Well, to tell you the truth, i think both the israeli government and hamas are on one side, The evil side.

How come ?

Well, to begin with, israel was talking about the tunnels long ago, if you already knew about the tunnels so long ago, why didn’t you stop the weapons from flowing in the first place and sparred a thousand lives (And counting).

Did a few flying trash cans really impose a threat ? i have seen one explode less than 10 meters away (On TV) from a man in beer-sabee, Nothing happened to him, are you really doing the right thing to counter attack the terrorists ? Does the over-reaction not make you a murderer ?

On the hamas side, why did you reject the Arab initiative, the internetional initiative, and the egyptian initiative… when you say they don’t meet the needs of Palestinians, do you mean they don’t allow importing more weapons into militia’s hands ?

What good is caring for the people if it involves getting them killed ? is your god going to “Pay you in heavenly money” you for using your own children as human shields ?

I wonder, if they are really sadistic or they just lack the imagination, maybe they think a child who lost a leg will grow a leg after the war is over, or maybe they think a little boy who lost eyesight will see again after they start the second round, or maybe when they insert another coin.

It really breaks my heart to see how primitive the human race still is, whatever happened to “We are all human” or was that hearsay ?

With Iran publicly threatening to stop the funding if hamas agrees to any initiative, i don’t see any way out, and with israel proceeding in what was there fault to begin with (By temporarily overlooking what they confessed to have seen), i don’t see what could end this “God Said” war.

My condolences to the dead on either side, including the mislead fighters.

*My BELKIN SATA II ExpressCard (Silicon Image SIL 3132 SATALink controller)
*My SIIG eSATA II PCIe Pro RAID (Silicon Image SIL 3132 SoftRaid 5 controller)
*My Western Digital Black WD1001FALS
*My Seagate 1TB hard drive
*My OLD Obsolete satellite receiver (It’s BOX)
*My WD esata compatible MyBOOK (Not the hero of the post anyways)

Long ago, i got the ESATA II Express Card that fits all my NEW laptops (Older laptops do not have expresscard), and another SIIG PCI-E ONE (V1.0) for my desktop at the office, i created an enclosure (MyBOOK’s Power block isn’t so powerful and 2 MyBooks are even bulkier than my solution, besides, i HATE the separate power Block (and i really really want 2TBs in that external enclosure).

To begin with, i got a box from an old satellite receiver that is very good (as something other than being an obsolete analogue receiver), took it’s guts out, installed a bay for 2 drives inside and a power supply of a desktop computer (they fit magically), i made 2 esata ports on the rear (Using a sata to esata bracket) and connected them to the BELKIN (F5U239) or SIIG (eSATA II PCIe Pro RAID) external adapters, they work fine (Or do they ??)

To start with, both the PCI-e card and the ExpressCard have the same chip, Made by silicon image, SIL 3132, nevermind the name SoftRaid or SATALINK, the chip is exactly the same.

Silicon Image does issue firmware for all there chips (For you to put on the flash on the board to run the chip), the SIIG takes this firmware fine, the BELKIN does not.

You can not get Firmware from the Belkin Website, and yet, updating the firmware with the one from Silicon Image does not work with the belkin, and what is much much worse, is that the belkin should be bootable but it is NOT !

It overheats and starts to act strange… i simply teared off the paper sticker so it can cool off, then with some thermal epoxy i installed 2 thick sheets of aluminum on it and made them stick out so they can conduct the heat outside the laptop and the problem dissapeared (Strange, knowing that the chip does not get in contact with the PLASTIC of the ExpressCard but i am not complaining !

Anyway, BELKIN card sucks, i regret buying it, i will buy a different one very soon.

Now back to my beloved enclosure

A 500W power supply, 2*1TB hard drives, one of them WD-Black edition mentioned in the previous post, the other 1TB seagate hard drive.

I will post images of how to do this with your obsolete satellite receiver (Remember the days of analogue receivers), and then you can sell your so called sata enabled mybook, The power supply in this makes me feel much more comfortable.

What is left for me to do is add crumble zones (Using polystyrene or some other material) so that i can protect my data, i do weekly backups of both drives, But it would be better to add a level of protection to last weeks work

I will update this as soon as i get my digital camera back

Happy Data Management for now

First of all, the drive is Super, Just like all my other hard drives, All other 3.5′ hard drives i have are either WD, Segate, Or deskstar, i have never owned a samsung, but i assure you, all reaining hard drive manufacturers are surely the good ones, i remember back in the day when a MAXTOR drive would eventually get you into unexpected trouble (Never liked maxtor, they were problematic)

Now, my favorite is Western Digital, i am a loyal customer, and they are loyal manufacturers.

So, what’s the deal on this black edition ?

In short, unlike what you expected the real boost comes from the Dual Processors that can do the math faster to enable that lovely 145MB/s (1160 Mb/s). the 32MB cache is nice, but the processor is the real deal, along with the 3 internal disks and the 6 internal heads.

The reviews of the drive on the internet say it is an average drive, i assure you it is not, it is a very nice drive up to now, even windows vista admits it, but i will need to get some numbers ready for you.

I already have a bunch of other 1TB hard disks, and so i will be comparing to those here, i will also collect as much data as possible to find out if this drive is really worth the extra $30 you pay over a standard seagate drive that is also 1TB !

My first impression is that it is, my Home made random access tests did not show any advantages for the drive (4 seconds disadvantage in the 10 min imprecise test), but don’t count on that, i wrote this software in 2 hours flat and so it is not The best test to compare drives…

I doubt there is 64 NCQ in the drive, but i will see once i move this drive to another computer that can detect this stuff (Intel’s tools).

For now, i will go on with my testing, but i assure you, the drive looks like it is the best drive i have owned to date in the 7200RPM category. Stay tuned.

What about the green edition WD10EACS ?

Never owned one, But i did not go for it for the following reasons

Ok, so you do understand it is a 16MB cache, comes at a very close price, with a promise to save you up to $14 a year in electricity costs, and therefore save the planet.

1- Power Saving: $14 is an exaggerated number when i did the math with the numbers on the website, You can only save half of this in a laboratory and it will take an expert from western digital to assist you if you want to save that amount of money/Power, as for the environment, you produce much more carbon dioxide in a 2 second run of your cars engine compared to what this drive can save and still be usable, Don’t get me wrong, i am obsessed with saving planet earth, but i can really do better saving energy from my toaster and TV than from a poor hard drive with 2 small motors and a low power consumption processor (The hard drive’s processor).

2- The whole concept somes at a price (Low to be trutheful) in terms of responsivness, the drive has variable speed disks, and heads need to dock at certain speeds so that they do not fall onto the disk (IntelliPark)! the wind generated by the disks is what keeps the heads floating.

It all sounds nicer on paper, the truth of the matter is, not much is the difference, the Black edition does have all the power saving features that Green has as long as they don’t compromise performance..

And if you really really want to save energy, ask Windows/Linux to do the saving… with a 5 Year warantee, i assure you they took into account the start stop cycles of your drive and you can have the computer switch it off as often as it takes to save mother earth.

Damn, i sound like an OIL PIG, i am not, i value nature and our future, it is just that i don’t want to lose my Objectivity and get obsessed.

Christian by birth, Greek Orthodox, Middle eastern (Jordan), atheist by “Non belief” is what i believe, but there is no reason why you (Probably a believer) should not check out what i think.

I have seen Christians bashing Pope Benedict XVI for what he wrote in his books, the video i am embedding here is an extremist Christian (I think he is extremist) telling you why the Benedict XVI is heretical.

My turn, i think this is the Bravest, Most Objective, Most intelligent pope to now.

Realizing all the blood religions have shed, Pope Benedict gives his church a NEW, more advanced, More civilized more intelligent set of beleifs, The pope finally says, other christian sects, and even other religions like Islam (The dominant religion where i live), and Judaism CAN go to heaven, He praises islam as a great religion (That sometimes looses balance but that is irrelevant), and does think that the Jewish reading of the Old Testiment is a possible one.

What this is to me is, Finally, some brave person comes along and says (Stop the fight now), i would say, check some of the quotes here out, forget the narrator who really does not agree with me but does point out the quotes i think are GREAT, he portrays the Benedict as a traitor of the church (Which is plain silly in my opinion)

Cheers, and god bless (His god or anyone else’s ) the 16th Pope for he is the greatest to hold the position.
Video Taken out…. 2 much drama in there

The DVD for the 64 bit came out with the MD5SUM 05b2ebeed273ec54d6f9ed3d61ea4c96, before calculating the sum i did check that the SHA1 is correct (For those of you who just want to throw in an md5sum Fedora-x86_64-DVD.iso and get a number.

Anyway, i downloaded it since everyone is saying the reasons i left fedora for are no longer true, and hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) has bugs i never could imagine might come out in an milestone release that has LTS).

Somewhere on the fedora website, they said they are doing XEN kernel differently to keep it in synch with the linux kernel (Since the xen kernel lags behind allot)

Anyway, i will finish my review for this as soon as i try it out.

I have LOOKED EVERYWHERE but no use, if i boot the patched xen kertnel, i don’t get the lovely GNOME login screen.

So, i was looking at my extreemly untidy desk, under the piles of paper i noticed a VGA card (NVIDIA 7300LE), then i remembered that i took this out because Ubuntu generic would not boot with this claiming 7676 stolen memory or something similar, i even remember fedora beta not booting with this same error message, Anyway i had a baseless idea (At least it was not my smarts that got me to the idea, i don’t know why i did it), i put the Nvidia VGA card back on the DQ965GF mobo, booted what i had already set as default kernel and got the No-Go stated above, then rebooted to the XEN kernel, and surprise, it is working again…

I thought people reported success with the DQ965GF motherboard… maybe the had PCI-e VGA cards that ran bothe XEN kernel and Generic Kernel !

Anyway, i will report this probably, when i get the time later today.

The computer runs an INTEL Quad Core that supports virtualization.

Happy XENNING….