Felger

Thought it would be about feds breaking in because you built a nuclear reactor in your basement while exposing your neighbors to some radiation.

Except almost nobody buys them, even last years for 10 bucks each. That's almost useless ECC Reg memory for HPE Gen 8 servers and workstations (from before late 2015 / start of 2016 with the introduction of the Gen9 using DDR4).

ECC unbuffered DIMMs (9 memory chips per side, no reg buffer/controller) is less available, quite widely used on level entry systems and thus costs a lot more even second hand.

Yep. Don't expect to sell those sticks on ebay at great price. Those new chips will be likely soldered to appliances like low end routers/APs, set top boxes, various adapters, low end systems, PLCs, IPBX, NVRs and various embedded devices.

I sold 7,2 Kg of DDR1/2/3 sticks two month ago, for gold recovery. As well as expansion cards, hdd PCBs and a few other things. Got about $600 from this.

Well here's goes my self-esteem again. I hate you ! :D

(Nice job, seriously)

Not surprised ownership is not cheap in the US.

West EU here, bought a new, architecturally wrong (yikes) house in 2012. I knew its conception would spell trouble, and sadly I was not disappointed on this part almost right off the bat. But the location and the price (right on the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and economical fallout / market bottom) were good.

After 14 years it cost an average of $130 per month on maintenance, mainly to correct on multiple occasion the conception issues aformentioned after the 10y warranty. Utilities are about $170 per month. And taxes are now about $1700 per year (rise 3-4% every year)

This $250k purchase must have cost less than $2k in fees, the credit was... well no credit. Spent almost 100% of my savings except some cash for my business. On the overall this house cost me less than $500 per month so far. Not really surprising for a new house, certainly.

And its market value rose by 60% in 14 years.

Yep, ownership is (was ?) very profitable in the west EU, mind the location.

Well, SAS disk tend to go in failed state immediately or very quickly, most of the time without going first through the warning state.

SATA disk are indeed generally more predictable failure-wise. Most issues are related to a failing head stack assembly. Rarely platter demagnetization for some disks (Toshiba laptop).

Other failure issues are usually related to a friggin' manufactured firmware issue from Dell, HP or Lenovo corp.

Hi, I believe you are quite new to workstation/hardware admin. Lots of things to say here (not native english speaking so basic style, sorry for that) :

Disk errors logged in the system event log are from the I/O layer, low-level class driver (msahci.sys) / filter drivers. See Windows Storage Driver Architecture : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/s...

A disk error of this type showing in the event log must immediately be treated as an actual disk issue. This is a low level issue below the actual filesystem and application/services. Seems here the .mdf/ldf of your SQL database used one or more bad sectors on the disk surface.

Your disk seems to be only one on the system, so the first thing to do is check SMART status, for example with Crystaldiskinfo (the most used and user-friendly free portable windows software).

It would very probably have shown a warning state for the internal disk, with probably one or more (judging the quantity of disk error entries in your log) for Attribute C5 "Current Pending sectors" and probably some in Att 05 - "Reallocated sectors count" and/or Att C4 - "Realloc event Count".

Second thing to do is trying to backup your data as fast as possible. In your case related to a Ms SQL database, trying to dump it / backup first was the good move. Sadly (DR pro experience here), weak surface / failing Head Stack Assembly of a traditionnal HDD from most vendors has more difficulties reading correctly a sector than writing it.

If the dump/backup fails, the second choice would have be to try to a sector-to-sector dump approach of the whole disk, with either a online (from OS) software capable of reading sectors from the boot disk (didn't try if HDD Raw Copy Tool 2.6 supports it), or an offline solution like Clonezilla, Acronis True Image, Aomei backupper, etc. But offline solution means offline computer and service...

I didn't exactly understood if you had an actual backup of the data or an image of the whole disk. Considering the critical usage of this station, you should have both running : daily data backup or more + up-to-date disk image ready. whatever the type of disk (HDD/SSD). And a spare, identical computer.

As for repair of HDDs "weak sectors" (meaning Current Pending Sectors), it is indeed possible, often with complete data recovery. If not, the sector will be left as is, or may be remapped if written to 0 (it will then shift from Current pending to realloc sector count).

Hard disk Sentinel Pro as such features (Disk repair, Quick Fix), it works quite well. The result vary greatly from one type of failure to another, as from one disk maker to another.

Note that if the SMART shows more than a little dozen of sectors, the head (amp/preamp) is probably failing, making weaker magnetically-wise sectors too difficult to read and/or write. In this case, the count of current and remapped increases every repair/check pass made by the tools. In this case, the drive is toast and must be replaced ASAP.

SSD are a complete different case for repair.

A older autonomous tool, Spinrite, was specialized for this usage (accurate recovery of data), but veeeeery slow.

RAID pertinence : fortunately, it is an expecteed case as most SATA disks are prone to HSA failure before not initialyzing at all. A RAID 1 mirror would have protected you from a mirrored defect accross the two disks.

The RAID controller (true hardware controller like LSI/Avago or Microsemi) or even fake raid like Intel RST / VROC maintain data integrity accross the array's disks. The defective disk will raise bad blocks (that will get marked in metadata of the Raid Volume), but the others disks are fine and the data can be read safely. If too many errors are reported on a disk (very few in fact on most controllers), it will be labelled as failed and taken down from the array.

Except I'm no maker. I'm in a midlife crisis stuck between two opposing forces : the urge to make something of my life against the risk of putting too much time and efforts to ultimately fail plus the futility of it all. Virtually wealthy enough not to work a day anymore now with my current lifestyle (aside the risk this EU country's state defaults and falls).

Quite a perfect neutralization scheme in this "hunt for self-actualisation".

That's why the display of commitment shown in this thread hurts.

Arrr. Here's the monthly dose of low self-esteem for all those who struggle to get anything worthwhile done. Currently working on figuring how you get motivated and competent enough as I browse various link from this thread.

I wrote the BX500 ils easier to find than the MX500, not that it is better. Obviously the BX is worse than the MX, having no SLC cache.

Gotta love Phison controllers then... despite noticeable progress with modern NVMe controllers, I still wish you good luck.

Or even worse : Maxio

Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro).

Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.

Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.

Very sad news. Crucial Micron is (soon "was") an great brand for computer assembly and upgrade. It is sad to see the brand rushing to the "easy money" stream. This won't be forgotten when the current bubble will evenually pop and they might meet the same fate as the now forgotten Elpida (who bought Qimonda wich also failed).

The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though.

Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though.

Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD.

Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell.

Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.

MiniPCs...

Have seen hundred of chinese ones fail. More than half failed between 1 and 3 years.

As stated by others, issues are mainly and very commonly with the power stage / power management of the mainboard. Also, soldering quality issues leading to failures.

Far less issues with good brands like Dell and HP (had a few hundred of desktop mini g2/3/4). Even tinys from Lenovo do perform quite well compared to their entry level laptops (also quite bad). Industrial computers form factor are also generally quite good but quite expensive, even second hand ones.

Currently don't have enough feddback on the Asus ones nor enough volume to draw conclusions, but so far they performed well with minimal issue, even with models back from i3/i5 8th gen series.

The inf update indeed almost didn't do anything beside renaming lots of PCI 8086:xxxx peripherals and I/O spaces.

To really wreak havoc, play a bit with Intel Dynamic Platform & Thermal Framework Chipset Participant on 6th/7th gen CPU, by installing optional drivers updates pushed by Windows 10's WU on many laptops (like HP's probook).

Expect miracles... and a lot of BSOD :]

Will it run on my Pip-Boy 3000 ?

I believe the Oracle 8 SQL Server we used at school in the starting of the '2000 was running on a RS/6000 system on AIX.

Nice system, had a good memory from it performance-wise. MySQL was not a serious competitor at that time.

The machine had often overheating issues starting from the beginning of june when ambiant temp rose above 24/25°. We did not have CVAC in the building.

Even though for REALLY sensitive applications (defence and space), DSP stay the gold standard.

Chuckles. Intel and AMD provide ME/AMT/SPS and PSP respectively on their whole x86-64 CPU range, which are embedded SOC : a CPU (based on quark for intel) and basic OS (said to be from Minix 3 for intel as well), nested within the CPU in the way they cannot be disabled as they are serialized to logical CPU init, "microcode style". Add obfuscated code modules, cannot be completely removed whatever everyone could do up to now. It can access to the network stack and has an "always on" behavior once the system is simply plugged to the power.

If you're security concerned, the OS stack is quite a... secondary issue to you.

You will have to consider switching to an open RISC architecture (Risc-V someone ? Strangely enough or not, EU seems quite fan of this on-the-rise-again architecture) AND a linux distribution.

For sure, for sensitive applications, having a cheap, secure and versatile architecture would be better than making DSPs or issuing hardly scalable and pricy FPGA solutions (well, lots of communication equipements' mainboards still uses them)

I recovered a post apo novel written like 30 years ago by a friend last year.

Patient : Miniscribe 8425SA 20 MB SCSI hard disk from an Apple Hard Disk 20SC (external SCSI enclosure with a HDD). Hoped the disk was still in working condition after more than a decade stored (HDD was built in '88 and a sticker mentioned a repair in '99), the enclosure power supply was presumed dead (no power on) and the mac itself was shorting mains power in a few little minutes, probably from the screen high voltage converter dying and shorting.

I simply extracted the hard disk from the enclosure. This full height 3.5" disk has an "external" mechanical actuator : a stepper motor visible from outside drives the arm with the head(s) inside the disk, protected by a bellows. It gives a cool sort of a floppy drive sound when random access occurs.

I simply plugged it on a SCSI chain on my vintage Advansys SCSI PCI Card and ribbons.

Read the HFS partition with an old recovery software I could find on the recovery computer, quickly found the files (very simple file system and hierarchy), recovered them on the PC. Encountered just one bad sector.

Then looked the content of the file as raw shaking and ajusted the recovered text format for use with Windows PC/Word from the old word processor software - I think they were Corel Wordperfect files.

Very few correction to make to the raw text. Layout will have to be more thoroughly restored beyond EOL. Mainly accented characters and a few other replacements to do. I thought it would be more of an chore from an vintage apple system and third party software.

Overall, it was far easier than expected. Took me less than 2 hours. But am a ex data recovery guy with some ressources.

Quite pleased the miniscribe acted almost like a charm after 10 years or so of (warm, indoor) storage and not a single power on. Feared the HDD motor's ball bearing were totaly stuck !

WDDM 1.0 (Windows Display Driver Model) introduced with Vista, indeed came with TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) function for the video adapter, enabling a soft reset when possible.

A lot of BSOD were also caused by generic and low quality DRAM sticks, unstable individually (failed addresses) or becoming unstable when paired in dual channel setup, especially with 2 pairs of dual rank, dual sided sticks. Had very often this issue with Corsair Value sticks, or with a XMP (Intel spec) RAM kit used with 1/2/3th gen Ryzen, manually setup to match the 1.35V XMP profile (for DDR4). EXPO does this much better now.

Diag tools like Quicktech Pro then Memtest86+ from Passmark Software and the free one were born on this 'lost era'.

Top 3 : - FPS : Duke Nukem 3D in solo or multiplayer, unmatched fun, terrific background music on a good MPU401 midi card (Gallant SC8000 / Guillemot Maxi Sound 32 Wave FX PnP, better MIDI samples at that time than SB AWE32). And its buggy/hard to use "Build" map editor that gave nighmares to every map designer wannabe.

- Hack and Slash : Diablo II, first game I believe that introduced grinding.

- RTS : Total Annihilation with Core Contingency. What's better than stopping your foes with a swarm of Krogoths ?

I concur : my bank currently offers 1.95% deposit interest's rate for a year (Apr '23)

How the heck do those makers find the time and energy to make such insane projects ??

I'm about wasted after a day of work and in/outdoor house chores.

(I was answering to the previous comment wondering if ramdisks still have any interesting usage nowadays.)

About 150 TBW endurance on a 250 GB Samsung M.2 NVMe Evo 970+. On paper that is, but since it is the OS SSD with Windows Server 2022 STD (sole DC AD/DHCP/DNS/Hyper-V), in production, I won't take any risk. RAID 1 in this scenario would have changed nothing. On the side, I have 40 TB RAID10 for storage.

So I cancelled the first C2 exec (with C2 encrypt on) when I reached 195 TBW on the SSD. Monitoring the ramdisk use still shows about 3:4 ratio on complete snapshot.

I have about 1 million files on the 2,29 TB data to backup.

I had indeed the RAM sticks available for free, simply had to take them (2x16 GB ) from a decomissioned ML350 Gen9 (which uses DDR4-2133P ECC Reg). It now serves me as a bench, litterally.

A very useful use case discovered no later than last week : local dedup management by Synology C2 Backup Agent and TBW on the OS SSD.

C2 Backup agent stores dedup/chunks data by default in ProgramData, which is stored on C:... which is usually a SSD nowadays.

I noticed a 3:4 ratio between written data in local dedup folder vs uploaded data volume on the remote C2 5 TB storage (suscribed a C2 Business).

TBW grew indeed horrifyingly fast on the SSD, and I estimated it would completely wear it in about a year or so, with the 2 TB and growing data to backup with my standard retention scheme.

So I made a 32 GB (16 GB was not enough peak size) lmDisk ramdisk with backup/restore at shutdown/startup (it is featured by lmDisk and quite nicely), mounted in place of the dedup folder, and ran my tasks.

poof, reduced TBW on SSD by 99%.

(4x16 GB DDR4 ECC Reg on my server, so not concerned about memory errors)

I understand your point. I mixed background, long term tendancies with on-the-field daily feelings.

I should have more emphasized on the long-term tendancy : almost all lights are now red in France (and not so better in the UK) :

- Educational system is in shambles. Not enough manpower, not enough funds, too many kids per classroom. Level is steadily dropping. France's PISA ranking is getting worse and worse.

- Health system is on his knees, and the decision to fire (without pay) the unvaccinated health staff put a additional strain upon it. Thousands of them left for Quebec.

- National debt is higher than ever.

- A great portion of the French GDP is in fact born from the pensions spendings (legal age for retirement was 62 till now, and 26% of the total population is 60 yo and more) and public workforce (12,4% of total GDP, very similar to northern europe).

- We lost most of our nuclear workforce and engineering because the plan was to phase out nuke power plants for renewables... until two years ago. I Have a part of my relatives directly involved in nuclear power production field, now retired and they lament the loss of the once respected french "expertise" (well, mainly bought from Westinghouse but cough).

- Big compagnies still perform well (especially luxury companies - thanks China), but the other industrial ones are outsourcing/offshoring production at an alarming rate (the plan was to relocate and reindustrialize, but this was also before the energy crisis). Not much hope here.

Consequently, spendings being high, labour costs are also high (too much, if you ask me). Even if 26% are 60 yo or more, we still "benefit" from a quite high immigration, but we aren't quite able anymore to make the better of it because of the failing public education system.

Forecast are not particulary good, hence the pressure from the EU commission to reform the French pension system and target 65 or 64 yo as legal retirement age.

In fact, very similar to the UK, with more socialism ?

For the "young ones" (I'm 40), I fear that they won't be able to acquire the skills they need if they don't have the basic knowledge (numeracy and literacy foremost) and softskills layer they are currently losing.

This is almost the same situation in France. Very same issue with management.

Most middle earning jobs don't need hard skills anymore, so most of employees gradually lost them over the time (and not the opposite, like a muscle). The gen-Z is additionnaly often missing the most basic soft skills : basic, social skills, punctuality... or even coming to work at all.

So we are gradually building a generation where about two-thirds of people have... no more or almost no skills whatsoever. Can't change a wheel, can't swap a breaker, can't replace a tap, can't do more than basic IT-assisted tasks in a predefined process. More and more youngs must try hard to get their driver license, and so city dwellers conveniently skip it (but a good thing in the end). To the point that basic maths are a thing of the past for them. Perhaps 10% are currently able to write this very comment. Let's not even talk about financial education at this point, more than 60% fail at giving you the right amount of two years worth of an account interests.

I can witness that even business holders are gradually losing skills at running their own businesses those last two decades. Their skill in the differents subjects they must address all day long are almost all declining, even their core ones. They don't want to make longer work hours anymore than their employees and want to "Netflix and Chill" like everyone else.

Remains about the 20% skilled, but I have the feeling that over the last 20 years their portion is progressively shrinking. Lack of forecast made health pro number dwindle, "true" engineers (mechanical/electrical/civil) are harder and harder to find since a non-negligible part of them leave the country after completing their studies.

Are we going to make Idiocracy a reality sooner that expected ?

The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO.

The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo.

Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)

Can relate to that, I wondered a sec if I didn't write that comment myself. Didn't go the medication route, however.

I slept for 8h30/9h per night. A better routine (earlier wake up time, 8 hours of sleep max, some intense physical exercice - weight lifting in my case) put me back on track after about 7/8 months.

But I tend to go back to my bad habits by taking too much workload on my sole shoulders...