pwm

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pwm last won the day on August 12 2018

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  1. Multiple arrays are great. More than two parity drives is great. But remember that parity is intended for improved availability - it is not a replacement for backup. So you should really, really look into cheap USB disks and copy out your "must not lose" data on them and then store them at parents/children/friends. A single "big oops" with the PSU may kill all drives in the machine. And a fire may kill all data on every piece of hardware in the house. So only use single storage for data you can afford to lose, whatever number of parity drives you may be allowed use of.
  2. Gamers really are worried about input lag for mouse/keyboard. And it can be shown that every x mouse clicks will be delayed another display redraw even for a single 1ms delay of the click. But since this requires statistical methods, it shouldn't matter much for most users who aren't using real-time-streaming devices. Besides using statistical methods, the lag can't be seen. Standard keyboards/mice have 125 Hz poll rate just because we aren't fast enough to notice the delay even when the key presses are only polled every 8 ms. But with 100 fps, a 128 Hz poll rate means half the key presses will be delayed one additional display refresh and in some games that will be measurable in damage-per-second or similar.
  3. Yes you can forward USB devices to a VM. Some people forward a complete USB host controller for maximum functionality, but in most situatuations it will work well to just forward individual devices.
  4. Yes, the update speed have been way higher the last year. And lots of the changes have been very useful for a larger group of users.
  5. You should normally not be able to notice with keyboard/mouse. A traditional keyboard/mouse has a quite slow report rate - maybe 125 Hz report rate. It's only gaming keyboards/mouses that make use of 1kHz report rate. And we humans aren't fast enough to measure such short delays. But when the game responds to key presses or mouse clicks synchronized with the display frame rate, then one in x mouse clicks may result in the game responding one display redraw earlier which for 100 frames/second could scale a 1ms mouse lag into a 10ms slower game response. Where it normally matters for non-gamers is when using USB sound cards, JTAG-interfaces, logic analyzers etc that streams synchronous data that may require hard real time (a bit depending on buffer capacity on each side). But for this type of devices, I have - in some situations - clearly seen a difference between having the VM own the USB host or just bridging the USB device. But it matters what other hardware shares the interrupts on the host machine and what load the host machine has (and quality of drivers), so it can work very well even with streaming devices. But a single slow critical section in the kernel can starve the USB processing enough to affect the transfer.
  6. Did you need the extra transfer speed? RAID-0 means you lose all data if one drive fails.
  7. Backblaze also see failed Seagate drives. But they note that they buy the Seagate drives cheaper than WD Red drives. And since their infrastructure can handle broken disks, it's more profitable with the Seagate disks. If 5 disks in 100 fails, that still only represents 5% of the purchase cost - and if they buy the drives 15% cheaper than WD Red and the WD drives maybe have 3 disks in 100 fail then it's clearly an advantage to select Seagate drives. For normal home users, it doesn't work well to consider amortized costs like that - we don't have the same routines to maintain redundancy even with multiple broken disks. And we don't have the same routines to restore data to new disks. And we have so few disks, that a single broken disk will represent a significant percentage of the total purchase price of the storage server disks.
  8. But the poster of the bitmap can at least spot if the bitmap doesn't look the same as the text output. When I look at the bitmap from my monitor, it looks the same as the text above/below. But I intentionally cropped down the width to reduce the probability of the forum scaling it in the inline view.
  9. Filled speech bubbles means you have been busy filling it. Empty speech bubbles means the thread is waiting for you to fill it with good content. Grayed speech bubbles means no new content.
  10. Viewing at 1:1 is obviously important. But the DPI decides how many 1:1 pixels that are used to render a 12point font, since the point system relates to an inch - there are 72 pica points in an inch and when rendering to printer or display, the computer needs to figure out how many pixels the output medium fits in an inch. Viewing that bitmap at 1:1 on a different monitor with a different DPI will show the characters larger or smaller than on the original system, since the pixel sizes will differ. Apple have been using the term Retina for a rather large span of DPI - from about 220 DPI to 460 DPI. Lots of Windows installations are also using quite arbitrary DPI settings, i.e. Windows isn't configured to match the true DPI of the monitor - that's a common trick to force rendered information to be larger or smaller.
  11. Note that the look of the screenshots doesn't just depend on system and web browser, but also on what DPI the display is configured for. So a screen shot from a QHD or 4k monitor isn't likely to look similar to a screen shot from a monitor with lower DPI. And lots of mobile phones are configured to run with quite low DPI (to preserve the battery) even if the native display is high-resolution.
  12. With the forum having moved to unraid.net, it's definitely best to stay away from own DNS entries of type x.unraid.net, since you can't know what subdomains Limes may introduce. so x.unraid.local would definitely be a better choice, given that .local is a reserved name for broadcast-local network trees.
  13. Extended SMART tests aren't really good friends with disk rebuilds. Both the rebuild and the extended SMART test requires access to all of the disk surface.
  14. A newer layout may have introduced some changes in the block structure or tag labels that trigs the ad blocker. Ad blockers hae manual white- and blacklist options just because they can never be 100% correct - they will sometimes misunderstand content.