The road to ruin
I have been slacking off again, I missed last week's update, but at least I am getting round to updating on the Monday this time!
Let's see. I have been in a consumers paradise.....or is that a consumer nightmare in the last couple of weeks?
Firstly, Crucial (the company) has finally released the C300 Solid State Drive. biofrog kindly pointed this out to me the other week, and I couldn't resist longer than 30 minutes....so a 256Gb model was purchased.
From all of the reviews that I have seen online, it looks to be the first in the next generation of REALLY fast SSD devices. I am so excited to get this puppy installed and tested. For instance...in one test involving writing random 4kb chunks of data to a harddisk, the fastest consumer drive on the market (Western Digital Raptor) can write up to 2.5MB/s or so. The C300 on the other hand crank out over 140MB/s!!!!
Even compared to other SSDs that is quick. Drives in the same price bracket can manage no more than 20MB/s, and some really expensive ones can get to 50MB/s. There is one other type of SSD using a Sandforce controller than can pip the C300 at this test by about 20MB/s but it does so by compressing the data before it is written, so results can vary.
Admittedly, this is a pretty biassed test, but it tends to top the SSD speed charts in almost every other test, but only just in most cases, and completely trashes any spinning harddrive.
Good article at Anandtech www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx.
Of course to get the most out of an SSD, you need a TRIM capable OS so that the repeated writing to the flash memory on board doesn't kill the performance of the drive. So I had to buy Windows 7 to go with it ;). I have gotten used to Windows 7 on my netbook, so the transition shouldn't be too painful. I bought Win7 Pro 64-bit (and run Win7 Home 32-bit on the netbook).
Now the naughty purchase that I made to go with all this is a spanky new Network Storage box (NAS). I bought a QNAP TS-410 and 4 x 1.5TB Harddisks to run in RAID5 for a total of 4.5TB of storage (or whatever passes for TB in harddisk manufacturer parlance). Since my new SSD is only quite dinky by modern standards, I need a place to put all of my.......Linux Distros......yea.....that's what I use bittorrent for.....downloading LOTS OF LINUX DISTROS.
This is a luxury thing really.....not needed, but have been pining for one for ages. I am dead impressed with it though. Onboard media servers, a variety of transfer protocols supported, brilliant RAID migration tools, and just a generally nicely designed web configuration interface.
The last of the consumerism of late involved a certain "buy 2 get one free" Bluray sale at JBHiFi. The less said about that the better I think (I didn't buy 2).
I really need to stop spending money on toys, and I promise to soon. The new job and salary are a dangerous combination. I am being somewhat well behaved, as I have upped all of my automated insurance and loan repayments so that I can't spend it all on crap, but I should be investing more into the house improvements, and saving more (as well as plowing money into the homeloan before the rates go up AGAIN!).
Unfortunately, 2 toys are on the horizon....the HTC Desire Android mobile phone (coming to Telstra next month apparently), and also out next month, an Apple iPad for azhure . I also want to think about saving for a new car....one of the new Hybrid Camrys that just came onto the market. I can't remember if I have spoken about the Camry here yet, but will save that for another post.
And on to the weight results! I thought last week's result would be much much worse. I had been sent up to Karratha on a business trip the week before that, and was subjected to the lure of the company sponsored all you can eat buffet at the local construction camp. I was terrible when it came to bacon egg and sausages at brekky time, but reasonably restrained for dinner.
This week;s results were also fair, considering I overindulged a little on Friday at a work Sundowner......a couple of pints, and finger food followed by a proper dinner at home.
The results were 0.5kg last week and 0.4kg this week. This brings me to a total weight loss of 18kg since I began! I am very pleased with the results to date and am really starting to feel my waist lose the last of the fatty layers in these last two weeks. I am quickly running out of room on my spreadsheet to add more weeks since I figured I would be below 80kg several weeks ago when I first started. I'll see how the next few weeks go, and then decide if the diet needs to continue :).
The graph!!
Let's see. I have been in a consumers paradise.....or is that a consumer nightmare in the last couple of weeks?
Firstly, Crucial (the company) has finally released the C300 Solid State Drive. biofrog kindly pointed this out to me the other week, and I couldn't resist longer than 30 minutes....so a 256Gb model was purchased.
From all of the reviews that I have seen online, it looks to be the first in the next generation of REALLY fast SSD devices. I am so excited to get this puppy installed and tested. For instance...in one test involving writing random 4kb chunks of data to a harddisk, the fastest consumer drive on the market (Western Digital Raptor) can write up to 2.5MB/s or so. The C300 on the other hand crank out over 140MB/s!!!!
Even compared to other SSDs that is quick. Drives in the same price bracket can manage no more than 20MB/s, and some really expensive ones can get to 50MB/s. There is one other type of SSD using a Sandforce controller than can pip the C300 at this test by about 20MB/s but it does so by compressing the data before it is written, so results can vary.
Admittedly, this is a pretty biassed test, but it tends to top the SSD speed charts in almost every other test, but only just in most cases, and completely trashes any spinning harddrive.
Good article at Anandtech www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx.
Of course to get the most out of an SSD, you need a TRIM capable OS so that the repeated writing to the flash memory on board doesn't kill the performance of the drive. So I had to buy Windows 7 to go with it ;). I have gotten used to Windows 7 on my netbook, so the transition shouldn't be too painful. I bought Win7 Pro 64-bit (and run Win7 Home 32-bit on the netbook).
Now the naughty purchase that I made to go with all this is a spanky new Network Storage box (NAS). I bought a QNAP TS-410 and 4 x 1.5TB Harddisks to run in RAID5 for a total of 4.5TB of storage (or whatever passes for TB in harddisk manufacturer parlance). Since my new SSD is only quite dinky by modern standards, I need a place to put all of my.......Linux Distros......yea.....that's what I use bittorrent for.....downloading LOTS OF LINUX DISTROS.
This is a luxury thing really.....not needed, but have been pining for one for ages. I am dead impressed with it though. Onboard media servers, a variety of transfer protocols supported, brilliant RAID migration tools, and just a generally nicely designed web configuration interface.
The last of the consumerism of late involved a certain "buy 2 get one free" Bluray sale at JBHiFi. The less said about that the better I think (I didn't buy 2).
I really need to stop spending money on toys, and I promise to soon. The new job and salary are a dangerous combination. I am being somewhat well behaved, as I have upped all of my automated insurance and loan repayments so that I can't spend it all on crap, but I should be investing more into the house improvements, and saving more (as well as plowing money into the homeloan before the rates go up AGAIN!).
Unfortunately, 2 toys are on the horizon....the HTC Desire Android mobile phone (coming to Telstra next month apparently), and also out next month, an Apple iPad for azhure . I also want to think about saving for a new car....one of the new Hybrid Camrys that just came onto the market. I can't remember if I have spoken about the Camry here yet, but will save that for another post.
And on to the weight results! I thought last week's result would be much much worse. I had been sent up to Karratha on a business trip the week before that, and was subjected to the lure of the company sponsored all you can eat buffet at the local construction camp. I was terrible when it came to bacon egg and sausages at brekky time, but reasonably restrained for dinner.
This week;s results were also fair, considering I overindulged a little on Friday at a work Sundowner......a couple of pints, and finger food followed by a proper dinner at home.
The results were 0.5kg last week and 0.4kg this week. This brings me to a total weight loss of 18kg since I began! I am very pleased with the results to date and am really starting to feel my waist lose the last of the fatty layers in these last two weeks. I am quickly running out of room on my spreadsheet to add more weeks since I figured I would be below 80kg several weeks ago when I first started. I'll see how the next few weeks go, and then decide if the diet needs to continue :).
The graph!!
