Comments by "SeanBZA" (@SeanBZA) on "ExplainingComputers" channel.

That, or the drive itself is one that failed QC as a 2G drive, so got programmed as a 1G drive with only the good blocks allocated, leaving the 2G drive controller ( which would be the same controller per generation) with it's much larger cache in there, but with the reduced main memory capacity. Another is that they ran out of the lower capacity chipsets, so instead ( probably as it is a single pick and place item, with a stacked die inside) simply substituted the larger cache chipsets instead as they are layout compatible, or they have depreciated the older controllers with the new higher capacity cache version, and there is a blend of the different size cache controllers currently in the supply chain, so they are refraining from updating the spec sheet till they are sure all the older versions have been sold off in the supply chain.
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@goury All were the same model of Deathstar I take it......
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@ExplainingComputers Yes POE is becoming very common as homes get IP cameras and such installed, which all then only need a single cable run to the device. While IP camera prices are dropping, you still find it common to have cameras that use coax cable, though there you also have use of UTP cable as well and a balun at each end, so 2/3 pairs are used for power to the camera, and one pair is used for video back, allowing you to have 2 cameras at a single point, and only run one low cost cable. There I have often used CCA wire, as the cable is very cheap, not that great for flexibility, but as it will be installed once, and left alone, cheap in that you can run 2 or 3 to all locations for future expansion, as the hardware is upgradable, and the biggest cost of installing them is laying the cable, not the actual cable itself. I have used entire boxes for a 4 camera install in a small house, just having those spare cables tucked up out of sight meant the future upgrade to 8 or 16 cameras was very low cost to do.
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Yes and remember as well WD also uses another older technology on the silicon as well, in there being an embedded 6502 processor, with 64k of ROM and RAM, which is used to bootstrap the main processor, feeding in the configuration file and doing housekeeping, as the core is now royalty free to use, and there is a lot of tools to develop for it, and it is both also RISC, and also incredibly small as well, fitting well in the RISC architecture. So small you can fit it into a ultra cheap processor sold as a toy.
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One thing to add, when upgrading memory often you will find the slots are full of dust, so a can of contact cleaner is very useful, and often a non woven wipe soaked with it used to gently clean the inside of the slot and the memory module will result in good contact, as you wipe off the dust and the film of dirt that has built up there. Same for adding in cards, the slot can easily have a build up of dirt in it, which is not visible easily, but a spray and wipe with the non woven cloth and contact cleaner does wonders.
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@AT-wl9yq Even the pressed ones suffer from bit rot.
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10 year old power supply, probably at least one of the capacitors in that power converter board is bulging it looks like, right there under the cabling. Power brick likely inside is somewhat well cooked as well, especially if it has been powered for a few years, cooking itself dry nicely.
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@christianholmstedt8770 I use it to run XP, because I have stuff that needs XP to operate, and is not supported under W10, but runs in a VM with no issues, plus the hardware pass through works really well. Just do not update the XP VM at all, it is not connected to the network deliberately, so that there is no issues with updates breaking things like FTDI drivers.
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Wine will run quite a few versions of Office quite well, but you always have issues with mail, simply because it is so intertwined with the OS itself.
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Will add that using Virtualbox is one of the non free softwares, it is free for non commercial use, but, being Oracle, the demonstration here can be classed as being commercial use, though Christopher using it for educational purposes might be enough to get out of having to pay Oracle an annual fee to use it, though IANAL, and Oracle is well known to be very litigatious.
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@Luigi_Vaz I started with buying a set of install CD's for Redhat, and using them to run on an old Slot 1 Pentium machine that had been tossed out as too slow to run Windows 98, and barely able to run Win 95. It positively flew on that machine, and I was converted.
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Tape also has an issue that the old tape formulations, dating back to the late 1950's, will be still in great condition, but tapes made in the early 1979's will almost all be unable to be read due to oxide flaking off. Change due to them no longer using sperm whale oil as a tape lubricant, the old tapes are still able to be unwound, the later ones need baking to hopefully get them to unstick one last time for the single destructive read.
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Most common power meters are poor at the lower end, simply because there you are using only 1 or 2 bits of the ADC range, and most common ADC chips on MCU's are pretty poor performers at the lower end and also pretty poor with long term drift. you have to choose full scale current range to get low power readings, and as most have to contend with the full rated current draw of the power socket ( 15-20A around the world ion most cases) you suffer at the low end. To get a decimal point you will have to step up a lot from the cheap consumer grade devices, and those meters are not going to be $10, and will also not be very tolerant of overloads either. You will be paying Agilent, Yokogawa or one of the other top tier instrument makers quite a lot of money for the extra point, and the confidence it actually is a valid reading. The common meters are poor performers with loads that are SMPS input as they tend to be slightly under or over in the power calculations due to the harmonics and the high peak currents.
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Remember as default formatting a drive as ext2/3/4 (or ReiserFS, with the warning that there is no way to undelete on this file system) the owner of the newly formatted filesystem there is root, so you need to change ownership of the folder as root to be user 1000 (the default login user, normally you) before you can use it. Formatting as FAT or NTFS does not do this, as these are non native Unix Linux file systems, they are mounted normally using FUSEFS, and many older distros could not read them, unless you added in a module to allow this, which was eventually included as part of the kernel by default. Also beware of compatability between different versions of EXT filesystem, older ones cannot read newer ones correctly, so you would need to use a compatible version, or format on the old system first, as the new one will read and write it correctly.
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Yes, LTS works better, no radical breaking of things every day, though some things just stay broken..... Just waiting for Mint to give the upgrade so I can do this.
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@ExplainingComputers I have no idea if you pay, just that Oracle is rather infamous for suing their customer base, to the point it is classed as an income stream. Just to point out that not all software comes free to use, some have very onerous licensing.
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Wonder if you could run VLC on it, which would sort out most of the capture and recording issues.
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@paulstubbs7678 Had to recover a failing Seagate drive on one, it took a few hours in the freezer to get it cold enough to allow me to get all the data off. New drive, due to the BIOS, had to have that 2G jumper put in, as Netware 3.11 was not happy past 2G of drive space, though the data was all only around 1G. Did find a good use for that extra space, made a second partition, and formatted it, and made it only visible to the administrator. Now it was used to take snapshots of the database running on it, so I could do a quick copy during lunch, and then again in the evening, and have a snapshot that was generally only a half day old. Was useful, plus also month end I could carry on and do a pre and post month end backup as well, just in case something borked. only 100M anyway, so I could fit a few snapshots onto the 1G partition, and at leisure write them to backup without slowing the system down much. That screensaver did roll over once or twice as well. 3 NIC's, to segment the network, seeing as it was still mostly 10M NIC's, and a lot were 8/16 bit ISA cards as well. At least a big step up from Arcnet......
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@ewanmcdonagh2827 You got the one good one in that batch.....
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@Number6_ Mine were about a decade old when I got them, SCSI drives out of a server. Only noticed the one had failed one day, one used as a scratch drive, and the other as XP swap, that the swap one had died overnight, and XP had decided to make a fileystem swap partition to replace it. Left it there, and eventually a year later the other one also died, so the pair got removed, leavbing the card behind to still service the scanner and Zip drive i had for use.
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Watching on a repurposed Fujitsu Core 2, with the upgrades consisting of 8G of RAM instead of the original 1G, and a SSD for the system, but still using a 2T drive for home. LTS Linux Mint, so no worries for the next 3 years or so. Did upgrade the original CDR drive to a DVDRW drive, and added another SSD for use as swap and temp space, though they generally sit at under 3G total used on the older 120G SSD I put in. Was fun putting 3 drives into the space most commonly occupied by 2, but they all fitted. Originally came with Win7, but that drive is parked away in a drawer. Nice thing about the upgrade was that pretty much everything worked out of the box one I transferred home across, even got the tabs open when closed back no problems.
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@terrydaktyllus1320 The splitters are common on CCTV, powering a camera that is non POE, or to allow you to put in single POE cameras without needing to spend a lot of money in upgrading a switch, often a more expensive managed one still with a lot of service life on it, to POE. Seen them a lot with one or two IP cameras running POE, and the server has a 48 port manages switch that is not POE capable, but the replacement is likely to quadruple the cost of the install.
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@aladdin8623 Amazon Glacial storage perhaps. Cheap, and fastish to shove into it, but, like it says, slow to get out, so useful for long term storage. Normal recovery strategy is you buy a hard drive of appropriate size, and they deliver to you using the Amazon delivery methods.
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Then you get open standards, like OGV and OPUS.... All in all, a video with a MP4 extension can be almost anything, and can actually be audio only, and still meet the sec. Audio can range all over as well.
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