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Posted on 20-09-04, 23:34 in Computer Hardware News (revision 1)
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Posted by creaothceann
Why would SATA disappear? Large drives (4TB and above) are still useful, and there might even some folks with optical drives...


The SATA ports take up precious space and chipset ports that could better be used for other things. Like an extra m.2 or PCIe slot, a USB-C internal header or similar.

To be clear, I'm not expecting SATA to disappear tomorrow, but the port is simply too slow to stay relevant in the long run. It also wouldn't surprise me if you in the future connect SATA drives through the m.2 or PCIe ports through an adapter cable that delivers both power and data traffic from the motherboard. If you really need them, 4x SATA port PCIe cards exist for less than $30 too.

Mechanical harddrives are pretty much on the way out; SSDs are getting so cheap and common these days, it is inevitable that mechs will get the boot. Sure, a 16 TB mech sounds like a good idea until you realise the random seek times and data transfer speeds on such a harddrive are atrociously slow and severely hinders your work. Case in point, just going from mechanical to SSD I managed to build my embedded Linux project in only 3 hours instead of the usual 5. After that I realised Mechs are garbage for most modern workflows. :)

[Edit] was thinking about something like this, but as a single unit: https://www.amazon.com/SATA-NGFF-Adapter-Power-Cable/dp/B01FE8NKC2 [/edit]
Posted on 20-09-05, 22:42 in Computer Hardware News
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I just don't see any use case for a SATA port on a desktop motherboard anymore.

The only thing the mechs got over SSDs these days are dirt-cheap storage and long-term reliability, making them an ideal replacement for tapes. So for long-term read-storage, they are... Okay-ish. You can fit more data on magnetic tape which makes that still the best backup medium in terms of bang-for-the-buck, but if it is a rarely used storage medium, HDDs are actually a more reliable long-term storage.

Thing is, the only place they make any sense anymore is in a home NAS.

* Data center, you can get a fancy 100 TB 3.5" SSD that costs a small fortune. However, storage wise one 4u server filled with 100TB drives can replace an entire rack of 4u servers, meaning you will only need 1/6 as many servers.
* As for webservers etc, most run on database machines with a shitton of RAM for speed and very little storage.
* Workstation, well, is all about fast storage these days. Movie projects? HDD is simply too slow. Same with music projects and graphics. And programming also speeds up build times considerably going with SSDs.
* Laptops are going completely m.2 interface, though it is slow going.
* Home/gaming PC, yes if you want some cheap storage. OTOH, in my opinion you really should invest in a 3.5" USB mech enclosure (external harddrive) in that case. That way you have an easy access to it regardless of interface. Or, you could just use...
* NAS, in which case you don't really care about speed you just want a place to store dem 1337 W4rez and Pr0n collections. Here HDDs make really good sense.

That said, if you already got the spinners by all means use them. It's just that for modern systems the SATA port is pretty much obsolete at this point.
Posted on 20-09-06, 10:27 in Computer Hardware News
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Posted by CaptainJistuce
Ain't nothin' wrong with the disk. I am afirm believer that a flash drive to boot off and a disk for bulk storage is an ideal setup.

Videos, music, and large games productivity applications don't need to consume your entire system, which they will if you only have a flash drive.


Yes indeed - if you only have something like a 128 GB or 256 GB fast NVME drive, I completely agree with you. Thing is, you're not stuck with those small drives anymore.

While drives like the $1300 8TB Sabrent Rocket isn't affordable by modern standards, the $229 ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro is (though, I agree, on the high end). 2TB is still plenty of storage.

That said, SATA ports will be around for a long time, but I'm expecting them to be more and more phased out of motherboards in favor of m.2.

If you still need optical drives, there are internal and external USB available. If you need tonnes of cheap drive storage there are controller cards available with 4-10 ports, and that only costs around $20. So this change will happen pretty soon. Then again, IDE ports took quite a while to die out, so again, not happening overnight.
Posted on 20-09-06, 21:51 in Computer Hardware News (revision 1)
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Posted by tomman
My prediction: SATA ports will still be going strong in 2030 in over half of the planet populated by not-wealthy people.


Not contesting that. Not-wealthy are usually getting hand-me-down tech, nothing wrong with that. But for the latest AM7 / LGA3151 motherboards, I expect the SATA port to be phased out on most boards.

Posted by tomman
I still saw new PCs shipping with floppy drives as late as 2007, and PATA ports on motherboards as late as 2014 (albeit behind PATA-to-SATA bridges - ditto for the very last PATA drives ever made which resembled early SATA drives by the use of a bridge chip too).


Yes, and this is what also will happen to the SATA ports. If there is barely no demand for SATA, and the demand *will* start to dry up during the AM5 socket generation, then there is no point in providing it.

Posted by tomman
Also: what stops spinning rust from switching to NVMe? That was what SATA Express was for. But then, I only saw WD demoing SATA Express/NVMe HDDs, and none of those shipped anyway.

And, why people is so hellbent on killing SATA plugs solely over physical dimensions!? It isn't like motherboards are so space-starved - SATA plugs are so tiny you can shoehorn those nearly everywhere, unlike the monstrosity of PATA connectors. Not everybody is using a RPi or a portless razor-thin Mac, y'know...


ITX motherboards and computers are a thing, so is having a clean desktop. You have no idea how nice a desk looks like with a sub-10 liter case on there. :)

And given that the HDDs have a maximum transfer capacity of 120 MB/s or so, there is no need for a faster port. A 20TB drive would take two full days to fill up with constant writing. Heck, even a 100GB game would take at least 15 minutes to read from the drive.

Spinners are on their last legs, and have only a single advantage left against faster drives; dirt-cheap bang for the buck storage capacity. Other than that SSDs are simply better in pretty much every single way you can think of.

So enjoy spinning rusts while you can, unfortunately they will disappear from stores in a few years (though 20 years from now, plenty will still be in use).
Posted on 20-09-07, 16:33 in Computer Hardware News (revision 2)
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Posted by CaptainJistuce
I need more than 2T of storage.


Don't we all. :) I put all the Warez and pr0n in my NAS, 2TB for my daily driver system is plenty of extra room. And where is this NAS? On my desk actually. Heart of the build is a 17L U-NAS NSC-810A and I could load it up with 8x8 TB of storage, though currently only got 4x6TB in there (whom used to sit in a few workstations @ work, but they upgraded to SSDs across the board - investment paid off in two weeks).

Posted by creaothceann

On the desk? That would a bit difficult for me...


You'd be surprised how many are opting for small builds these days. There are quite a few small *and* performant ones around. How about a nice 8L case, or a nice 7L cube? If you want to go *really* small, you can even go for a 4 liter gaming monster (2070 Super, 3950x) or why not give mommy a 2L computer mounted to the back of her monitor?

Not judging or anything, just trying to give some use cases why I like to do SFF these days, and why I think the SATA port will disappear. My use cases are not everyones use case though.
Posted on 20-09-07, 21:47 in Computer Hardware News
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Posted by creaothceann

I noticed, but I hurt myself too much by limited working space back in the dark times, before SATA, when drives were still connected via ribbon cables and 'cable management' was an unknown concept.


Yeah, you can certainly cut yourself badly, it's really important to keep track of your supported dimensions. At the same time, given how much extra skill is involved in building ridiculously small systems, well... Way too easy to fly too close to the sun, but getting that sweet spot with 2mm to spare sure gives a nice feeling! ;)

And yeah I remember those ribbon cables, I even remember pictures of a case or two that actually had proper cable management. They folded the ribbon cables in 90-degree angles all around the case, but the images seem to have been lost to time... :(
Posted on 20-09-08, 10:18 in Computer Hardware News
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Posted by kode54
Fine, you buy your new shit, I'll keep using something that still works for another decade.


You are aware single-core computers will not exist anywhere on the market in 2030 right? Maybe for small, low-end embedded systems, but otherwise most of the world will have moved on. Today high-end CPUs starts at 16c32t beasts all the way to 64c128t, this will probably be at *least* 256c/1024t machines by 2030 running at 4-5 GHz boost clocks. Lowest end will probably be 16 cores by then.

At that point, lending one core to focus 100% on a single data transfer OP will be perfectly acceptable even for a Low-end NAS. Software raid will probably also be a thing.

Posted by kode54
Also, what the fuck, are you going to route external cables for internal drives, or is everyone supposed to be moving to tiny ass micro PCs by 2022 too?


There will still be room for large cases - but just like we moved from MicroVAX form factor to full tower to mid-tower, I think the future desktops will be small enough to mount on the back of our monitors. Instead of having an iMac we simply combine a screen and an upgradable PC unit, which is actually an awesome setup to have. :)

2TB is not enough for everyone, but it's a lot of storage for most people. Especially given how ubiquitous cloud storage is (where you let another company back up your data).

But 'dem warez and pr0n are a thing of course...
Post: #148 of 204
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Posted by tomman

No incidents to report... except for THIS.


Oh, wow... Time to get a few used RX 550 cards?
Posted on 20-09-27, 23:48 in Looking for a python script in the now defunct archives (revision 2)
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Nice attempt, but knowing a thing or two about python, this should take you where you want to go:


infile = open("input.txt", "r")
outfile = open("output.txt", "w")

skills = ["one", "two", "three", "four",
"five", "six", "seven", "eight",
"nine", "ten", "eleven", "twelve",
"thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen", "sixteen"]

for line in infile.readlines():
writeline = ""
for index, word in enumerate(line.split()):
try:
num = int(word[:2],16)
writeline += "1 " if (num & 128) else "0 "
writeline += "1 " if (num & 64) else "0 "
writeline += "1 " if (num & 32) else "0 "
writeline += "1 " if (num & 16) else "0 "
writeline += "1 " if (num & 8) else "0 "
writeline += "1 " if (num & 4) else "0 "
writeline += "1 " if (num & 2) else "0 "
writeline += "1 " if (num & 1) else "0 "
writeline += "//" + skills[index] + "\n"
except ValueError:
pass
outfile.write(writeline)


There is (almost) always a shorter solution. Anyway, you're welcome, a fun little 10 minute problem for me. :)
Posted on 20-10-30, 22:43 in Misc. software (revision 3)
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Posted by tomman
Time to tear apart the MAFIAA? Nah, nobody cares because lazyness / not communist enough :/
Also: the DMCA is a really bad law that everybody is abusing it for whatever purpose they see fit (even if there are no actual copyright infringements happening!)
As for youtube-dl, I guess it's time for a much-needed rebrand since the application can actualy download stuff from waaaaaaaay more places than just YouTube (it can even serve as a generic download manager in a pinch). Just like XBMC became Kodi because noone is using it on Xboxes anymore.


Preach it bro!

I have long held the belief that the MAFIAA is best countered by actually... Well... Doing what they freaking ask. Think about it. How many would've watched and hyped a show like Game of Thrones if it wasn't possible to pirate it? Which lead me to the conclusion that indeed, the piracy movement is mostly a bunch of cheapskates that just want Free Stuff(tm) coupled with a few (tens of thousands of) people that get hurt by really bad laws.

So the MAFIAA is putting down these completely assholery laws because they know it won't really matter because noone cares what laws they put down anyhow, meanwhile people want their Free (and Convenient) Stuff(tm) and as long as they can get what they want noone really cares. Until shit hits the fan, and then it really doesn't matter either way.

So the best way to actually get a change is to let the MAFIAA start using their massive guns, then people would actually start to take notice and realise "Wait, we can use free software, creative commons and open source to get out of this!" and 20 years later, voila, copyright circumvented. Unfortunately, everyone is too busy torrenting the latest hottest on Netflix to actually do what is right, both figuratively and literally speaking. Oh well!
Posted on 20-11-01, 16:44 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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First videogame ever: A Pacman clone c:a 1986 or so, on an old Gen II (era before NES) Phillips console my parents owned.

First PC (as in Personal Computer) game ever: An old black and white original Macintosh game where you ran around in a castle. Dark Castle perhaps?

First NES game: Duck Hunt. Played it while my family was visiting some relatives, and for some strange reason we had an NES a couple of months later.

First legit PC (as in Windows) game: Warcraft II, played it on my friends computer and was one of the biggest reasons my dad got a computer the year after. Hey, I'm sensing a pattern!

First emulator/rom: Either ZSNES or NESticle, c:a 1997 or 1998 I think. I still remember those howling wind noises from Chrono Trigger and FFVI...

First Linux Game: Some text only game. I don't remember if it was nethack or bsd-tetris.
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Posted by Screwtape
Time for a little Debian gripe of my own.

On one hand, I love tiling window managers because they automatically arrange everything for me to see without having to carefully resize windows all the time.

On the other hand, I love modern desktop environments like GNOME they make the computer get out of my way and let me focus on watching videos or hacking source-code instead of trying to set my audio volume or remember how to mount a USB drive.

Unfortunately, those two tastes don't go great together; modern desktop environments are uniformly floating-window based, while the people who like and promote tiling window managers are grateful just to have pixel-addressible displays, never mind anything like polish.


I have the same problem actually. I love the way i3 works, but Gnome 3 just has too much polish to let it slide. Best of both worlds would be a decent Gnome 3 tiling extension that lets me set things up the way I want, and easily create a 30-70 split or set a fixed 80 column width to a terminal or similar "hacks".

The other important thing for me would be a Gnome 3 extension that lets me set up my workspaces; A simple one that lets me simply assign workspaces to screens in order of preference would be awesome (imagine working with laptop docked to two extra screens, then remove laptop which collapses all screens to laptop screen, then plug it back in and it all gets reassigned on the fly).

Another thing that would be *really* nice would be to assign a multi-screen workspace, say you are a graphics artist and your work spans four massive screens, then you can switch to a two-workspace screen and two small workspaces while configuring an animation and viewing the result, then back to massive four screen workspace...
Posted on 20-11-07, 14:53 in Misc. software
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Question; Why even involve yourself with github when gitlab or other free repository hosting sites also exist?

Their site, their right to be arseholes. Even when it's not right.
Posted on 20-11-08, 11:13 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs) (revision 1)
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Posted by kode54
You must be much older than my soon-to-be-turning-39, or you're saner than I, as I find myself regularly desktop and even sometimes distro hopping still. I end up going back to Arch. With a shitload of AUR packages.


Nah, not older, actually two years younger than you - but I have been using Linux since 2002-ish. :) For now I have resigned myself to running Gnome 3 on Ubuntu - it's not perfect, but for the current single-screen setup I run, it's good enough. If and when I invest in multiple screens again, I'll look into a more efficient setup. Ubuntu stock just works good enough for me, and nearly everything I need to do can be done with either PPAs or the good old ./configure+make+make install dance (these days, ninja and cmake is getting more prevalent, but still works decently).

The problem with all rolling releases is that you *must* run the latest and greatest. Even when you don't want to. Even when you have already found the perfect setup. That's why I stay away from rolling even though I like and support the concept as such.
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Posted by MysticLord

Recommend me a book?


What I did was pretty much text processing combined with knowledge about low-level programming, so nothing is covered 100%, but as for text processing this book seems to do the trick;

https://www.nltk.org/book/

The dead tree version is not updated to Python 3, but otherwise it seems legit.
Post: #156 of 204
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Posted by tomman
Kernel 5.10 (which is now available for us Debian Stable plebs via the magic of buster-backports) breaks TRIM on NTFS partitions mounted via ntfs-3g (what else?):
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211167

Workarounds:

- Boot to kernel 5.9 when you need to TRIM your NTFS partitions.
- Revert the offending patch as seen on the bugreport, then build your own kernel.
- Consider migrating away from NTFS, if possible.
- Wait for the next kernel release.


Wait, people still use NTFS on anything other than their Windows OS partitions? Didn't Windows get native file system support for ext4 a while back?
Posted on 21-06-28, 15:01 in Near (revision 1)
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...

There is a special place reserved in hell for the people who did this to him.

I am tempted to throw the gauntlet to 4chan or 2chan and destroy these people by the very same method they themselves use; at the same time, I know it would accomplish nothing. These guys are mindless bee drones. Kill one, two more takes their place. The SWAT party van will arrive at their house one day too. The problem is not them per se but the dehumanization going on.

I can't even put words to describe my feelings of rage, sadness and disgust to what these people do.

R.I.P. Near.
Posted on 21-07-04, 08:26 in Windows 11
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As always with Windows you have two options:

1. Throw the windows crap down the garbage can.
2. Do as your uncle Ben Dover and submit to whatever craziness Microsoft requires in the hopes that Microsoft will never fail you in their wisdom.

You have until 2025 to comply. :D
Posted on 21-07-04, 23:17 in Windows 11
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Posted by creaothceann
I also don't see my i7-4790K on the list of supported CPUs.


I got bad news, Windows 11 only supports Intel Gen 8 (8000 series) and AMD Zen 1+ (2000 series) and newer.
Posted on 21-07-18, 22:12 in Instant messaging (cr)apps
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Yeah, the world sucks. Unfortunately I'm in the same boat and since IRC is pretty much dead now...

I have resigned to use Discord. It's the one that works best as an alternative so far, would've preferred something based on an XMPP-based technology (decentralised and Open Source) but since XMPP also died a few years ago... Discord it is.

At least it is possible to block the spam coming from channels and "servers", even though you can't do global settings. Can't say I'm happy with it though.
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