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[Ulfarr]

Sorry for the double post but I'm at my wits end. New motherboard arrived and it's working the whole pc is working again (tested). There is one problem though, my windows installation no longer recognize my usb mouse & keyboard. I know that they are working because they work fine both in the bios/uefi and when I swapped my HDD with a different one..

I guess it's a drivers issue but I have no idea how to reinstall the drivers when I can't even log into windows..

My last resort would be to either format my old HDD and do a new installation or finally buy an SSD, install windows there and try to salvage whatever files I can from my old one..

Yeah... after the n-th restart/bios change it finally worked right as I posted this... 

PS I'm not sure if it means something but with the new mobo, whenever I boot my pc the first thing it shows in the screen is my mobo's layout instead of say it's maker's logo as the old did

[Starver]

I think that's just a degree of corporate narcisism. Whether they try (and perhaps allow to be disabled) displaying a start-up 'splash screen' to advertise that it is their technology behind this particular device. Or not. (The more subtle ones might put a badge up in a spare space in the text-bootup.)

Old one could have had it disabled (you generally could in a BIOS, I delve less in UEFIs), perhaps the new one even has one (by default unused) one which could be enabled?

(In other words, it probably doesn't mean much at all, or serve any practical purpose. But just an observation based on time-worn experience that might be a bit outdated.)

[Lord Shonus]

I'm looking into picking up some refurbished SATA drives (counting on a combination of RAID and a complete secondary backup of everything important to offset the risk) and building a RAID-based NAS in place of my current setup (which is based on simple external drives plugged into a Pi4 running Open Media Vault.

For cost reasons, a purpose-built NAS box is impractical - 12 TB drives seem to be the sweet spot for cost on the refurbished market, and I want to use either 4 or 5 of them. A purpose-built NAS that can hold that many drives is expensive enough to offset any cost savings. So I see two main options.

A is to build a server out of spare computers. This would be the cheapest route but I don't know if it would be powerful enough. I'd want the network connection to be the access bottleneck if possible. Ideally I would want to be able to transcode files at 480p-2460p for DNLA streaming at 720p or 1080p, but I get that this is a tall order.

B would be to get a USB RAID enclosure and just connect the new drives to my existing setup as a massive internal drive. This would give me no more capability (I'd still be bottlenecked at a USB 3.0 connection) and cost more, but it would be very simple. My issue with this option is that I have no idea what is a reliable brand of enclosure to buy, and that kind of hardware raid introduces a single failure point - anything that breaks on the server option can be replaced without loss as long as I keep a good OS backup (if I understand things correctly), but losing an enclosure would make me lose everything.

Could somebody set me straight on this if I've got anything wrong, and break down exactly what I'd need?

[wierd]

Consider the power costs of running this, and also consider that you could, in theory, get yourself something a little more data-center style.

There are midsize business class eSATA disk enclosures that have build in port replication features (allowing you to have many more disks per sata channel your base system sports, if the controller inside it supports port replication; some do, some do not-- research appropriately)

For instance, you could drop some bills for 2 of these, and a suitable USB-C 10gbit interface, get similar enclosures for eSATA and use that, etc.

If this is still not suitable, or you find the idea insufficiently scalable... It is possible to get your hands on cast-off small datacenter equipment, and go with a small SAN.

There are offerings for numerous vendors, such as Fujitsu, IBM, HP and pals, as well as more "Cadillac" offers, like NetApp.

There are a wealth of cast-off obsolete devices, like netapp disk trays, which will work on basically any FibreChannel HBA card in any computer that can support it, but FibreChannel is a dying technology that is old, and comparatively slow to more modern offerings, like SAS

That particular disk tray also can use SAS, which is a cousin of SATA, but not the same thing.  Like with FibreChannel, there are inexpensive HBAs out there.

Full documentation of that shelf is available online.

If small 2.5" laptop size drives are not your thing, there are also full size 3.5" drive trays as well, they just cost more.

Note, this is not meant to tell you what you should buy, only that these options exist, and can be in reach if you have saved your pennies, and plan ahead. 

Disk trays like these are made to be stackable to an insane degree, meaning you can attach another tray on your SAS chain, and get just that many more disks on the controller.  (note!! CAVEAT EMPTOR!! Older SAS trays like these may demand bonafide SAS drives, which have a different interface, and cost more, than bulk SATA drives. As the Wikipedia article on SAS points out though, newer iterations of SATA disks, support the SAS protocol, and as such, there *ARE* SAS trays that accept SATA disks! Shop wisely! The linked DS4246 is such a tray, and accepts SATA disks.)

(quick setup) (service guide) (Using with linux}


The question I would have you ask yourself, is this:

Do I intend to have this controller grow ever larger, and have more and more disks on it?

If the answer is YES, consider switching to disk trays that are intended to be stacked in this manner.  If the answer is NO, by all means, use one of the eSATA port replicating trays on a more or less stock SATA equipped system.

[Lord Shonus]

Much as I genuinely like the idea of a server rack, it's probably impractical for my current situation. I probably wouldn't be happy with the trays *not* in a rack either.


What's the advantage of the port-replication enclosure over putting them directly into a PC with an extra SATA card if needed? I'm presuming that this would be totally incompatible with the Pi option I'm currently using, as the Pi4 has no SATA capability and OMV doesn't allow you to RAID devices connected via USB.

[wierd]

There are distros that are tailored for use in homebrew NAS boxes.

In linux, the raid driver is the "md" driver, and it is 100% software controlled. (EG, by the host machine, not the disk shelf). Those netapp disk shelves are dumb LUN presenters. They just present a child device ID for the slot.

The eSATA enclosures are suitable for sticking many drives onto a single sata cable. Basically.  So, if your motherboard has 4 sata connectors, and it supports port replication, you can have 2 normal disks to boot the OS with, and then 2 to put the enclosures on.

[Lord Shonus]

The eSATA enclosures are suitable for sticking many drives onto a single sata cable. Basically.  So, if your motherboard has 4 sata connectors, and it supports port replication, you can have 2 normal disks to boot the OS with, and then 2 to put the enclosures on.

Wouldn't that potentially slow read speed by potentially a lot compared to just putting a PCI-E SATA card in? For this application I don't see a great need for much of a graphics card. Or any graphics card at all unless you have to have one to POST, really. Most of the NAS distros I'm familiar with allow you to do everything over SSH.


I'm increasingly leaning toward the "build a server" option, because I can build it mostly out of parts (except I'll probably want a better PSU) I have lying around and upgrade later.

[wierd]

Welcome to the frame of mind of a SAN guy.

Yes-- the controller's max IOPS is important. Very important. However, a high speed eSATA link is quite speedy, and spinny disks usually are not (singly) sufficient to saturate them.

It's important to consider the disk tray as a single device, which is what happens once the drives inside it are managed by the (md) driver.  For instance, let's assume the following:


We have a 6gbit sata 3 link, which has an enclosure, containing 5 disks, 12TB each (per your note on them being most cost effective).
It has an identical partner, on another 6gbit sata 3 link.

You create an md device using the 5 disks on link 1, using either JBOD or RAID4 (or 5).  This gives you either 60TB with JBOD (5 data disks), or 48TB with RAID4(-5). (4 data disks, 1 parity, (interleaved))

You create ANOTHER md device, using the disks on link 2, with the same raid type.

Finally, you create yet a THIRD md device, out of the first two md devices, in a MIRROR configuration.

The final md device has an effective total bandwidth of 6gbit, and acts like a single, large disk-- as far as the system is concerned.  Internally, it is using parity and data striping across the disks in the connected enclosure, which is mirrored onto the second array, on the second enclosure.  If any disk in this setup fails, it can be replaced. If two disks fail in one enclosure, the duplicate copy from the second array can be used to reconstruct the first array, and it can be re-onlined.


Your typical NAS box is NOT capable of sustained 6gbit throughput, even on gigabit ethernet. You would need to have 10gbit ethernet, and even then, there will be significant protocol overhead, and link share overhead.  The eSATA controllers will be more than suitable.

This assumes you have ideally partitioned the drives in the arrays, and have ideal stripes being written.

ENTER the dreaded specter of Write Alignment.

In addition to simply wanting to optimize the physical disk IO, alignment and stripe width, play a HUGE role in ensuring that data written to the array is always done efficiently.  The linux md driver keeps metadata at the start of all the disks in created md devices, and the kernel probes for these structures, and re-builds the md devices after a reboot automatically for you. If any are missing, it goes in degraded, or offline mode, respectively. In this metadata, there is information on how large the stripe and stride are, which need to be configured with the bandwidth of this shared transport in mind.  The same "shared bus adapter bandwidth" issue has been with us forever, and applies to the fancy disk shelves I mentioned earlier just as much.  This problem is mitigated with an efficient stripe and stride.

[Starver]

Is it a common issue in Windows 11 (I am drawn to ask) that all notepad windows and all command-prompt windows close (or don't reopen after Windows is paused/slept and restarted, even when all other windows do)?

At first we thought it was the problem of Alt-F4ing the one Notepad window (separate window, deliberately, rather than "tabbed" in the same one) would close/attempt-to-close[1], and that we have to remember to Ctrl-W or Alt-F-C to avoid this particular behaviour. But it seems that it 'autocloses' the Notepad instance(s) and the command-prompts (which have been in directories of files within which we "notepad <file>"ed to work on things). And it's messing up the long-standing workflow that both I and the user were always rather happy to use.

And it may have happened without any sleep/suspending. Hard to tell.

At least reopening Notepad is "reopens everything that closed", but I'm really not sure that they all opened in exactly the same state as the editor left them. That'll need further checking, until we can be sure and actually trust what 'comes back'. And then there's diving into the various working directories and keeping track of where work had got to...

Of course, it could be an error with the Sleep/suspend settings on the whole OS. (We've set it to, when powered, never sleep; but, unpowered, let it do so. An interesting side-effect is that if left untouched, with power on, and then remove the power it immediately sleeps because the 'timer' is clearly respected across the change of powered-state. I've even toyed with the possibility of actually temporarily switching it around and seeing if it'll happily sit idle for five minutes 'on battery' and then immediately sleep itself if you plug the power in...


Oh, it's probably just a new behaviour that we just need to get used to. But it all seems like an unnecessary change, compared with our prior 'favourite' versions of Windows where this sort of fuss didn't happen at all. But I'm recording it here as a learning process.


(Addendum: Hmm, interesting, one of the things that quit, earlier today, was a command-prompt running CPAN, updating some of the Perl modules I'd installed. The .lock file remained and I needed to delete it but the process that had been running it was still in-process, despite the cmd.exe it was running from having been 'vanished'. This side of a complete restart of the system (due later tonight) I went and hunted down the process in the Task Manager and fully abort it, hoping that I'm not causing other problems, just to get CPAN to start up, see that it looked ok and could be quit (for now!)...  It'd probably be easier on my own machine (or I'd balls it up all a lot worse!), but handed it back with a shrug and some crossed-fingers...)


[1] If it needs saving, because of change/not having been saved then it does at least hover around in the background with an appropriate Save/Cancel/Quite-type option, ready to abort them. But anything actually nicely saved/unchanged just vanishes which is... annoying... Grrr..

[McTraveller]

My parents are finally looking to get a new laptop (They are running Windows 8.x on 10-year-old hardware).  They are sadly constrained to Windows because my mom uses some Windows-only software to run her sewing machines.

Am I right in assuming I should tell them to try and get Windows 10 if they can, rather than 11?  And not just 10 Home?  I really don't want to deal with requiring MS accounts, or all that stuff.  So is that Win10 Pro?

I am, of course, recommending at least 8GB RAM/512GB SSD.  Probably a 10th-gen intel or equivalent AMD (I think that's 4000 series?)

EDIT: I ask because I haven't had a Windows or Linux machine in my own house in over a decade.  We're happy in Apple land, thankyouverymuch.

[Starver]

Ok, given my recent experience (see above) of a getting a Win11 working (for someone who hasn't even had Win8), it does like to tie into an email/etc[1] but the biggest things are removing all those desktop/taskbar widgets that try to serve you the weather/news/etc... Which takes a while. (What? Why wouldn't I want my lockscreen to advertise an image-library of alternate background images? Surely that's the most important thing for my computer to do, forget Office software!)

And absolutely every one of the pre-installed games are now trying to get you to enter a Freecell/Hearts/Minesweeper/etc 'tournament' and/or earn daily participation rewards. Also keep getting notifications for an XBox pass, or something, and going into the Microsoft Store is itself a minefield of micropayment invitations.

...this is Win11 Home, which hasn't been particularly jailbroken (barring that single setting to not just restrict installations to Microsoft Store), just politely but firmly declined most of the 'targetting' stuff. In setup, it asked which of several purposes it would be used for. Checking the reasoning first, it seems it wasn't going to be like a typical Linux Distro's reasoning[2], but would be used to push suggestions/alerts to you. So left it blank, in our case, which (in a worst-case scenario) will still send as many such notifications but at least not know which particular categories we would then end up dismissing/ignoring.


It's certainly seemed fairly easy (as in no worse than prior generations of Windows) to go out there and grab from source (or discs) the actually required software (LibreOffice, GIMP[3], the prefered browsers that aren't Edge...) and get them on there. Couldn't work out how to rearrange Start-pinned items other than the rigmarole of successive and tactical "Move To Front"s in the right order. Pinning to Taskbar (the widgets to the left of the Start now disabled, and Start now full-left where it traditionally has been) is perhaps more useful, once you realise how it's a combined Taskbar (Win95+) and Custom Toolbar (Win98Plus+?), though without the actual main advantages of either. But it works.


In other words, I don't think you need fear Home11, which is probably default for most retail computers (that are MS-based, anyway). But be prepared to take time adjusting things and (though it's probably not as bad going from 8.1 to 10/11 as it was for us) dealing with the various (and possibly unnecessary) foibles.


[1] Needn't be an MS one, but we made one just for it, at setup time, just for separation.

[2] Select "Home Office" and you'd get your expected FOSS office-suit added to the build, choose "Creativity" and you'd get GIMP/etc, "Programming" would add select IDE/compilers)

[3] They've updated their interface paradigm, again, of course... I think, between us, we've got five different 'generations' of GIMP across various computers, none of their interfaces exactly the same as the others (by default), with dockables docked or undocked left/right/top/bottom, combined, etc... perhaps I should just retain the installation binaries of one era and stop being astonished in the next.

[McTraveller]

Yeah so my parents live 700 miles away... so unless I ship it to my house and prep it, then ship it to them... it sounds like removing all that crap will be beyond them (esp. since my dad likes to go online and try to do stuff himself... but doesn't quite know how to filter out signal from noise).

It really is annoying how hostile computer companies are to end users these days. I don't say "customer" because... who knows who the customers really are.

[dragdeler]

I would not install the win10.1 public beta on some old folk's computer. Unless you want to confuse them with stuff like->

-simply click shutdown
-have winkey+L screen instead
-look in confusion at your user account
-"hey sorry we couldnt shut down  the computer because a user is still connected"

Hibernation is as shit as it has been on any windows that came before.
Ads got worse, telemetrics got worse, actually does need an email now...



Advantages of win10.1beta: in some scenarios the gpu can pull textures straight from the ssd. As to how that actually differs from before? Shut up you need it is all you need to know.

[wierd]

no. I would not advise old betas either

I am perfectly happy on XFCE4 on xubuntu personally though. YMMV.



My main beefs with Microsoft lately, is the increased insistence on trying to tie your local user account identity on your computer, with a microsoft store ID.  While I can see the obvious benefits (FOR THEM) of being able to get all that delicious installation metric data, and all that application use telemetry data, and being able to unambiguously de-anonymize it to their little hearts content--- As a computer user, and as a security minded person, I know that this is just one big databreach away from some very real shit going down, and it does not in any way actually make anything about the affected user account more secure by giving it such an attack surface.

So, I am perfectly content to ignore microsoft's OSes until they learn their lesson, which given prevailing management directions at their company, appears to be *never*.

So, XFCE + WineGE + Lutris + xubuntu it will be for the time being.

[LordBaal]

Which method would you recommend for Windows users to remove the most of the telemetry without going to the point of just installing another OS?