I’m in the middle of exams right now, 3 down 2 to go, so these posts are lacking text these days. Hopefully some picture will suffice. I just thought that I should share my hockey playoff viewing setup. I have one tv set to CBC and the other to TSN.
For those of you who don’t know, I am a habs fan. I don’t really talk about hockey that much here, as it is not the primary purpose of this blog. Actually, I still haven’t figured out what the main purpose of this blog is. Nonetheless, the playoffs are only 1 regular season game away, and my mind is on hockey quite a bit these days.
I am definitely not as confident about my habs as I was a year ago. This season has been quite the roller coaster ride, with more lows than highs. I am hoping that the adversity that we’ve face in the regular season will pay off in the playoffs. We have been looking fairly good recently, especially due to the new top line of Koivu, Kovalev and Tanguay. The only thing I am really concerned about is the loss of Markov. The only good thing about losing him is that our top scorer won’t be a defenceman anymore.
Anyways, the point of this post was to showcase a music video about the habs. Annakin Slayd released a song about this time last year, and has just put together video for it. The samples from Journey are pretty catchy…check it out..
That’s right, after my next hardware upgrade, I am going to be ditching hard drives. Seriously, why does my computer still have gears and motors in it? It’s not a freaking adding machine from Babbage’s lab. My transition away from hard drives will most likely happen in the next desktop that I build. I am going to be switching to solid state drives. There will still be a place for HDDs in a backup roll for me, but not as a device that my OS runs on.
Solid state drives (SSD) are rapidly falling in price, making them a reasonable cost for the performance gains. Most SSDs can achieve about 200 MB/s access speed. In a desktop, this can be dramatically increased by putting a few SSDs in RAID 0. I posted a video a few weeks about a guy that put 24 SSDs together in RAID 0, who got insane access speeds of about 2 GB/s. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to afford 24 SSDs (unless someone donated some to me 
), but I can see buying about 4 being practical in the near future.
Below is the results for an HD Tach test that I just ran on my laptop. My current 5400 rpm hard drive had just of 70MB/s peak access speed. I just can’t deal with these number anymore. Hard drives are by far the bottleneck in today’s computers with fast processor and memory. It is time to start ditching hard drives.
If you’re not convinced yet, check out this insanely quick boot accomplished by putting two OCZ SSDs in RAID 0. It’s not as impressive as the last video that I posted, but it is still pretty darn quick.
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