March 25, 2011

Alcyone's sick

Rats. Starting a couple of days ago, every once in a while Alcyone would start buzzing loudly and vibrating. It sounds just like a hard drive dying. To make it stop, I have to turn the computer off and then rap the case sharply a few times.

I didn't need this.

Alcyone has two 500GB drives, and I just now looked it up. They're ST9500420AS, which turns out to be Seagate. I just checked, and Newegg sells the same size drive from  Toshiba for just $70. I trust Toshiba the most of all HD makers. I've never had a Toshiba drive fail on me.

So maybe it's about that time.

(By the way, all my computers get backed up daily by Deneb, the NAS. So data loss is not really an issue here.)

UPDATE: Just thought I'd mention that I'm working on another flash to run April 1, like I had last year. But if Alcyone dies on me, I might not be able to complete it. I ordered the replacement drives and they should arrive next week some time, but installation and recovery-from-backup might be challenging.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 11:39 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 189 words, total size 1 kb.

1 I feel like I must have said this before:  I know you name your computers after stars, but because some manga artists use star names for various characters, at least one is also named after a manga/anime character.

 "Alcyone" is a villain in Magic Knight Rayearth,

I name my systems after anime/manga worlds; the laptop is Seiren and my old P3 was Escaflowne; this machine is Cephiro.  But I've run out of names I like; hopefully something will come along that grabs me by the time I get a new machine.

(The network is "Roshtaria" so that's already taken, worse luck.)

Posted by: atomic_fungus at March 25, 2011 01:11 PM (7IkA9)

2

Well, the iPAQ is named "Uiharu" and the Slate 500 is named "Saten" and my WiFi hub is named "Railgun."

But if I buy another big computer, it'll get the name of another star. I might use Mintaka; I haven't used that one before.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 25, 2011 01:32 PM (+rSRq)

3 I've always thought you should name one of your computers "Zubenelgenubi", just because it'd be fun to say.

Posted by: Wonderduck at March 25, 2011 03:53 PM (W8Men)

4 I'm not sure I can figure out how to say that! Besides which, it's probably an obscenity in Turkish.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 25, 2011 05:29 PM (+rSRq)

5 I used to set up test networks fairly frequently, coming up with 10 or so names with a theme without getting boring got to be a challenge. Several times I picked an anime series and named everything based on characters or places in that series, but that got to be too mundane, I'm sure there are a million machines out there named Rei, Haruhi, or Motoko. One of the last networks I did in that job had names like Hyde, Kryv, Febdash, Ablïarsec, Aptic...

Posted by: David at March 25, 2011 09:57 PM (xcVNq)

6 When I worked at BBN, we were using Sun 3 workstations. (Sigh, 1982.) The sysadmin grew up in the Bay area, and all our computers were named after BART stops.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 25, 2011 10:31 PM (+rSRq)

7 One could probably use the list of admirals from LoGH. I heard there were hundreds.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 25, 2011 11:10 PM (9KseV)

8 Besides which, it's probably an obscenity in Turkish.

You make it sound like that's a bad thing...

Posted by: Wonderduck at March 25, 2011 11:41 PM (W8Men)

9 I started college at Clarkson University. The computers in the student labs had themes like the seven deadly sins, the seven dwarves, the Jetsons (I used Rastro quite a bit) and there was a lone Mac named "idared" because someone said you couldn't get it on a TCP/IP network.

Posted by: RickC at March 26, 2011 07:30 PM (VKVOz)

10 In our labs at OSU, the original rule for themes was "something with at least a dozen items that would look good as screensavers on a black-and-white Sun monitor". Fish, trees, dinosaurs, musical instruments, etc.

Over time, we relaxed the rule, and added themes like "no" (shirt, shoes, service, parking, spitting, etc). The annoying new professor who had insisted on having one of our very few high-end graphics workstations in his office received the one named "clue".

-j

Posted by: J Greely at March 26, 2011 08:40 PM (7CyNp)

11 J, which "O"? I went to Oregon State, but that was 72-75 and there weren't any networks back then.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 26, 2011 09:20 PM (+rSRq)

12 Ohio State, Eighties; when I got hired, we were installing dozens of shiny new Sun 3/50 workstations. 4MB of RAM, and 1.5 MIPS!

-j

Posted by: J Greely at March 26, 2011 09:42 PM (7CyNp)

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