Search results

  1. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    According to both chkdsk and defrag, the MFT isn't taking a huge amount of space. The MFT is only using about 128MB on the 2TB drive. Rather, it appears by default that Windows considers roughly 1/8% of the drive space to be "used" for recycling purposes when it reports the amount of free...
  2. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    Ugh, it seems this behavoir is normal. I just checked one of the partitions on my 200GB drive. Total space is 150,271,983,616 bytes. Windows reports the free space as 102,551,552 bytes. However, chkdsk reports 289,656,832 bytes available on disk. The "missing" space is 187,105,280 bytes, or...
  3. J

    3TB HD from WD

    That's what it looks to me like it's doing.
  4. J

    An LED lighting project

    The controller shouldn't need heatsinking. Typically my LED drivers are 90% to 95% efficient, depending upon how close the LED string voltage is compared to the input voltage. As such, you're usually talking about a watt or so of heat in the controller. Making the candles out of aluminum rod...
  5. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    Well, I think I partially solved it, or at least found out what's behind the problem. After reformatting the disk, my free space was back to 2,000,270,127,104 bytes. I tried deleting and then restoring a file from my other hard disk. After I restored it, I noticed that the free space on the...
  6. J

    Electric Cars

    It all depends upon what voltage the charger sends to the vehicle. Of course, there's probably an upper limit on that for safety reasons. Offhand, I would probably say about 2000 volts. Reasonably-sized conductors ( about the size of jumper cables ) might be able to carry 500 amps, so you...
  7. J

    An LED lighting project

    If you can take a few pictures of it that would be nice. I basically want to get some idea of how much space I have to work with where the emitters will go. Also, this will let me figure out heatsinking options ( i.e. size, shape, etc. ).
  8. J

    Electric Cars

    Here is a great cost analysis of FCV versus BEV: http://www.metricmind.com/data/bevs_vs_fcvs.pdf Even not accounting for the cost of FC infrastructure, BEVs unsurprisingly come out ahead.
  9. J

    Electric Cars

    I also forgot to mention in my last post that I do in fact see a great role for hydrogen fuel cells-basically as energy storage to smooth out the intermittant power generation of renewables like solar or wind. This is where they shine. Their inefficiency compared to a battery doesn't matter...
  10. J

    Electric Cars

    Their math is WAY off. A typical BEV battery pack for 150 mile range is about 30 kW-hrs. Let's say the charging efficiency is about 85%. Therefore, you need to pump about 35 kW-hrs into it. To do that in 5 minutes you need a charger which can deliver 420 kW. With a 150 kW level 3 charger you...
  11. J

    An LED lighting project

    That shouldn't present a problem. I agree you probably need to have all ten light sources flicker randomly and independently for good effect. I'll have to think whether and how this can be done with minimal complexity. Actually, probably closer to 1900K. The idea of using both amber and...
  12. J

    Fusion power and peak oil

    Despite all the hoopla about fusion as the ultimate power source of the future, the truth is pretty depressing. Especially sobering is the fact that starting up a single commercial fusion reactor will require more tritium than currently exists on Earth. Sure, deuterium fusion is a better...
  13. J

    Electric Cars

    At this point the idea of battery swapping is dead. I wouldn't care for the idea anyway for the reason SD mentioned. Today's batteries can charge in 5 minutes given a suitable charger. As electric cars comprise a greater percentage of vehicles owned, doubtless you'll see gas stations also...
  14. J

    An LED lighting project

    Do you have space inside the chandelier to fit a couple of 1" x 1" x 1" boxes? That's all we'll need for the internal electronics. All you'll need coming out of the top is a pair of wires to hook up to the power supply. This will need its own controls. A standard lamp dimmer will only work...
  15. J

    Electric Cars

    Nothing wrong at all with that idea other than the added cost of the bank of batteries. I'll go one step better, however. It makes even more sense if you can dual purpose the home battery bank. The majority of the time fast home charging probably is just not needed, but I can see people...
  16. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    Exactly what would you want me to try here? I'm not really resisting your suggestion. I just don't know any other method here to compare folders than the one I used. I you tell me step by step what you want me to do, I'll gladly do it. I only have two data folders on the drive in question...
  17. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    I've surface tested the drive about a dozen times already. All is well. I used diskpar to partition the drive. Maybe I should do it over with diskpart and see if the problem reappears? I just have to figure out the parameters to use with diskpart to start the partition at sector 64 instead...
  18. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    The difference between the used space of the folders between the compressed and non-compressed drives is minuscule. For example, one folder used 15,148,750 bytes more on the uncompressed drive than on the compressed drive. I'm using 4K allocation units on both drives. Also, the page file is...
  19. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    All I copied so far were two DVDs I ripped. Yes, the original folder had compression while the new folder didn't. However, since these were already video files with built-in compression, they don't compress much. They take about about 0.01 GB more on the uncompressed drive. Here's the...
  20. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    Yes, hibernate is off, the recycle bin has no reserved space, system restore is turned off on this drive. I don't really know anything about shadow copy, but it looks like it's off. Any other ideas here? Lunar, my beef with the whole base2 thing is we already have conventions for it-KiB...
  21. J

    Mega-Storage

    I was talking about the way he stacked the drives before he put them in the enclosure. Why didn't he just leave them in whatever container they came in until he was ready to mount them?
  22. J

    Mega-Storage

    I got nervous just looking at the way those hard drives were stacked. And then of course they're also on a carpet with all the attendant static discharge problems. :erm: I'm amazed how many people are unaware of how to properly handle hard drives. 70TB? I couldn't fathom filling that much...
  23. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    From what I've read, XP 32-bit should be able to handle drives up to 2^32 sectors. With 512-byte sectors, that's 2,199,023,255,552 bytes. I've read of a few cases of motherboards which couldn't handle even 1 TB drives. My A7N8X-E was one of them, but I updated the BIOS. It had no problem...
  24. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    I purchased a Samsung F4 2TB drive about a month ago. Generally, before using a drive, I'll let it burn in a while and also surface scan it a number of times. No problems there, but it seems the drive is reporting its free space incorrectly. The free space is correct after I format the drive...
  25. J

    Something Random

    It's been hard to get back to this point given the number of years of not riding much. Thankfully so far my body has cooperated with me, more or less. I had leg cramps a lot earlier this year. Diet may have partially been at fault for that though. Now my main "problem" is my output seems to...
  26. J

    Something Random

    That's pretty much what I do. I have 10 cogs in back ( 11-12-13-14-15-17-19-21-23-26 ) and three ( 30-42-52 ) in front. I find using the middle one in front is fine 99% of the time. The only exceptions would be a long uphill steeper than about a 5% gradient ( rarely encountered where I ride...
  27. J

    Something Random

    I know it's comparing apples to oranges but I've cycled 8862.4 miles over the same time period. And BTW, that total is pathethic for me but I've gotten back into cycling lately. Total for 2010 not including today ( because I didn't ride yet ;) ) is 2359.3 miles. Might break 3000 miles this...
  28. J

    Samsung 2 TB, eco-5400 rpm

    I've had one for about a month now. Nice drive. Picked it up for $99.99 with one of Newegg's promotions. Runs about 9 or 10 degrees cooler than my 200 GB 7200 RPM drive. I'm getting transfers averaging 30 MB/sec between drives ( limited mostly by the slower read speeds on the 200 MB ). When...
  29. J

    Samsung Ecogreen 1.5TB f2 better than f3?

    I've had my 2TB F4 for over a week now with no problems to report. Yes, STRs are blazingly fast. Even though my M/B only has SATA 150, average STR over the entire disk is around 100 MB/sec ( the interface is bottlenecking STRs to ~115 MB/sec ). On the inner tracks STR is about 65 MB/sec...
  30. J

    4K sector drives and RAID cards

    So am I. And surprisingly, I haven't had to replace the caps-yet. In a bit of irony though I came very close to bricking the M/B while flashing the BIOS. We had two tornadoes touch down in NYC on 9/16-one in Brooklyn, the other in Flushing. About a minute or two after I flashed the BIOS...
  31. J

    4K sector drives and RAID cards

    Well, I purchased the 2TB Samsung I linked to earlier. It turns out Newegg packed it well, and it works fine. I had to update the BIOS in my M/B to keep the system from hanging while it was trying to detect the drive ( see description of the procedure here ). Also, to partition the drive I...
  32. J

    4K sector drives and RAID cards

    Just storage. I'm nearly out of space on my 200 GB drive. I'll leave the 200 GB for the boot drive for now. Down the road, maybe next year, I plan to buy an SSD, and will image the old OS install to boot from it.
  33. J

    4K sector drives and RAID cards

    I have a similar question as Doug. I'm thinking of ordering this 2 TB Samsung now that Newegg hopefully fixed the packaging issues. Sweet deal at $99.99 shipped with the promotion code. Only possible issue is it's using 4K sectors with 512 byte emulation. Would this cause any performance or...
  34. J

    Something Random

    Great news to me! At least they finally acknowledged the problem.
  35. J

    Something Random

    In NYC technically you're not even allowed to do electrical work unless you're licensed electrician. That even includes stuff like changing an outlet or a fixture. In practice it doesn't matter so long as it's done to code. Generally when you sell a house it will require inspection, including...
  36. J

    Wiring a house for LED

    If you didn't have dimming requirements I would suggest flush mount T8 fixtures. Tubes are cheap, readily available in all color temperatures, available in high-CRI, and very efficient. The light distribution is uniform without the harseness of cans. The only downside is dimming in not...
  37. J

    Nichia Develops 60 Lumen Per Watt White LED

    If it's like the Romison I have, then the driver board is soldered to the heat sink and fairly easily removed for examination. If you can get the board out without too much trouble, then attempt a repair. In all likelyhood the bad part is either a MOSFET or Schottky diode. Don't spend too...
  38. J

    25TB Hard Drive!

    This is interesting although truth is from reading between the lines it may be a long time before any drives based on this technology, or any other new technology, reach the market. Another problem we're already seeing from ever higher areal densities is lower reliability. It seems the failure...
  39. J

    Nichia Develops 60 Lumen Per Watt White LED

    The driver on some of those early Romisons was flaky. They used components which IMO weren't up to the task. What probably happened is one of the parts went, most likely either the Schottky diode or the MOSFET. End result would be the light either doesn't work at all, or comes on dim. The...
  40. J

    This Is Why We Don't Buy Drives From Newegg

    I would hook a VCR to a TV card using the A/V inputs. That should avoid the signal degradation issues you mentioned. No idea of what TV card to get. I'll probably start a thread on that when I'm ready to buy. I'm really looking for something which has YPbPr as well as A/V inputs so it can...
  41. J

    This Is Why We Don't Buy Drives From Newegg

    While on the subject of buying drives from Newegg, is there any good reason for me not to consider the Seagate Barracuda ST315005N4A1AS-RK 1.5TB? It's been ages since I've purchased a hard drive. 1.5TB seems like the sweet spot right now in terms of price per GB ( and also in line with how...
  42. J

    That will make JTR drool

    The only possible modes of failure are loss of vacuum in the tube, or loss of magnetic field. Both are exceedingly unlikely. In fact, given the volume of the tube, it would take literally hours or longer to lose the vacuum even from a large leak, so plenty of time to get to the next station...
  43. J

    Real innovation

    It's under much higher pressures than LPG, and also needs to be kept at close to absolute zero. Like I said, using it in vehicles just makes no sense at all. Current electric vehicles have sufficient range for 99% of trips. If there's ever enough demand for it, you'll see fast recharge...
  44. J

    That will make JTR drool

    All I can think to say for now is WOW! Seriously, I knew this concept was the future, but I honestly didn't expect to see a system built for at least another 50 years. If China can pull off a successful demo, then this idea can pretty much obsolete air travel. I'm obviously going to be...
  45. J

    Real innovation

    Here on earth hydrogen isn't a naturally-occurring fuel. It's a very volatile element which instantly combines with other elements. It's simply an energy storage medium which uses about 3 times the energy to produce it as is returned when using it in a fuel cell ( and I'm not counting the...
  46. J

    Something Random

    Join the club. I've found every time I've done anything at home it takes twice as long as I anticipated. Usually it's because something ends up being short or long by an inch or less. Three years ago I put a new ceiling in the finished basement and also added a bunch of outlets plus several...
  47. J

    Something Random

    Don't overlook the possibility that the metal enclosure could be acting as a speaker. I actually had that problem while trying to quiet down a PC. Everything was isolated, but the sound waves propagating through the air caused the case to vibrate. A thin sheet of polyurethane foam glued to...
  48. J

    It's HOT

    Yeah, that's not overly uncommon here in NYC, either, especially on rainy days. Totally disgusting, even when temps are in the 50s or 60s F. 100% RH and 80+F, ugh. Might as well be in a sauna.
  49. J

    It's HOT

    I'm dying right now in NYC. About three weeks so far of unrelenting heat and humidity. It's really the humidity which makes these kinds of temperatures unbearable, and it doesn't get much better at night. I just came back from an 80 minute ride soaking wet. :x
  50. J

    R12 recharging or replacement

    Regarding R134A retrofits, it's interesting to note that even R134A is scheduled to be phased out in the EU, and the US will likely follow suit. IMO then if you keep your car long enough, you'll be running into the same problems with an R134A retrofit as you're already running into with R12...
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