New disks

Received an Amaz0n order for a 2TB Hitachi disk. Never worked (I/O errors). Sent it back without investigating too long, waiting for the refund.

Yesterday I found a used 200GB (also Hitachi) PATA drive in a thrift store, for 5€ -40% sales = 3€. Not large enough for backups but might be a good idea as playground while experimenting with btrfs, LVM and such. So got it and testing it currently. So far so good. Had to re-create the GPT however, seems like there wasn't any partition table initially but the reformatting went fine. Here's the results of f3write & f3read:

Data OK: 182.31 GB (382329456 sectors)
Data LOST: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
        Corrupted: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
 Slightly changed: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
      Overwritten: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
Average reading speed: 58.11 MB/s

Contemplating buying another 2TB SATA from same source or a used one from local classifieds. In both cases around 60€ or so.

Tested a "2TB USB stick" from China. Obviously it was a fake but I got most of my money back. Just a confirmation of what I thought already, these things don't exist, or at least not at the prices they're selling for.

On a side note I also received my PCI Express USB3.0 interface card and installed it. It needs a MOLEX power cable and I have only one in that box (kid2) so now I need 3 of those (2 PATA drives + the USB3 card). So I ordered a 3-way splitter and in the meantime I can test these devices one-by-one. The USB3 card seems to work (at least with a mouse) but I'd need to check with a real USB 3.0 HDD to be sure.

kid2 role, revisited

So on the ACPI side, the BIOS+LXde settings seem to be able to suspend the system, resuming (sometimes) with a double click on the mouse.  However this is not what I'd want from a server that is supposed to do "stuff" at periodic 1-hour intervals, like backuppc or my photo posting script.  So far powernap doesn't seem to do anything for me neither, so I removed it completely.

I tested IDE HDDs that were lying around.  Seems like the 500GB and the 200GB are both dead.  I'm left with an old 6GB to play with.  Mounted it on kid2, checked that there was no data left (moved some to kid2 home).  I also moved data from the Windows partition into the home partition so that I can prepare to attempt a Windows reinstall.

On the 6GB hdd I removed the old partitioning, created a single partition, and installed Puppylinux just to play with it, and have an alternate/backup boot method for kid2.  That distro is really damn small!  But quite functional as a intetnet/word processing box.  I might try that on my old eCafé that's sitting in my drawer awaiting for better days.  The installation media could be a single SD card, 512Mb would be enough...  I think the eCafé can boot from USB so that would seem like a piece of cake.

I like the internal hardware on kid2, and the way it allows to add many more 3.5" disks in the future if I wanted to.  The base hardware (packard bell) really has only one free spot left for that.  I'm starting to think about swapping roles for these two boxes.  Both could accept the USB3 PCIe card that I've ordered...  both hardware seem to be reliable still... I wonder how the slower CPU would work in the context of rsync/gzip/network backups; we'll see when I complete the backuppc setup by adding a few more clients on kid2's backup hosts list.