tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14570352292129918362010-02-27T08:31:58.414-08:00Random rants and musings....noegrutshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18332849570411950706noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457035229212991836.post-65710645288397303082008-03-10T16:01:00.000-07:002008-03-10T16:02:08.121-07:00

Now that large hard disks are amazingly cheap and getting more common every day, I've noticed many people posting questions similar to the above on various message boards. The implication seems to be that the formatting process is somehow responsible for consuming ~36GB of a 500GB disk.The truth, however, is that ever since the first 1GB hard disk was produced, manufacturers have conveniently

noegrutshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18332849570411950706noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457035229212991836.post-64029704981751191702008-02-26T23:45:00.001-08:002008-02-27T00:41:22.675-08:00

Well sort of, I guess. Previously, in my first blog post in fact, I documented the problems I'd been having getting my Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drive to work reliably over its eSATA connection.RecapThe interface firmware that the drive originally came with sucked so badly that the throughput on the eSATA interface was barely any higher than that on the USB interface (39MB/sec vs 33MB

noegrutshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18332849570411950706noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457035229212991836.post-4191260754170149652008-01-02T17:09:00.001-08:002008-01-03T11:41:38.876-08:00

Pop quiz: what's wrong in this photo?In case it isn't obvious, both of the ink tanks should contain yellow ink. However, the rear one has turned almost completely black. This ink tank was taken from my Canon i950 photo printer, which up until this point I'd been very happy with. In front is a new Canon BCI-6Y ink tank.After a bit of research, it turns out that the print head on the i950 (and

noegrutshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18332849570411950706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457035229212991836.post-58671227435937503452007-12-29T19:29:00.000-08:002007-12-30T02:36:26.229-08:00

I was recently researching which drives I wanted to buy for a machine that will replace my trusty old Pentium II mail/web server. While browsing through the customer reviews on Newegg's site, I found that some people had been complaining of receiving drives that were reporting smaller cache sizes than advertised.Specifically, this affected one of the drives that interested me, the Seagate

noegrutshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18332849570411950706noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457035229212991836.post-67486235653419105302007-12-09T15:07:00.000-08:002008-01-03T18:00:24.318-08:00

(Image (C) FreeFoto.com)This particular rant could equally be titled "why don't people know how to drive", but I'll just concentrate on this particular maneuver for now.When you want to turn left at a traffic light and you are first in line, what do you do when the your light turns green? Assuming you don't have an arrow, so you have to yield to the people opposite that are going straight ahead,

noegrutshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18332849570411950706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457035229212991836.post-22389303426503954452007-12-01T15:37:00.001-08:002008-01-07T12:51:10.759-08:00

Or: Why to avoid the Seagate FreeAgent Pro line of external hard drivesBack in June of 2007, I decided I needed an external hard drive to backup my ever-growing collection of photos. So I went on a quest to find a suitable drive to buy. I decided on some basic requirements, such as:Decent capacity, say 500GBQuiet (I hate whiny noises)Both USB and eSATA connectivityReasonably priced (does this

noegrutshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18332849570411950706noreply@blogger.com78