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Up until recently, I ran a RAID array of 10k RPM SCSI drives in my main/gaming computer. They are fast. They are also noisy, power hungry, hot running and expensive. They are too expensive for me to buy new, so I  bought them used. All was well until about a month ago when I had one of the drives fail on me. Since they are in a RAID 5 array, it was really no big deal. The virtual drive dropped into ‘degraded’ mode, where it uses the two working drives to figure out what was stored on the third drive. I made a mental note to backup files and continued working.

Then another drive failed a week later. This was not good. I’m not sure if drive #2 was close to failure already and the increased activity killed it or what. It’s possible the drives were running too hot — I had been monitoring the temperature and it was always kept within the manufacturer’s specs, but they definitely didn’t run cool. Two out of three drives failing within a week still seems suspicious but maybe it’s just coincidence.

Ultimately I was a little fed up with the SCSI drives. The noise the 3 drives make together can be anywhere from mildly bothersome to nerve racking, depending on background noise in the room. I ended up replacing them with a pair of new Seagate 7200.11 320GB drives. I made the switch from SCSI to SATA for a couple of reasons:

Noise: The 10K RPM drives are really loud. The new drives are barely audible.

Cost: SCSI drives (for me) are too spendy to buy new. And I’m fed up with buying second hand drives — you never know what they’ve been through and they definitely don’t seem to last as long as new ones. Also, SCSI drives bigger than 74 GB are quite expensive. See next point.

Performance (kinda): I’m sure the data seek and read times on my SCSI array were faster than what I can achieve now. However, I’m kinda tired of RAID 5. It seems to really rob performance on writing data. In order to stay away from RAID 5, I had to increase the capacity of my harddrives in RAID 1. It’s prohibitively expensive to buy SCSI drives larger than 74 GB (even used!), so I switched to SATA.

Stay tuned for how I managed to recover my data from the old drives.

On the advice of a friend, I decided to pick up Bioshock for PC a couple of days ago. I was able to get it for $12 after shipping (yeah ebay!). Not too bad at all in my mind. The game won many game of the year awards for 2007. It also looks pretty nice on my gaming PC, but I don’t think it looks as nice as it should for being a 2007 game. Maybe I’m just being picky or the graphics style of the game (explained below) doesn’t lend itself to fancy graphics and showy weapons. I think TF2 looks quite a bit better, having been released only a couple months after Bioshock.

It took me maybe a half an hour or 45 minutes of playing to really get into it, but now I am really enjoying it. Until I played it, I never realized that the game takes place in 1960. The art and general graphics style of the game fits with that era, and it’s quite different from any other games I’ve played. Unique.

I played for almost 4 hours in one sitting the other day…it’s been a while since I’ve done that. Since the orange box I think. I just started level 3, and I think there are 7 or 8 total. All in all it’s a pretty good game and I’m enjoying it.

I put a couple of gallons of gas into my car this morning, $10 worth to be specific. At $4.24 a gallon, it didn’t really go far. Not even enough to get my low fuel light to go off. Gas has gone up in price ~40 cents in less than 2 weeks’ time. Pretty crazy. I need to start taking my bicycle to work and get the proper license endorsement so I can legally ride my motorcycle.

From an environmental standpoint — and even a personal health standpoint — I can’t really complain too much about the rising price of gas. Every dime that gas prices rise, more and more minds are working towards alternatives to traditional fossil fuel powered transportation. These minds are also getting a lot more funding as of late. Also, America is too fat — maybe this will be at least part of the kick in the pants we need to take out the bicycle or walk more often.

I’d be lying to say high gas prices haven’t changed my travel plans for this weekend. Originally I was thinking I might go home this weekend, but then I decided it’d be to expensive. I don’t think I can afford to drive my car downstate unless I’m carpooling. So far no luck there. Secondly, they are doing pretty massive renovations to the Mackinac Bridge right now. The whole northbound I-75 side is closed down for various repairs. So right now there is 2-way traffic on the southbound side. Traffic on that bridge is going to be a nightmare this weekend.