I always run badblocks on new drives when I get them, out of paranoia that there’s a chunk of bad disk just waiting to eat my data. Now that drives are starting to get into ludicrous sizes, the amount of time it takes to do this is going up dramatically. I just bought two 1TB drives. It turned out to be slightly cheaper than buying one 2TB drive, but had the other advantage that I could run two badblocks instances in parallel.

I invoke badblocks via mkfs’s -cc command line, which does a destructive read/write of patterns 0xaa, 0×55, 0xff, and 0×00 one 4k sector at a time. So how long does it take ?

Two days, and twenty minutes.

Whilst on the subject of storage, this is just obscene.
Four Intel X25-E SSD’s in RAID 0. Those are the SLC variants too, which are still ridiculously expensive (Currently $447 for a 32GB one).

So $2k for an average read speed of ~560MB/s is impressive, though a little out of my (and most peoples) price range.

I still haven’t got to the bottom of why RAID0 of my two cheap MLC SSDs didn’t yield any noticable improvements at all.
No matter what I tried, I was bound to the performance of a single disk (~80MB/s).

I blogged a while back about the gigabyte iRam. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work reliably at all, so I ended up ebaying it. And then refunding the buyer when it got lost somewhere between the US post office and the buyers home in France. (Protip: Don’t use USPS for such things, they can’t track international packages for shit).

So everything about the iram was loss. But now there’s a new contender ready to take it’s place Acard’s ANS-9010 looks really sweet. A little more expensive (about three times the price iirc), but it’ll for sure be a good way to put all those surplus DDR2 DIMMS to good use.

I really wish someone would make one that took SODIMMs. Every time I upgrade a laptop to a reasonable amount of ram, I’m left with pairs of useless SODIMMs that I can’t use in anything else, and can’t sell (because who would buy a 512MB DIMM ? Really?).