What do you do with a drunken hard drive?

What is RAID 0, 1, 5, & 10?

I was sitting outside enjoying a pleasant late summer afternoon when I got to musing about the pile of old disk drives I have sitting in a box. Surely something that 'valuable' could be put to good use. Of course value is in the eye of the beholder. When I bought them, or more likely the computer they came in, they were serious equipment. Okay, not serious serious, but more than adequate for my needs.

I've been thinking for awhile that there ought to be some way to combine them all into one giant storage device and since there's so many of them, I ought to build in some kind of security, like a RAID system. Never mind that the mix of sizes I have probably couldn't be configured in any kind  of RAID configuration. The biggest one is probably bigger than the sum of all the rest.

So then I try to remember how a RAID system works. I remember there is a system where if you have three or more disks, you can arrange the data so that if any one disk fails, you can rebuild the data from the remaining drives. You can do it with two disks but two disks doesn't require any mathematical magic, you just copy one to the other. Hence the video up top.

XOR is the answer. Here is an example I came up with for how it works.

We have five disks, each one can store one number (they are very small disks). The way this works is you XOR the data from the first four disks and store the result on the fifth disk (yellow). Now, suppose the third disk dies and you want to recover the missing data. You simply XOR the data on the remaining four disks and write the result (pink) onto the replacement disk. You will notice that the XOR sum of the data on the remaining four disks is the same as the data was on the now missing disk.

In order to rebuild the data on the new disk, you are going to have to read all of the data from the remaining four disks. If those are big disks, like in the terabyte range, that's going to take a while. The SATA disk interface can transfer data in the range of 100's of megabytes a second, so a terabyte is going to take on the order of a thousand seconds. Reading four disks with an actual computer system is liable to take hours, just so you know what you are getting into.

Okay, back to the original 'problem'. 

My hard disk collection

I bought the big Western Digital disk when I had hopes of consolidating all of our family's photos, but kids these days, they don't care, and evidently I don't really care as I haven't spent much time on it. I gave up trying to use Western Digital's fancy backup system and resorted to using an external hard disk adapter.

Unitek USB 3.0 to IDE and SATA Converter $35

Of course now-a-days you can buy a 2 TB USB stick for $40:

2TB USB Flash Drive $40

Problem with USB thumb drives is they are small and easily misplaced. Fortunately this one has a key ring so you can chain it to a boat anchor like they do the restroom keys at roadhouse restaurants.

So for a couple hundred bucks I could stuff all my old hard drives in shoe box with a bunch of USB adapters, a USB hub and a power strip and I could have my very own giant data storage complex. But then I would need to organize my pitiful collection of files that probably wouldn't add up to 100 GB much less a terabyte, so I'm probably not going to do that. 

I could try and sell them, but used hard drives are worth almost nothing, and certainly not worth the time and trouble to pack them up and take them to the post office. Shipping them out one at a time I would need $50 each to make it worth my while and I don't think anyone is going to pay that kind of money for these antiques.

I can't just throw these old drives away, it just goes against everything I believe, so it looks like they are just going back in their box and back on the shelf. Maybe one of these days something will change and they will once again become valuable.

Chyron

Tucker Carlson's trademark expression

Very entertaining story on Unherd:

Why America is seduced by the Obama sex scandal by Kat Rosenfield

Tucker Carlson relies on the allure of forbidden knowledge

It's all about the nonsense that comes out of people's mouths, but it's the way it's written that makes it entertaining.

I tripped over the word chyron while I was reading this, so I looked it up:

an electronically generated caption superimposed on a television or movie screen.

Since it was one fact I found in the linked article, I made it my title.

Verde Cocina

Verde Cocina

We had an early dinner at Verde Cocina with our daughter last night. As the above photo shows, it's a real brick-and-mortar restaurant. 

Verde Cocina Streetside Seating

We sat outside in their street-side booths. There has been a proliferation of these things since the pandemic and they appear to be becoming permanent. It's a low traffic, low speed street, so sitting there inches away from certain death was comfortable enough, as long as you don't think about all the yahoos running around in cars. There was only one hot-rodder revving his engine and squealing his tires while we were there. If you ask me, I think these street-side booths are a really terrible idea, they're dangerous and they consume parking spaces. They look to be part of Portland's war on the automobile. Isn't that wonderful.

Might be the last time we get to enjoy eating outdoors for a while. Cold weather and rain are liable to start any day now and then there won't be any dining outside till next spring. 

Añejo Old Fashioned

'Cold' weather is coming so I am on the verge of switching from beer to bourbon, but I wanted something with a little extra flavor. I had a Manhattan at Stanford's last week, but it was a bit too sweet. Last night I thought I'd try an Old Fashioned, and lo and behold, they have one. So, made with tequila instead of bourbon, and Ancho Reyes Chili Liqueur, which gave it a little tang. It was excellent.

Jicama Sticks

Devil daughter ordered an appetizer of Jicama Sticks. They don't taste like much, but they are crunchy, kind of like water chestnuts. There was a sprinkling of chili powder, so there was a bit of a tang. Daughter doesn't trust water chestnuts. "I mean" she says, "are they even chestnuts?" I have to agree, the only place I have seen them is in a can or on a plate of Chinese food from a restaurant.

My wife and I shared a surf & turf platter and it was perfecto. 

P. S. avif file format is becoming more popular for images. Blogger can't handle it. There are online converters available and they seem to work.

Tina – The Tina Turner Musical | West End trailer

We went to see Tina at Keller Auditorium last night, and there was something very wrong. I don't know if it was me or whether the sound director was asleep at the wheel, but the sound was awful. I mean, it's probably me. I'm old and my hearing is not that sharp, and a big production company that's putting on this show would certainly have people who know how to deliver the sound they want, so it must be me. But good lord almighty, why did it sound so bad?

At times the sound was normal, but anytime they got into full song (which was most of the time) it was like somebody had turned up the volume to 11 and the loudspeakers were being overdriven. It was like a big blare of noise.

I enjoy listening to pop and rock music at home, so I am not completely clueless, but I usually listen at much lower volumes.

What is going on? We were sitting in the box seats which are like the first balcony above the main floor, if that makes any difference.

Anyway, here's one of her hits. It doesn't sound anything like it did in the show last night.

Tina Turner - What's Love Got To Do With It (Official Music Video)

The Hypersonic Missile Vulnerability That NO ONE Talks About

I dunno, it kind of sounds like nobody has a hypersonic missile that can live up to its hype. At least not yet. 

I suppose that the compulsion to build ever more deadly weapons is ingrained in our society, our minds and our bodies right down to our bones. All driven by the fear that if the 'other guys' got an edge up on us we would be at their mercy, and being as 'they' are heathen, pagan, devil worshipers, we can't expect much in the way of mercy. Probably be put up on stage and dissected. Better to go out in a blaze of glory, am-I-right?

Of course, this compulsion is buried deep within our bones and after you have applied a nice thick layer of civilization over those bones, you might think we live in a civilized society. I am pretty sure we don't, but we like to pretend that we do, we like to pretend that if we all just got our shit together, we could all live in a civilized society. It's a nice dream and its our belief in that dream that allows us to have little bits of paradise scattered here and there around the world.

But our society is not really civilized. All that civilization that's been slathered on our bones is no kind of armor if reality decides to intrude, and it doesn't take much reality to break through that cream puff layer and reach the bones where the killer resides. Wake him up and see how civilized our society is.

Name Calling

How a White Man says the N-Word to a Black Man | Laugh Factory

We've all heard how the n-word is verboten for everyone except n-word-s. Talking to my wife last  night about another pejorative, as in what makes someone a [squawk]? I mean how do you know someone is a [squawk]? What are the defining characteristics of a [squawk]? After several seconds of consideration, her answer is that a [squawk] is someone who would call someone else a [squawk].

Who Were We Running From? | Official Trailer | Netflix

Mother and teenage daughter live in expensive hotel rooms. They stay for a while and then something happens and they pack a bag and run off to the next hotel. The 'something' tends to be the mother being offended by one of the staff, so she offs them with her handy little knife. Mom has obviously gone round the bend, but mother and daughter are, so far, totally devoted to each other. Daughter seems to unaware of her mother's murders. So far they have managed to stay one step ahead of the police, but this can't last, can it? It's a very strange show.