HDD failures

 

Hot off the press with some excellent numbers on real world disk failure rates. As someone who`s consuming and storing a substantial amount of TB`s this kind of data is invaluable. Full post can be found here

Am using WD green drives coupled with SSD on ZFS thus you get alot of bang for buck with large cheap disks and fast cache/working set (SSD). So far have only lost 1 disk and luckily it failed during burn-in.

Keep in mind this data for consumer grade disks, not your typical HP/DELL/IBM crazy ass expensive servers.

In short: seagate barracuda disks sucks - beware.

Ultra Advanced FPGA Development

This was just too amusing to pass on. Having a cooling problem with a 10G fpga board which required some hardcore engineering skillz to solve. Essentially the board has no fan and there is no case resulting in a rather poor airflow and toasty chip. To make it worse there was nothing to rest the fan on thus the below highly engineered solution was taken to the business for approval.

Full purchase order is as follows:

- x1 1 12V fan
- x2 alen keys  (one required to be quite long)
- x1 twisty tie
- x1 TAPE! *this is special thermal tape, forget the name but it happy survives 1-500deg C*

The truly novel part of this is invention is the unqiue application of a twist tie to secure the alen key to the heatsink, via the heatsinks own design.

NOTE: technically tape is not required but psychologically, tape is always required.