Apple dumped SCSI in favor of lower-cost IDE/ATA components, which any Mac aficionado will tell you are inferior and slightly embarrassing, and which can be admitted only under one’s breath at the local “Mac Marginalization” meet-up, I remained a power SCSI user, clinging to the notion that because ATA requires a significant amount of oversight by the computer’s CPU, my hotrodded SCSI setup would be faster, sexier, and a lot more fun.

Case in point: my G4 workstation boots from an ATA drive (sshh!), but the applications reside on a striped RAID-0 array built from two Ultra2 Wide SCSI drives attached via a $50 cable (cheap!) to an Ultra2 Wide SCSI PCI card, promising a screaming 80 MB/s of data transfer. Having my apps on a striped volume means read performance should be even faster than that, because both disks can be read in parallel — so that any single drive only has to locate half the data sought.

A mirrored (RAID-1) partition on the same two drives stores my data. Having two copies of all my files means I’m a lot more likely to survive a disk crash without data loss.

But the machine that housed all this high-tech storage magic has been aging. 1000 MHz have never felt so slow. I finally pulled the trigger on a long-awaited upgrade: a dual-cpu G5.

First impressions: it’s huge. It weighs over 40 lbs. The case was milled from a single piece of aluminum. By hand! By old-world craftsmen in a small village in rural Germany!

My old G4 is smaller, lighter weight, and suddenly very plastic-y looking and quaint. But it has this advantage over the G5: three internal drive bays.

The G5 has exactly one open drive bay. Which means my two Ultra2 Wide SCSI drives would have to find another home. Crap.

I considered an aftermarket drive chassis. I considered external housings. And then I considered that my SCSI drives were just as old as my G4… and a light began to dawn…

The crew here at Corinthian Leather Award headquarters has been idle for nearly four years, not so much because there aren’t any fresh instances of ridiculous, laughable, insultingly dumb marketing verbiage, but because we haven’t been shopping. Well, not really.

Somebody in Target’s design department is a real math whiz — much smarter than I am, for sure, because he or she can fit “multiple” 4in x 6in photos into a single 8 x 10 frame.

It’s a “4-up” frame with a windowpane design. The windows for the four photos measure 3.5 x 4.5 inches, or about 65% of the area of a 4x6 photo. The ad copy is 35% wrong! I’ve grown sadly accustomed to overpromising and undelivering, but it is rarely so easy to quantify.

Pictured at right is an photo of my son cropped to fit this frame’s aspect ratio. I managed to fit more than 65% of him but I guess he’s still just a few percent too tall.

Click for previous Corinthian Leather awards.

The EFF reports that color laser printer output contains trackable digital watermarks. I doubt this “feature” is listed on the outside of the box. (“New and improved! The government can identify every page you print!”)

The EFF’s work follows a PC World article from last Fall, which had escaped my notice until now, perhaps because I’ve been busy composing notes of encouragement and support to your President by arranging letters cut from random magazines and gluing them onto scraps of paper rescued from the recycle basket at distant Kinko’s: Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents

So until somebody slips tiny RFID molecules into my glue stick, I guess I’m still anonymous.

So I found myself in the car for about four hours today, occasionally scanning the FM band on the off chance I’d find something other than the regular morning masturbation of most radio show hosts during rewinds of the latest Dream Theater album.

I paused the relentless channel-scan on a news program. I realized after a few moments that the station was playing a “newsroom” soundtrack behind the announcer’s voice. It sounded like 100 people frantically hammering on typewriters.

Typewriters? Sheesh, why not telegraphs?

Granted, this particular station’s demographic is old enough for this anachronistic sound to be accepted without question. (“Coming up after the break: The Association! Stay with us.”)

No, it’s not at all ironic that I’m ridiculing the sound of one old technology while listening to another. My car’s cassette player is not deserving of your scorn. Besides, the other car has a CD player. Now leave me alone.