Great Happenings over the weekend

Sitex was on over the weekend!

Despite the bleak outlook of the economy, the amout of people purchasing goods was still respectable. In fact, I didn't even thought that we are in a technical recession! Most of the stuff was cheap. I guess its due to the resellers wanting to clear stock in exchange for cash before the recession sets in. GREAT discounts, GREAT products, POOR me. Lol, I didn't buy much.

The purchases I made, a Norton Internet Security 2009 3 licence. Full Stop

I think this is the first time which i bought so little stuff. Probably there won't be another time when I only buy 1 software. Well, there were other purchases for other people and probably thats why I didn't feel hand itchy even though I didn't buy much.

Purchases for other people:

3 X Western Digital Ext 1TB HDD

1X Seagate 2.5" portable 320GB

Large files on USB 2.0 is simply too slow and won't cut. I have made it a point never to buy USB 2.0 products without E-SATA. 100+ GB files take an hour or more! Enough is enough. E-SATA all the way!

Today I experimented with Raid 1 on my computer. It is the feature called Drive Expert on Asus Motherboards. I know that the performance of my HDDs could well hit 90MB/s. After setting up a Raid 1 on this Chipset, I don't think i would like to use it again. Transfer rates of about 70MB/s sounds like quite a bad performance hit... Its back to the Intel Matrix Controller for my next set of Raid 1.

Why raid 1 you ask? I personally prefer Raid 0 for speed. Raid 5 for security. Raid 10 for both speed and security.

Raid 1 is the economical reasons since i already have 2x 500GB drives which i intended to raid from the start. I have decided to raid drives for performance is simply a waste of effort. Now you can get 90-100MB/s on a HDD you raid 2 of them for approx 160MB/s . 1 year later, 1 HDD with the same capacity as 2 drives and can achieve 140MB/s. It is a good as a slap in the face for me with the decreased failure rate and reduced energy consumption.

Hence, Raid 1 sort of won't get outdated so fast, since I have to buy 2 drives and reliability for 2 drives storing the same data is 100% better than 1 drive. 2 X160gb HDD i bought 4 years ago can each do 40+MB/s and Raid 0 65+MB/s. Now 1 HDD can do 100 MB/s check that improvement out!