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[Tellemurius]

No do not use the Red drives in a desktop. Those hard drives are designed to be put in a NAS system where they are always on, the constant spindowns from idling is bad for these drives and alot of people complained about them failing early. Just stick with the Blue or Black series.

Quoting Western digital themselves: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810&utm_source=WD%20Red%20redirect&utm_medium=collateral&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=product
"Specifically designed and tested for small office and home office, 1-8 bay NAS systems and PCs with RAID."

Oh so the computer is going to be used as a NAS? No? Still not recommending.
Every hard drive can RAID, its down to the motherboard and controller cards for support. It still doesn't mean its a good idea to shove this hard drive into a computer THAT WILL CONSTANTLY GO OFF AND ON IN ITS LIFETIME. A NAS is an always on infrastructure where the disks are constantly spinning even at idle, Desktops are designed to spin down the disks when idling, its BAD for the Red series. The increased lifetime was designed in mind for machines that will not be turned off, unless this computer is going to be on forever with heavy I/O workload do not buy this.

[Thief^]

If WD are willing to say it was designed for "PCs with RAID", I find it hard to believe it will have trouble with normal PC use. They didn't say "servers" after all, they said "PCs". I've seen people online who've had a red replaced under warranty despite using it in a normal PC (and not even in raid) so WD are clearly willing to guarantee a red will last 3 years even in a normal PC. (They only guarantee their Blue/Green drives for 2 years)

If you can find any evidence that using a Red drive in a PC will cause it to fail sooner than e.g. a WD Blue, I'd love to see it. All I've seen is speculation, confirmation bias and small-sampling error. e.g. My red failed in my pc after a week! I heard reds fail in pcs, so I replaced it with a blue, and it's been fine so far! therefore reds fail in pcs more than blues! Ugh no, that's one sample, and likely just a normal case of early-life failure that happens to all electronics...

EDIT: I'm not saying that excessive power cycling won't damage a hdd, just that normal desktop use should be fine. Unfortunately all the hard data I can find is based on datacenters, where drives aren't spun up/down often, and no tests on desktops.
The best paper on the subject is google's, which claims that high power cycle counts was only correlated with a 2% increased failure rate in drives 3+ years old, but that that could be a reverse causality (more problems mean they need to be restarted more, rather than more restarts causing more problems).
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

[Tellemurius]

If WD are willing to say it was designed for "PCs with RAID", I find it hard to believe it will have trouble with normal PC use. They didn't say "servers" after all, they said "PCs". I've seen people online who've had a red replaced under warranty despite using it in a normal PC (and not even in raid) so WD are clearly willing to guarantee a red will last 3 years even in a normal PC. (They only guarantee their Blue/Green drives for 2 years)

If you can find any evidence that using a Red drive in a PC will cause it to fail sooner than e.g. a WD Blue, I'd love to see it. All I've seen is speculation, confirmation bias and small-sampling error. e.g. My red failed in my pc after a week! I heard reds fail in pcs, so I replaced it with a blue, and it's been fine so far! therefore reds fail in pcs more than blues! Ugh no, that's one sample, and likely just a normal case of early-life failure that happens to all electronics...

EDIT: I'm not saying that excessive power cycling won't damage a hdd, just that normal desktop use should be fine. Unfortunately all the hard data I can find is based on datacenters, where drives aren't spun up/down often, and no tests on desktops.
The best paper on the subject is google's, which claims that high power cycle counts was only correlated with a 2% increased failure rate in drives 3+ years old, but that that could be a reverse causality (more problems mean they need to be restarted more, rather than more restarts causing more problems).
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control#Desktop_Computers_and_TLER_Effect Not fail persay but an issue with NAS associated drives. Point I'm making they are not designed for normal desktop use, IT DOESN'T SAY ANYWHERE on their website for their normal desktop use, Why would you put them in a normal desktop? Software RAID alone is crap and is error prone, You can expand storage space but do not expect the reliability, it puts the I/O workload on your CPU making it more bottlenecked with other tasks. "PCs with RAID" is a 300+ dollar controller card slapped on your PCI-E slot which a normal user DOESN'T have.
WHY am I fighting about this? You are trying to tell me all hard drives are all the same. They're not, WD specifically designs their lines to depending on the needs along with Seagate, Samsung, and Toshiba. WD RED is for SMB and low enterprise usage for NAS (NAS NAS i mean the website screams this out)Environments. BLUE is used for the normal desktop usage but has the flexibility to be used for any tasks depending on the user level. BLACK is another level of their BLUE drives that has met their specifications on performance and reliability, they got the longest warranty to prove that(5 years). GREEN drives are designed for archival  purposes as they spin-down faster than any of their drives to be "energy efficient" and probably the worst drives ever to use for a RAID array.

[LordSlowpoke]

what up computer advice thread

i've been tasked with finding out what the fuck takes up so much space on a given partition in windows 8

it's not a system partition which makes it all the more confusing

so instead of being a productive member of society i'm going to ask you whenever there's a good way of finding out the size of a directory without fucking around rightclicking properties all over the place because i assume all the junk files are in one place tia

[Lord Shonus]

You have two options. Spacemonger (site seems to be down right now) and Treesize free. Both enable you to simply right-click on a drive or folder and get a breakdown of file type, size, percentage of disc/folder, etc. Spacemonger has a much nicer interface, but it's nagware, while Treesize Free is, well, Free.

[Tellemurius]

I can also recommend WinDirStat https://windirstat.info/ its a free software as well.

[LordSlowpoke]

aaaand that's twenty seven gigs of shitty programming dealt with

yes let's just drop temp files in the same directory the exe is in and never clean it up

like what the hell

nyway thanks m8s

[Thief^]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control#Desktop_Computers_and_TLER_Effect Not fail persay but an issue with NAS associated drives. Point I'm making they are not designed for normal desktop use, IT DOESN'T SAY ANYWHERE on their website for their normal desktop use, Why would you put them in a normal desktop?

I notice that that wikipedia article also has an almost complete lack of citations/references, particularly the bit you are referring to.

Software RAID alone is crap and is error prone, You can expand storage space but do not expect the reliability, it puts the I/O workload on your CPU making it more bottlenecked with other tasks.

In what way is it error prone? You can argue power failure issues all you want but if the power goes out in the middle of a write you are going to lose any data that's not been sent to the hdd (controller) yet regardless. Battery backing on professional controllers just allows you slightly improved performance by being able to treat data as flushed to disk once it reaches the card, instead of requiring it to be physically written to disk (which takes many milliseconds longer).
As for the increased CPU usage, I believe I mentioned that myself (although it's only really relevant for parity raid, e.g. raid-5.)

"PCs with RAID" is a 300+ dollar controller card slapped on your PCI-E slot which a normal user DOESN'T have.

Again I don't see them saying this. They say "PCs with RAID". How's that so hard to take at face value?

WHY am I fighting about this? You are trying to tell me all hard drives are all the same. They're not, WD specifically designs their lines to depending on the needs along with Seagate, Samsung, and Toshiba. WD RED is for SMB and low enterprise usage for NAS (NAS NAS i mean the website screams this out)Environments. BLUE is used for the normal desktop usage but has the flexibility to be used for any tasks depending on the user level. BLACK is another level of their BLUE drives that has met their specifications on performance and reliability, they got the longest warranty to prove that(5 years). GREEN drives are designed for archival  purposes as they spin-down faster than any of their drives to be "energy efficient" and probably the worst drives ever to use for a RAID array.

Sure the different drives are designed for different purposes, and WD themselves say one of the purposes the Red is designed for is "PCs with RAID". I'm inclined to believe the maker of the drive here. They even list them if you go to "Internal Storage - Desktop" in the site's menu, and there it says "Designed for: Desktop RAID": http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/desktop/

I would recommend the black for the warranty, but WD themselves say: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=760

Recommended use
WD Black hard drives are tested and recommended for use in PCs, high-performance workstations, all-in-one PCs, gaming PCs, game consoles, home media PCs and notebook computers.*

*Desktop drives are not recommended for use in RAID environments, please consider using WD Red hard drives for home and small office, [...]

Although I admit that given the warranty on the Black, I'm not sure why the Red is more recommended for RAID. Is it purely the TLER? The black even supposedly has a the same MTBF as the Red, and the same vibration reduction technology. People online seem to be suspicious that the black and red are the same hdds with different firmware. I'm not really sure why you'd want a hdd with a shorter warranty if you are worried about reliability (which you must be if you're considering raid in the first place).

[Tellemurius]

Back in the days the firmware for WD drives were pretty open, enough so that people can turn off/on certain functions like TLER. Once WD found out they got locked which im pretty sure is the same time the Red drives released. TLER is a delay function for reporting parity errors. Its suppose to give time for the RAID controller to begin data repair without causing a pause in service during workload. Advance software RAID can recognize it too if you coughed up the cash for it. For a regular machine though technically its not suppose to do anything but for some it can cause lockups and disk errors. Also the Black and Blue series are designed to spin down during idling, If you spin down in a RAID it will detect that drive as dropped and will need to rebuild. TECHNICALLY you can tell the drives to never spin down but they want you to buy the Reds just for RAIDing.

[PyroDesu]

Hello again!

So I've finally put the whole thing together and started out by booting from a USB stick (with Fedora), to run tests on the system. One of them concerns me - the SMART test on my 2TB hard drive is showing a Read Error Rate of 29024, while the threshold is 6. Similarly, the Seek Error Rate is 3507, with a threshold of 30.

Is this something I should be worried about? (Well, obviously I'm worried enough to ask)

Looks like the raw numbers are actually pretty meaningless for those. I'm good.

[Sappho]

New question!

I've been assigned a webmail address for my new job. The UI for the webmail makes me want to gouge my own eyes out, so I set it up to work through Thunderbird instead, using IMAP. So far this has been working fine, working from home on my own computer. However, tomorrow I start actually working in the office, on their computers, and I don't think I'll be permitted to install an email client and configure it for myself.

I figured I would just make a gmail account and use that. I made the account and started fiddling with settings. I can't find any way to access the work account. I set it up so that outgoing messages from the gmail account will be sent from the work account, but I can't IMPORT the messages through IMAP. It will allow me to use POP3, but I tried setting that up and nothing is happening. On the settings screen it says "importing messages" with a note that it can take several days for them to appear.

The webmail, of course, has NO option for forwarding messages. Is there a way I can directly link the gmail to the IMAP, the same way Thunderbird does? Basically using the gmail UI but the webmail server? If I have to use that webmail, I might cry.

EDIT: Aha, nevermind! The POP3 started working. Looks like I might have to manually tell Gmail to check the messages periodically, but that's not the end of the world. Far better than having to use the webmail...

[Azerty]

Hello,

because of the inability to access to a wired internet connexion from my pre-2009 Amilo, I settled for a D-Link WLan device, for which I had to reinstal a badly instaled driver.

Now, the device works but, after a length of time ranging from one hour to three hours, my computer become unable to access the WiFi network I habitually use but still print others, forcing me to access this network by switching for another computer.

How do I can solve this problem of inability to access to a network from a computer when, with all others are fine with it?

Thank for your help!

[gimlet]

I have a cheapo wireless AP that I put in for my tablets, every few days something happens so nothing can connect to it.  Rebooting the AP fixes it for me (pull the power plug and plug back in, by the time I walk back to the couch it's back up), since it's only every few days and usually 1 room away it doesn't bother me much so I haven't really looked for what's ultimately wrong - if I had to do it every hour I'd probably go berserk.

Anyway, until you can find a more permanent fix, I'd sure try the rebootski.

[MagmaMcFry]

Yeah, I get a similar issue when connecting my laptop to a certain network. Disabling and reenabling wireless usually does the trick.

[MaximumZero]

Have the DHCP settings been monkeyed with? It sounds like it's re-assigning IP addresses every few hours and not actually giving you one.