• 4 Posts
  • 761 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2024

help-circle
  • It is mostly professional/office use where this make sense. I’ve implemented this (well, a similar thing that does the same thing) for clients that want versioning and compliance.

    I’ve worked with/for a lot of places that keep everything because disks are cheap enough that they’ve decided it’s better to have a copy of every git version than not have one and need it some day.

    Or places that have compliance reasons to have to keep copies of every email, document, spreadsheet, picture and so on. You’ll almost never touch “old” data, but you have to hold on to it for a decade somewhere.

    It’s basically cold storage that can immediately pull the data into a fast cache if/when someone needs the older data, but otherwise it just sits there forever on a slow drive.


  • …depends what your use pattern is, but I doubt you’d enjoy it.

    The problem is the cached data will be fast, but the uncached will, well, be on a hard drive.

    If you have enough cached space to keep your OS and your used data on it, it’s great, but if you have enough disk space to keep your OS and used data on it, why are you doing this in the first place?

    If you don’t have enough cache drive to keep your commonly used data on it, then it’s going to absolutely perform worse than just buying another SSD.

    So I guess if this is ‘I keep my whole steam library installed, but only play 3 games at a time’ kinda usecase, it’ll probably work fine.

    For everything else, eh, I probably wouldn’t.

    Edit: a good usecase for this is more the ‘I have 800TB of data, but 99% of it is historical and the daily working set of it is just a couple hundred gigs’ on a NAS type thing.



  • One thing you probably need to figure out first: how are the dgpu and igpu connected to each other, and then which ports are connected to which gpu.

    Everyone does funky shit with this, and you’ll sometimes have dgpus that require the igpu to do anything, or cases where the internal panel is only hooked up to the igpu (or only the dgpu), and the hdmi and display port and so on can be any damn thing.

    So uh, before you get too deep in planning what gets which gpu, you probably need to see if the outputs you need support what you want to do.



  • So, this is a ~15 year old laptop?

    The first two things that immediately come to mind when you’re kernel panicing is bad ram, and bad cpu temperatures.

    Thermal paste doesn’t last forever, and it’s worth checking if your CPU or GPU are overheating, and repasting if so.

    And, as always, a memtest is a quick and easy step to rule that out - I’d say half the “weird crashes” I’ve ever seen ends up being bad ram and well, at least it’s cheap and easy to replace?




  • had the issue that they tied their chip designs to specific nodes.

    In fairness to Intel, every modern semi design house has that same issue: a chip is designed and laid out for a specific node, so this isn’t really a failing so much as a how-it-works.

    Of course, Intel was being very, very, very risky when they were designing for a process that basically didn’t exist assuming that hey, they’ll have it done by the time the design work is complete and they’re RTM.

    couldnt just take the design and use it on a different node without a lot of effort

    Which is what they had to do once they failed to ship newer nodes on schedule with the new CPU designs, and well, we see how that ultimately cost them a whole hell of a lot, if not ultimately their entire business.


  • Linux users don’t want to admit that a huge thing that makes people hate Linux is having to type in their password every time there’s updates

    Hell, people get mad about having to hit a ‘Cool, do that button’, let alone something like a password. It’s how we ended up with UAC v2, because people were steaming pissed about having to accept when a badly written app was doing something stupid that they just changed the scope of ‘stupid’ to be much less restrictive.

    In fact it’s even bled over to OS X, as people are SO mad about entering passwords they’re angry at Apple over it, too.

    Basically, any time a UI hops in front of you and goes ‘Wait! This is important!’ people get annoyed, and well, all OSes are moving towards more of that shit rather than less, as if they didn’t know that was annoying or something. Glad I don’t work in UX or I’d probably lose my mind at how much stupid hostile shit is being added constantly.


  • Quicksync

    Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you’re transcoding in a way that’ll show any particular benefit from Quicksync over AMF or anything else. My ‘it’s better’ use case would be something like streaming to a cell phone at 3-5mbps, and not something local or just making a file to save on your device.

    DDR4 and no ECC

    That’s what my build is: 128gb of Corsair whatever on a 10850k. I’m sure there’s been some silent corruption somewhere in some video file or whatever, but, honestly, I don’t care about the data enough to even bother with RAID, let alone ECC.

    I will say, though, if you’re going to delve into something like ZFS, you should probably consider ECC since there are a lot more ‘well shits’ that can happen than what I’m doing (mergerfs + snapraid).

    power consumption

    A $30 or whatever they are kill-a-watt plus something like s-tui running on the NAS itself to watch what the CPU is doing in terms of power states and usage. I’ve got a 8-drive i9-10850k under 60w at “idle” which is not super low power, but it’s low enough that the cost of hardware to improve on it even a little bit (and it’d be a very little bit) has a ROI period of longer than I’d expect the hardware to last.


  • If you’re going to be doing transcoding for remote users at lower bitrates, quicksync is still better than AMF, so I’d vote Team Intel.

    If you’re not, then buy whatever meets your power envelope desires and price point.

    For Intel, anything 8th gen or newer should be able to natively do anything you need in Quicksync, so you don’t need to head to Amazon and buy something new, unless you really want to.

    Also, I’d consider hardware that has enough SATA ports for the number of drives you want so that you can avoid dealing with a HBA card: they inflate the power envelope of the system (if power usage is something you’re concerned with), and even in IT mode, I’ve found them to be annoyingly goofy at times and am MUCH happier just using integrated SATA stuff.




  • where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok

    I’ve been dealing with more zoomer-and-younger kids and uh, it’s less that we can’t trust that their education level will protect them from the evils of capitalism, but more that we can’t even trust that their levels of education are sufficient for them to be able to both read and write, nevermind more complicated things like determining the accuracy of factual data and be able to make a reasonable decision based on you know, critical thinking and analysis.

    It’s shockingly dire in a lot of places, and it’s unlikely to improve, at least in the US, since nobody values education and nobody wants to fund education, and we just elected a pile of geriatric rich white people that think we don’t need to do anything but add more Jesus.

    And yeah, as adults we’ve absolutely failed the two most recent generations, and are going to epically, epically fuck up the next one too.



  • Speed test from who?

    I’ve got gigabit fiber from AT&T and Netflix’s site is the only one that can reliably shove a full gigabit at me. (Or ,rather the 940mbps, which is “gigabit” according to Ma Bell.)

    Maybe try fast.com and see if you get different reported speeds?

    Maybe the router is just too weak? Well, I used iperf3 between two desktops that are both hardwired in and I got ~940 “Mbits/sec”.

    Also this doesn’t mean anything: switching is probably handled by an ASIC in the router, and routing is handled by the CPU to keep track of all the NAT table state stuff, so you 100% could have a device that’ll pass gigabit on the lan, and only 10mbps on the wan.



  • New (7000 and 9000) ryzen CPUs have an iGPU that can transcode via AMF, so the ‘equivalent’ would just be buy a modern AMD CPU.

    AMF isn’t quite as good as Quicksync, but it’s probably fine for most use cases for most people, though I can notice the image quality losses when you’re doing something like transcoding to 1080p low(ish) bitrate for remote streaming, and so have a very big bias in favor of nvenc or quicksync.

    Also, I’m in the more-ram-is-better camp, so buy as much as you want and/or the platform supports.