Some years back I decided to read all of Christie’s novels chronologically. I’ve mostly been reading them when hung over or when I’ve had a cold, so it’s taken a while.
But today I reached the final book. The novels from the last decade of Christie’s life were, er, not very good, but this was written in the 50s (I think) and published after her death. And it’s lots of fun, even though I guessed who the killer was halfway through.
After innumerable requests (when counting, it’s “zero, one, innumerable”, right?), here’s my new DVD storage setup.
I got an allegedly 7W AMD computer from CompuLab, recklessly disregarding any current boycott of wares from the occupied country of Palestine.
I got the bareback, I mean, barebones (funny how WordPress only thinks the latter word is misspelled) version of the machine, so I had to root out an SSD from the Closet of Mystery.
I found this old Kingston thing that I probably used in an old machine some years ago. It’s not a good SSD (I think it’s barely faster than one of them there old-fashioned spinning disks, hee-yaw), but this machine is just going to serve out films, so it shouldn’t really matter…
I tried to measure the wattage on the machine, but the only wattagometer (it’s really called that) didn’t see to actually register that I switched it on, so I’m going to assume that it’s not pulling a lot of power.
Anyway!
The SilverStone USB3 cabinet is called “SST-TS231U”. And it seems totally unproblematic. It just works. I’m running it in JBOD mode, and I’m not getting any of the errors I was getting with the Icy Box enclosure.
It does have a very loud fan, though, which I’m just going to disconnect. If the disks die the heat death, they die the heat death.
And then Inga Copeland played afterwards, but I didn’t get any footage because I was kinda bopping around.
Not as stuffy as I thought it would be. Kinda fun. But not actually good.
Oy vey.
USB has always been “well, it kinda works”. So I shouldn’t have been surprised at these pains.
And I wasn’t.
I decided to store my DVDs on disk for rapid access. I bought USB3 devices. This is my story.
My first device was a single 6TB Western Digital Green disk in an Icy Box USB3 enclosure.
lsusb says:
Bus 004 Device 007: ID 05e3:0731 Genesys Logic, Inc. Device Descriptor: [...] idVendor 0x05e3 Genesys Logic, Inc. idProduct 0x0731 bcdDevice 90.84 iManufacturer 3 Raid Sonic iProduct 4 USB Storage Device iSerial 5 0000000000000000
The WD Green disk is quite nice. It’s very quiet.
The only problem is that whenever it goes to sleep, and it does that a lot, it goes missing from the Linux USB subsystem when you try to write to it.
Anyway, it was too small, so I bought a two-disk enclosure and made a RAID0 stripe over it. Another Icy Box USB3 device, as it happens.
I put two 6TB WD Red disks into it. This is what lsusb says:
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 067b:2773 Prolific Technology, Inc. [...] iManufacturer 1 ICY BOX iProduct 2 ICY BOX IB-3620 iSerial 3 PROLIFICMP0000002F1 [...] bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only
It’s fast and nice, but the problem is that once in a while, whenever I try to read and write a lot to it, it freaks out.
Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.343239] usb 4-1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.356884] usb 4-1: device firmware changed Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.357083] usb 4-1: USB disconnect, device number 5 Oct 15 00:29:53 stories kernel: [86720.357484] scsi 9:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
And the device goes to read-only, and you have to switch it off and then on again.
So either Western Digital makes lousy disks, or Icy Box makes awful USB3 enclosures, or the USB3 chipset sucks, or USB3 sucks, or Linux sucks.
Or all of the above.
The USB3 chip is
02:00.0 USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03)
So naturally I bought an enclosure from a different manufacturer: SilverStone.
lsusb says:
Bus 004 Device 011: ID 152d:0539 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technolo gy Corp. [...]
bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only
And what do you know! It works! It’s kinda fast-ish, too. So I bought a tiny 7W computer with USB3 ports to put into a closet, and now I can watch movies without moving from the couch.
In conclusion: Icy Box sucks. So much.