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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I have a dual NVMe USB3 caddy that’s smaller than most 2.5 HDD housings with currently 2 2TB drives, you can buy 4 and 8TB nvme drives these days too. I can throw that thing out a car and it won’t care.

    And the drives are easily swappable and so are the electronics in the casing.

    So no, 2.5" HDD’s still are an utterly dead end of technology.

    Especially with these and some other vendors, the USB interface is part of the drive (there’s no SATA port on them), so you can’t swap them or take them out for data recovery. They are HDD tech, which doesn’t do shocks or any other sort of roughhousing, they are slow as shit and use far more power than any NVMe drive.



  • They have a secondary motherboard that hosts the Slot CPUs, 4 single core P3 Xeons. I also have the Dell equivalent model but it has a bum mainboard.

    With those 90’s systems, to get Windows NT to use more than 1 core, you have to get the appropriate Windows version that actually supports them.

    Now you can simply upgrade from a 1 to a 32 core CPU and Windows and Linux will pick up the difference and run with it.

    In the NT 3.5 and 4 days, you actually had to either do a full reinstall or swap out several parts of the Kernel to get it to work.

    Downgrading took the same effort as a multicore windows Kernel ran really badly on a single core system.

    As for the Sun Fires, the two models I mentioned tend to be highly available on Ebay in the 100-200 range and are very different inside than an X86 system. You can go for 400 or higher series to get even more difference, but getting a complete one of those can be a challenge.

    And yes, the software used on some of these older systems was a challenge in itself, but they aren’t really special, they are pretty much like having different vendors RGB controller softwares on your system, a nuisance that you should try to get past.

    For instance, the IBM 5000 series raid cards were simply LSI cards with an IBM branded firmware.

    The first thing most people do is put the actual LSI firmware on them so they run decently.


  • Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

    For history and “how things changed”, go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000’s (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90’s (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

    x86 computers haven’t changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we’ve been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

    For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.







  • Everyone has “cancer or whatever” resistance. That’s why DNA works, it has repair mechanisms.

    Getting cancer is when that mechanism either fails or isn’t good enough to repair the damage.

    Abnormal radiation levels can cause an excess of damage or different type of damage than what your natural mechanism is capable of fixing.

    We’re constantly being radiated, we’re constantly employing our resistances and defenses against radiation.

    We float around on a rock in a sea of radiation and even we ourselves emit low levels of (mostly harmless) radiation.



  • A mutation for having a higher radiation resistance or higher resistance to cancer is something that already happens in nature, but in most of the animal world those are relatively useless traits, normally cancer doesn’t develop fast enough to stop procreation.

    In Chernobyl, the highly elevated radiation would normally kill animals before they can even breed. The ones that don’t have the resistance die before they get the chance, the ones that do have a higher resistance breed.

    With humans in the modern age, a resistance to cancer or radiation trait never gets the chance to become a dominant evolutionary trait as most all people only develop the cancer later in life and the ones that do get cancer early more and more often can get treatment giving them a chance to procreate even when they got cancer young.

    Outside Chernobyl, there is no evolutionary pressure for a trait like that to become dominant.

    Living long enough to procreate is the primary drive in nature.

    We generally don’t see fast evolutionary changes in nature because nature doesn’t change quickly often.

    Leave it to us, humans, to create situations where the change is drastic and quick.



  • Even as far back as XP/Vista Microsoft has wanted to run the file system as more of an adaptive database than a classical hierarchical file system.

    The leaked beta for Vista had this included and it ran like absolute shit, mostly because harddrives are slow and ram was at a premium, especially in Vista as it was such a bloated piece or shit.

    NTFS has since evolved to include more and more of these “smart” file system components.

    Now they want to go full on with this “smart” approach to the filesystem.

    It’ll still be slow and shit, just like it was 2 decades ago.