Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 January 10

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January 10

Raid and storage space

Just to clarify: A specification like: "2x 120GB SSD RAID SOFT 0/1" from a hosting provider means that I can store 120GB of data (minus space taken by OS? bamse (talk) 08:54, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

None of us can answer definitively because we don't know which hoster it is. Your best bet is to email them and I bet within 12 hours you'll have a good response. Notwithstanding that, the fact they advertise 120GB suggests it might be on the 1000 vs 1024 scale. I don't know why you'd want a SSD on a hoster, just more cost and less reliable, and the difference between RAID 0 and 1 is significant. One's good for reliability, one's not. I suggest you ask them specifically. Shadowjams (talk) 08:58, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Will ask them. As for reliability, from what I read, if it is mostly read-only access, SSD are pretty reliable. And SSD are supposed to be much faster than SATA, no? bamse (talk) 09:47, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

SSDs refer to solid state drives, which are virtually the same as flash memory in SD cards and keydrives. SATA is the interface, initially 1.5 gb/s (i think) and later 3.0. I could be wrong about some of these details, but I'm sure that SATA describes the interface, not the drive, and SSD describes the drive, not the interface. The interface has almost nothing to do with the reliability on a low bandwidth website. There are much more important issues if you're getting enough traffic for this question to matter. Shadowjams (talk) 09:51, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Try SATA and SSD. Incidentally, SATA 1.0 was 1.5 Gb/s, SATA 2.0 was 3.0 GB/s, and we are now on SATA 3.0 at 6.0 Gb/s. The fastest mechanical hard disk drives are only slightly faster than SATA 1.0 limits, and so the growth in speeds really is driven by new technologies like SSD. To answer the original question, when I see a spec like that, I assume the host gives you the choice of 2x 120 GB RAID 0 with an effective size of 240 GB or a 2x 120 GB RAID 1 with an effective size of 120 GB. As explained at RAID, the former is larger and faster but all data will be lost if either drive fails (increasing your vulnerability to drive failures), while the second is smaller and slower but all data is duplicated so you can generally recover completely if one of the drives fails. Dragons flight (talk) 12:11, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion, indeed SATA is the interface, but the hoster apparently uses a string like "2x 2TB SATA3" to refer to mechanical (spinning disk) hard disk drives and I just copied the SATA from there. Dragons flight's assumption was confirmed by the hosting company. Do you know of any comparisons between mechanical hard disks and SSD particularly for use in servers? I read variously of life expectancies of 3-4 years for SSD, but haven't seen numbers for mechanical HD. bamse (talk) 20:24, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

The big drawback of SSDs is that they are comparable in price to moving metal but only a fraction of its capacity... So it looks quite silly a choice for web hosting(OR). I'd expect SSD in a completely different role than moving metal - not as a user-accessed storage but as a place to store internal data: logs, caches, etc. They would burn out quite quickly in that role but could cut down on accesses which would have to wait for actual read-write heads to move... thus reducing load on the disks which hold the real data.

I would not assume that 120GB included the OS - Advertising for 120G if some of that is already occupied by the OS sounds like unfair competition to me. However, there might be some FAT granularity on small items - a 120G partition is unlikely to hold, say, 500 million 240-byte items. Not that that's a thing the average user would do. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 07:56, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

I doubt they're using FAT... even if it's a windows server it'll be NTFS. More likely ext4 I would guess. That doesn't much affect the original question though I suppose. Shadowjams (talk) 06:44, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Advertising total space instead of available space isn't that uncommon, although advertising 32GB with only 16GB available was apparently a bit over the top... http://www.informationweek.com/software/windows8/microsoft-sued-over-surface-storage-clai/240142224 212.238.237.85 (talk) 18:13, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Menu Bar Goes Black

Quite frequently my menu bar and favorites bar get covered with a black cover. I can see the blue hiding underneath at the edges. I right click on the blue screen and tgo to properties and change my theme and it goes back to normal, but I keep having to do this. How can I prevent this from happening in the first place? I'm in IE8 and a beginner. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.233.41.244 (talk) 15:22, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Would seem to be a common problem: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22internet%20explorer%22%20%22black%22%20%22menu%22 ¦ Reisio (talk) 15:46, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

After Effects plug-in

I need a recommendation for a god AE CS6 plug-in that allow me to use the velocity maps generated by 3ds max

Preferably that don’t cost too much and let me use the same copy in a 10 pc environment…

thanks

Iskánder Vigoa Pérez (talk) 18:03, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

RE:Vision's ReelSmart Motion Blur Pro. It's the only plug-in of its kind for AE. --71.189.190.62 (talk) 22:48, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

thanks Iskánder Vigoa Pérez (talk) 04:05, 11 January 2013 (UTC)