Ketogenic Forums still often not accessible

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #22

And your point is that my 4 Terrabyte drive is ‘cheap storage’? I assure you it is not. I worked 18 years with a software company that built servers to serve it’s software for business users. I’ve built multiple systems for myself, including servers. This drive is not cheap storage. It is as good quality as any hard drive available on the market, built by Western Digital for Apple. As I mentioned to @ctviggen above, my first hard drive was a whopping 20 megs and cost $250!

(Bob M) #23

Whoa, SSDs have gotten that cheap? That’s astounding.

Yeah, I remember the first drive I bought, I think it was 40Mb, was huge and sounded like a jet starting up.

The “server” I built uses all hard drives, usually green (slower but use less power supposedly). The “problem” with what I built is that it uses parity drives, each parity drive determining parity from a set of drives. This allows one drive to go bad, and be replaced. It’s happened a few times to me. The detriment: the drives can only be as big as the parity drive. So, I have 3TB parity drives, so the drives can only be 3TB at max.

I’ve built this system over years, from back when there weren’t 4Tb drives, or they were insanely expensive.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #24

Sorry, I was mistaken. The device I purchased is a 4T WD My Passport 25E4 for Mac. Not the SSD model which only goes to 2T and costs $170 more.

(Ethan) #25

As for “the cloud,” just remember that it is nothing more nor less than someone else’s computer.
As for the image size limit, I know we were facing a lack of storage capacity when the current troubles began, but my impression was that we upgraded to a larger hard drive, and that the current trouble with the server is something different. I could certainly be wrong about that, however, and I am sure @richard will provide a more accurate explanation at some point, when he has time. But let’s just let him get through his exams in peace, please

That was kind of my point. The cloud isn’t just somebody else’s computer; it’s somebody else’s entire framework of services to provide elastic compute, storage, processing, network, etc. It’s potentially more money in some configurations, but the cloud means no hard drive that gets full (if you set it up right), the ability to expand horizontally for capacity and load, and a bunch of extra services exposed in APIs. I know you know this though. I just find the whole co-located server very old school.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #26

Since Richard is an accomplished professional system designer, I suspect he has taken your points into consideration already.

Please bear in mind that I am merely a retired coder, and all the cutting-edge technology I worked with in my day is now so obsolete that you probably wouldn’t even know what I was talking about if I described it. So the comments I have made on this thread reflect only my meager understanding of how the forum might have been set up, gleaned from Richard’s remarks in passing.

For information on the system requirements of the Discourse software, I refer all who are interested to https://www.discourse.org/.

(Ethan) #27

Any plug I can do for my employer is always best :wink:

(Ellenor Bjornsdottir) #28

It does if you aren’t on the server every day.

Cloud is a downgrade for many uses. But I’d think it already is on a mainframe.

It’s a department store posing as a chemist. Come to Canada some day.

I’m unsure the exact name, but there’s a phenomenon of hard disk storage now being much slower than it used to be, because they’ve changed technologies to something involving shingling.

It’s mainframe. For many uses, and for better security, cloud effectively ends up being similar to colocation.

(Bob M) #29

A chemist?

Sadly, I don’t think Canada is letting people from the US come in. Too much covid-19 floating about. Where I am, the cases have gone down, but in many US states, they are going up.

As for the “cloud”, it depends on what you want. If you still desire your own control, you can have that with your own system. I have terabytes of data on my system, and cannot stand the “cloud”. I attempt to store nothing there, and instead backup to multiple physical devices.

Alas, since many things have moved to the cloud, it’s impossible not to store something there.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #30

@ellenor2000 London Drugs is not a department store posing as a chemist. It’s a drug store that smartly expanded into other profitable merchandise. It’s not a Walmart wannabe, but it is a Vancouver, BC and Canadian success story.

London Drugs was founded in 1945 as a small drugstore in Vancouver, British Columbia…

In 1976, the business was acquired by the H.Y. Louie Group under the direction of President Tong Louie.

Tong Louie expanded the company within BC and, for the first time, beyond the provincial border into Alberta with the first Edmonton location in 1976. In the next ten years, London Drugs tripled its number of stores.

During this growth, the company also began increasing the types of products available in stores…

#31

Do you actually believe a desktop hard drive or cheap SSD would suffice running 24/7/365 with multiple input/output requests? Large pictures, documents, etc…

I’ve built computers for 20 years and I don’t believe this constitutes for anything. There’s plenty of professionals that don’t know what they’re doing. Doctors, etc…

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #32

@anon81060937 I built computers too, for more than 18 years. Mostly servers for high volume retail and commercial businesses. Any name brand component will last for years 24/7/365 high volume in/output. You spend money for capacity, redundancy and backup. Western Digital, Seagate, LaCie and others make quality hard drives not ‘cheap’ junk. The difference in prices are mostly based on capacity, not quality of the drives.

Name a ‘cheap’ SSD, please. I’d love to buy it.

Yes, all hardware eventually fails no matter what it’s initial ‘quality’ or manufacturer. Still, you can expect years of continuous service whether for your home computer or a server. That’s really an amazing fact, don’t you think? Considering what hardware components cost 20-30 years ago to what they cost now, it’s way more than ‘amazing’.

My only claim is that the forums server(s) can get increased ‘disk space’ at a relatively low cost compared to the overall cost of service. So that should not be a constraining issue. I simply used my recent experience to demonstrate that fact. Sure, if the forum needs a 32 Terrabyte hard drive, its’ going to cost a few thousand dollars. But my 4 Terrabyte drive is just as good quality as the 32 Terrabyte drive costing $3K more.

(Ethan) #33

It’s not mainframe… ha. Cloud is virtualized services exposed through apis. True, the cost can be higher at high and low scale, but you also don’t have to manage things like capacity as tediously

#34

Why make enterprise drives if they’re all the same?

You’re basically saying a honda civic is just as good as a Ferrari.

Any SSD with many negative amazon reviews.

(Peter) #35

LOL

(Ellenor Bjornsdottir) #36

So was TELEX in the old days. Ok, maybe that wasn’t virtualised, but you get my point.

(Ethan) #37

I do get the point, but I think it’s actually problematic. Cloud used to be about virtualization, but now it’s really about a framework of microservices that let you do things—with code—at small and large scale in pay-as-you-go that would have cost tremendous amounts without tremendous capital expenditure before.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #38

The Civic will probably have a longer useful life than the Ferrari. They’re designed for different purposes. The Ferrari is designed for a short and exciting life. The Civic is designed for a long and boring life.

What’s an ‘enterprise’ drive? If you purchase Western Digital or Seagate you’ve purchased top of line hardware. As I said before, the price differences result only from differences in capacity, redundancy and backup. As @EZB mentions, the ‘cloud’ enables the use of multiple small devices networked rather than a few huge hunks of big iron. There aren’t many ‘mainframes’ out there any more and likely none of the survivors are part of the internet. The internet runs on Linux running on many thousands of networked small servers.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #39

Have ever been in a server farm? That’s the internet and the ‘cloud’. Racks upon racks upon racks of x-U computers, each with it’s own power supply and hard drive(s). In big farms, there are usually racks of hot swappable hard drives as well. This enables individual hard drives to be replaced without powering down the server. We can replicate hot swappability at home using USB connected external hard drives.

#40

Are you forgetting that a Civic requires a lot more maintenance throughout its life than a Ferrari?

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #41

Wow! Seagate is top of the line, now? Jeez, you leave an industry for twenty or thirty years, and look what happens! :grin: