If you can handle it…

When I built my computer last year, the motherboard I picked out had two M.2 slots for ssd’s. At the time, I went with regular hard drives (though I had 2 hard drives at the time). Then a week and a half ago, I finally decided that I had run out of space on my main hard drive. So I ordered a bigger one (albeit slower). About a day later, I realized I could afford one, so I ordered a new boot drive (2 TB M.2 ssd). The hard drive arrived Saturday, the ssd arrived Monday. Tore the computer apart, and then I realized that the SSD didn’t come with any M.2 screws (they apparently exist). Fortunately, my tower came with a case of extra screws, and I found one that fits, and the motherboard already had the right riser installed in the proper slot). A drawback was that I had to remove my video card to install it (my experience is that if I have to remove a part, there’s a real chance it won’t get put back in properly). But I reassembled my tower, and everything was reinstalled properly.

My tower has enough slots to hold more than two hard drives, and my motherboard has enough SATA ports, too. The one catch was my power supply. I didn’t have enough power couplings. So I’m going with only two HDD’s (a 4 tb and 8 tb). Plus the 2 tb SSD. My ssd isn’t the fastest around. But it is so much faster. Last week, when I turned on my computer, it took at least 2 minutes to reach a desktop, and then it still took even longer to finish loading everything. Now it’s a fraction of the time.

If your motherboard can handle an M.2 ssd, I highly recommend one.

Getting ready to move…

No, not that move. Last weekend, Square Enix had virtually their entire Steam library on sale for 95% off, and all proceeds benefiting charity (I can’t remember which one, but I know there was one). Including the prorate for everything that I already had, it came out to about $35.00 for 47 or so games. So I went for it. And it was a 247 gb download. And after I downloaded it, I realized I’m running out of hard drive space. I currently have 2 7200rpm 4 tb hard drives. On Newegg, I found an 8 tb hard drive that I could afford, but it was only 5400 rpm. But I went ahead and ordered it. And a couple of hours later, I realized that if I played my finances right, I could also get a 2 tb M.2 ssd. So I ordered one. They should both be here by me next day off. And I have another used 2 tb hdd that I’m going to put in the tower just to play with Linux on (so I can avoid repartitioning my hard drive every other day). I guess this means back everything up today, and get it on to the external hard drive.

But when this is all done my setup will be:

• A 2 tb ssd drive to boot up from.
• A 8 tb hdd to install all my games on.
• A 4 tb hdd for my documents. And
• A 2 tb hdd to play around with Linux on.

The 4 tb hdd that I will be pulling from this tower will be going into my other tower that I currently use for my media center/blu-ray player…

Was starting to warm up…

For the past couple of days, it’s been getting real warm. Warm enough that my heavy coat has been retired for the season. And more importantly, it has warmed up enough that I set up my air conditioner. Since I work overnights, that means I sleep during the day, and it’s hard to sleep during the heat of the day. During the night, when I have it on, it’s still cool enough that just the fan runs, but in the afternoon, it does warm up enough that the compressor kicks on.

I should say it was starting to warm up. But today, there is just a little bit of rain coming down, so it’s not as warm as it’s been. And as I wrote that the AC compressor kicked on again…

So far on Mageia…

Ok, yes I know I’m writing this in Windows. But Mageia is still installed. And I’ve already made further progress this time than I’ve ever had with OpenSuSE on this tower. I’ve already configured Firefox and Thunderbird. And I’ve even set up my primary adblocker: the HOSTS file from mvps.org.

The potential issues that I see from this setup are the TV tuner (and that’s a moot point right now, since my Tuner Card doesn’t have a signal coming to it), and the ability to play a Blu-ray. But I can Netflix on it.

There is a drawback: I’ve set the bootloader to boot windows by default, but when I boot into Linux, it resets the default back to Linux. Until I find a fix for it, I guess I have to watch the menu when turn my computer on.

This week's misadventures....

I will continue to dink around with OpenSuSE, but only on a virtual machine. But I'm still going to experiment with Linux on my tower, not that I've figured out partitioning and the bootloader. Unfortunately with OpenSuSE, once I've installed all the apps, I'm unable to login as root. Now, I'm going with Mageia. When I first started tinkering around with Linux in 2004, I first started with SuSE, which was a no-go at first, but I had also downloaded the install set for Linux Mandrake. There were some issues with it, but I was able to install it. Albeit with no printer and no 3d graphics at first. I think it lasted for about 3 days to a week before I wiped the whole tower again. Mergers and bankruptcies happened, and SuSE became OpenSUSE, and Linux Mandrake (or Mandrake Linux)'s descendants were Open Mandriva and Mageia. I'm running Mageia right now. And so far, it's usable...