System Builders

You can buy these tiny little piezo-electric PC speakers that fit on the appropriate motherboard header. Works great if your case - like most these days - does not have a built-in speaker. The ones I have are roughly 1cm diameter/tall, and quite loud despite their small physical size.

For my previous PC I cannibalized the speaker out of an older PC chassis I had and attached it to the steel case using the driver magnet from a broken headset, but these piezo-electric things are much more convenient and tidy. Cuts down on cable clutter inside the case too, as the cables to the thing are only like 2-3 cm long.
 
Case and PSU were from 2005, great looking black micro ATX tower with tons of front USB ; the junk motherboard that was in it appears to have a piezo on it.
I have another such little PC in case I need to build something for me.

I remember I liked having a conventional speakers because piezos (found in some very old OEM PCs) would fail at rendering some arbitrary frequencies.. Which is not a common use case at all anymore. But I liked listening at the "guitar solo" in Ski or Die's hill descent stage!


I'm trying to make my beeper work in linux but it's quiet, software side seems to work or at least believes it works and fails silently.
.. alright, I had to enable the pcspkr kernel module and it works :D. another module can emulate a sound card but I'll try that on another PC. btw I have a real speaker but rather not deafeningly loud .
 
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You may be right, I don't know. It would still take some effort at least if the drive is decently large, but fortunately there are enterprise-grade SSDs these days with high-endurance flash that handles many PBs of writes (or even many, many PBs for a large drive.)

If you can write constantly at 550MB/s (may not be possible for small I/O sizes for vast majority of drives), it would still take nearly a week just to write 1PB. You'd be looking at a shedload of SQL transactions per second to hit that average load. :)

Constantly writing at saturated SATA speeds is impossible except in theoretical testing.

Something like an Intel DC S3500 could still hack it for months on end and be perfectly fine. Hell even a consumer Intel drive could. Have you guys seen the testing Intel does? Particle Accelerators Whammy!
 
Samsung EVO does degrade in theoretical test, still that's weeks/monthes of constant abuse. The EVO stores three bits per flash cell (TLC). All other drives, consumer ones in that particular test I read of were MLC ones and showed no degradation.
Even with that EVO you're supposedly fine. Simply running an OS and some stuff won't kill it, even disk-access hungry ones like Vista and Windows 7.
 
Constantly writing at saturated SATA speeds is impossible except in theoretical testing.
Yes, you'd probably need a PCIe-based drive to reach full SATA bandwidth in a real-world situation. There's some add-in board-based SSDs that are just brutally fast. (Brutally expensive too no doubt, and I don't know if they allow booting off of the drive either...)

Have you guys seen the testing Intel does? Particle Accelerators Whammy!
Intel shoots particle accelerator beams at their drives? :oops:
 
I'm sitting before a particle accelerator while typing this, and I misplaced my portable plasma generator. Someone in my entourage kept it, as a more or less honest mistake. I resorted to using my pyrolytic radiator to initiate the combustion of little health de-optimizers.
 
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Oh my goodness, you haven't heard!?

Behind the scenes with Intel's SSD division
A look at reliability, validation, and frickin' particle accelerators

http://techreport.com/review/26269/behind-the-scenes-with-intel-ssd-division

Intel vetted its firmware validation scheme by artificially injecting flipped bits into DC S3700. It also took that drive to the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center and stuck it in the crosshairs of an actual particle accelerator.

Basically they do this to protect against "silent errors" caused by cosmic rays :!:
 
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx
Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

  • Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
  • Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
  • Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
This is from 2009.
 
Oh my goodness, you haven't heard!?
Hah, no, this is the first I hear of this (although I have heard before that Intel has a thorough validation procedure... Just wasn't aware quite to what level they were taking that validation! :)) Thanks for the link, I will absolutely check it out.

Basically they do this to protect against "silent errors" caused by cosmic rays :!:
Okay, lol, well better they stick a SSD in the crosshairs of a particle accelerator beam than their fricken heads...! ;)
 
I know at least one person who developed epilespy through an organic chemistry mean. Nothing nuclear or radiation related!
I think that in Soviet Russia you could also fly into space or invent Tetris and still live in 20 square meters.
 
Uh I feeled the proton beam story was creepy. Face peeling off!
The guy who looks like beardless Abraham Lincoln was at least a long time ago. ..alright I've just read the worst passage :oops:, yes it's better to not read after the introduction.
 
Face peeling off is probably more like skin peeling off I'd think, considering the man still had a face after the accident.

...And in any case, that still doesn't beat a a man throwing up and as he does, a half cup's worth of brains falls out of his blown-open skull! Or fungus growing on his brain! Jesus! That's fucking disgusting any way you put it.
 
What does the resource monitor say? What task is doing all that disk I/O?
always system stuff, usually msmpeng.exe (anti malware) and other stuff. Ive tried disabling that but another system thing takes its place.

empty pc - insert windows dvd, install windows. i.e. nothing else was installed on machine.

left my pc alone for a couple minutes until the HDD starts going apeshit & took these
hd1.png

hd2.png

basically now if I leave my PC alone for more than 3 minutes I first start up a movie, this seems to fool the OS into thinking Im using the PC (just playing music alone still triggers it)
 
I just don't see any reason not to throw a pagefile on a RAM drive with 16Gb+ of RAM. I have 4Gb dedicated to pagefile, temp files, caches etc.

Why care about whether windows uses it or not, how bad it is for SSD etc. when you can bypass everything and have fastest possible speed IF it is used.
 
Zed -
If you leave the thing alone, doesn't the disk activity ever let up? Or it just keeps going, say a day, two days...? (Maybe you can't be without your system that long. :))
 
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